Simon

by Alexander Masters

  “I mean it as a joke, of course. Perhaps you should include: ‘Simon added jocularly.’”)

  Simon had a second tactic re punches. It was cleverer. He showed love.

  Instead of punching his persecutor back, Simon would open his arms and attempt to embrace the boy.

  He knew exactly what the effect was. “I started as soon as I realized that hugging had a sexual connotation.”

  It scared the daylights out of everybody.

  “On February 4th the Queen Mother had a successful appendix operation and Miss Beaumont in sympathy retired to bed.” “On February 7th the first yellow crocuses appeared.” “On February 10th Simon Crane produced mumps.” “Just this side of Honiton a woman, in a small car, pounced out on me from a filling station and contrived to ram the rear offside mudguard of my car…”

  At the end of each term, Billy Williamson, the headmaster, typed up the school Bulletin.

  “On May 17th came the sad news of the death of Lord Brabazon of Tara, one of the great pioneers of motoring, aviation and tobogganing.” The “lovely weather at Whitsun” was “sadly marred” by the “necessary arrest of 76 Mods and Rockers at Brighton.” Brighton and Lord Brabazon had nothing to do with the school: the headmaster just liked cars and disliked scooters. “Next term Norton will try for Eton.”

  As a practice, Simon did the Charterhouse School math paper, for which two hours were given, did all the sums in twenty-five minutes and gained 100 percent. He tried the Radley School scholarship exams, did all questions on all three papers, well within time, and again scored 100 percent for each. While he was in bed with chickenpox he did the three papers set for the Assistant Masters’ math prize at Eton, “got everything right and was easily top.”

  For the Eton scholarship exam, Billy Williamson wrote ahead to ask the setters to give Simon a really beastly question, one that he “could get his teeth into”—something from the Cambridge University entrance paper, for example. “Oh, don’t worry,” wrote back the Eton people (who had heard all the rumors about the young genius), “we certainly will.”

  “For logical thought, analysis and visual memory,” wrote Williamson in the final issue of the Bulletin dealing with Simon’s days at the school, “I don’t suppose there will ever be anyone quite like him here again…He is unique. I am told that at the age of three he had an IQ of 85.”

  Williamson had a Jilly Cooperish attitude to any test not involving biblical history or Pindaric odes. He meant, of course, 185.

  Two days before Simon was due to sit the Eton paper, disaster: gastric flu struck the school. “Twenty-nine boys, three masters and one under-matron in bed,” Williamson informed the Bulletin.

  Simon was dispatched to his grandmother in Woking for safety, and Billy Williamson followed shortly after, inching down the flooded roads through a storm to meet Simon and the other candidates at the Eton examination hall. “Lurid flashes of lightning were followed at ominously short intervals by loud crashes of thunder.” For the next four days it rained continuously, with “only one small mackintosh and one umbrella between us.” But through the downpour, out of the examination room, filling the spring air, they heard a boy’s voice…

  “Sir, what’s that?” asked one of Williamson’s companions.

  “What?”

  “That strange yodeling noise, sir.”

  “That,” said Williamson, putting his ear to the wind to pick out the notes, “is Norton, in his mathematics exam, singing for joy.”

  Thank God for Porter!

  Porter was another Ashdown boy, sitting the same scholarship entrance paper. At his preliminary interview, the Eton beaks had demanded:

  “Why should you be allowed to come to the school?”

  “Why, sir,” said Porter, “to look after Norton.”

  Porter knew exactly how to shut Simon up in the exam and get him back to his desk:

  20 Eton

  These have been the three happiest days of my life: an infinite variety of food, a minimum of exercise and a maximum of fascinating problems.

  Simon, on rushing out of the Eton exam hall

  From the age of twelve, Simon starts to become incomprehensible to me.

  At Ashdown House Junior School, Simon worked with infinite series, negative numbers, modular arithmetic and “imaginary” numbers. I grappled with those things at university: they are within grasp.

  Infinite series are sequences of numbers or letters that go on forever, according to a pattern that is always a little bit different from the one you suggest.

  Negative numbers are understood by anyone outside of Manchester.1

  Modular arithmetic (also called “clock arithmetic”) is what we use every day to tell the time with a twelve-hour clock.

  Imaginary numbers are often represented by the letter i.

  Imaginary numbers have nothing—at least at first—to do with the imagination. Ah, shame. They are stolid, practical little beasts, good for describing circular motion. They appear repeatedly in turgid university lectures on electricity and magnetism, because both of these forces depend on electrons, and electrons fling themselves around the atom, and up and down copper wires, in circular sorts of ways. They are fundamental to Quantum Theory, because Quantum Theory depends on the idea that sub-atomic particles can be treated like waves, and waves (as anyone knows who’s played at the seaside) tumble you about in circles. For any subject in which the notion of back-and-forth or round-and-round crops up, imaginary numbers are close behind, panting to get a bite of the fun. They could be used to describe barn dancing if you like, because that involves the occasional swivel, and the twirl of delightful skirts.

  At Eton, Simon’s mathematics left this practical stuff behind. It entered the world of magic.

  Extract from Simon’s entrance exam report for Eton. He was awarded the highest scholarship score in the history of the school.

  Using chemical analysis, we can determine Simon’s age at the time he produced this drawing:

  Is that a fly in the bottom right-hand corner?

  It’s a hexagonal hydrocarbon ring; it appears on the inside cover of a blue notebook I’ve discovered in a box file (yellow, mottled with mold) among the early geological layers of the back room of the Excavation. Hydrocarbon rings belong to O-level chemistry. I date Simon to be fourteen at the time he made this diagram. There follow two pages of trivial calculus of the sort designed to make schoolboys miserable all weekend; then come eight pages, in red pen, of boggledom.

  They are not in Simon’s hand.

  They are in the louche strokes of Kenneth Spencer, his tutor: a list of bitterly difficult books and theorems by authors whose names look as though they’ve been put together in the forests of Eastern Europe from reject scraps of algebra: Sierpinski, Kuratowski, Tarski, Gödel, Banach, Schröder-Bernstein, Heine-Borel-Lebesgue, Zorn.

  Spencer had been a senior mathematical scholar at Oxford and a university lecturer.

  It’s not the complexity of the problems that make his suggestions difficult, it’s their simplicity. As with the difficulty of finding a way into Groups, these problems about the foundations of mathematical thought are as hard to clutch hold of as an oily ball; they are greasy with simplicity. The things seem hermetically sealed against all forms of assault.

  When I was Simon’s age (fourteen, at the time of the blue notebook) I crept off to a friend’s house to watch Star Wars, and see Luke Skywalker fly his X-Plane down at the Death Star. Skywalker—battered and bumped by Darth Vader’s proton-beam ack-ack guns—finds a bombing run, a furrow in the impenetrable surface; roils down this valley between mountainous blocks of spaceship windows, the air boiling with enemy explosions; and drops his bomb…ever so neatly, a moment of supreme cinematic silence…into a tiny ventilation outlet (the only known architectural weakness in the evil Vader’s vast edifice); then roars up and away as the Death Star erupts.

  * * *

  Eton beak and housemaster who helped and inspired pupils to excel in Maths

>   …A fervent supporter of the mathematical tutorial system, Spencer taught several generations of top maths specialists, helping to secure many scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge. Notable amongst his pupils was SP Norton, a King’s Scholar whom other masters found almost impossible to teach in a class since he was so far ahead of everyone else.

  Spencer gave up considerable spare time to teach Norton privately, as a result of which Norton (now an independent researcher at Jesus College, Cambridge) obtained a First Class external degree from London University while still at Eton. He used to play three-dimensional chess with Norton and another mathematical scholar, Campbell. The two boys were better at this complicated game than their beak, but often devoted so much energy to beating each other that Ken Spencer would win…

  * * *

  An obituary is supposed to be about the person who has died. Kenneth Spencer’s obituary in the Daily Telegraph spends much of its length talking about Simon.

  The mathematics that Simon was investigating was like this also: it required unexpectedness, cavalier courage, total precision, utter clarity of thought, and a mountain of insolence.

  On a table beside the moldy box file containing the blue notebook there’s a black-and-white picture of Simon, aged fifteen: a thin, handsome chap with short, dark hair and an angular face. His jacket is too large; it drapes from his shoulders. He’s receiving an award from Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, for winning a national mathematics competition. Philip is leaning forward with an air of paternal concern: “Is this little fellow right in the head?” his look says. “Why does he seem so beaten-in?”

  He is tired, Duke—a little boy, fresh from wars.

  After Spencer’s eight pages of red ink, carefully laid out, grouped into sections—the whole thing headed by the word “Analysis”—come three pages of Simon’s tongue-biting script, in blue ink. He is growing up fast: this is now recognizably the handwriting that Simon has stuck with into adulthood. It’s a little broader, there’s still a bit of bounce about the way the letters stretch across the page; he’s not yet gnawing his tongue quite as hard as he does today.

  From the blue notebook: numbers (except a few token ones floating by) have almost disappeared.

  Something takes place during these three pages after Spencer has made his recommendations for further reading. There’s a shift in Simon’s attitude to mathematics. A mathematician would no doubt know immediately what’s going on with the marks he makes, but to a non-mathematician there’s an unsettling calm. The clunky equipment of school methods (columns of long division, times-tables, logarithms, cosine rules) has been pushed aside. It’s all letters. It’s as though Simon’s found a way under the surface cladding of mathematics into its levers and cogs.

  Then we are back to Spencer’s red pen. There’s been a change here too. Spencer is no longer at ease. He has lost his patrician cool. Instead of the pages being blocked out, divided into sections relating to different theoretical points, references to higher authorities appended as appropriate, he’s dashing at the page, scrawling wildly:

  “Differential Geometry.” Spencer batters on:

  Spilling knowledge as fast as he can now, Spencer’s handing out every last weapon to Simon that he can think of, before the boy disappears so far inside the soul of the subject that he can no longer reach back to ordinary men:

  Then, pooof!

  Spencer vanishes. His hand is never seen in the blue notebook again. A few pages later, that disturbing shape from the back of the front cover reappears. It’s simplified—still chemistry but pared back:

  Simon is doing to this hydrocarbon what he has just learned to do with numbers—getting under the surface of it, looking for the machinery, the general pattern, the cogs and levers that make it function. Over the next pages, the last traces of oxygen vanish. Released from particulars, the purified form starts to flex:

  mutate:

  (Oops, no, sorry, that’s a set of train/bus routes from Cambridge, Bedford and Huntingdon that Simon’s trying to work out on the same pages)

  and tessellate:

  as Simon drags it with him into the depths:

  October 1966. Eton allowed him to start a university degree in pure mathematics. Simon calls it “My Day of Awakening.” His “Arrival.” “The moment I felt I really came out.” But he is not talking about mathematics.

  He remembers the number of the bus he took to college on the first day: the 441, which was “a perfect square: 441 = 21 × 21.” (“No, Alex, that was the bus that took me to Holloway, not Imperial. The bus to Imperial was the 705.”)

  He remembers the locker room, the woman at the desk who gave him the key for his own locker, where he could store his books on topology, algebraic geometry, complex numbers, infinite series, Set Theory, Group Theory; the locker door—metal, gray, holes at the top.

  (“Alex, I do not remember holes.”)

  He remembers opening the door. He can picture the first sight he had of the locker’s contents, inexplicably left behind by the previous owner.

  And after that he forgets. The rest of his three years at Imperial College and later Royal Holloway College are gone.

  It was what was in the locker that changed Simon’s life that day.

  London Transport folders.

  To this biographer, the only way to make sense of the moment is to fill it with coruscating splendor: piled from bottom to top, the metal cupboard tumbled with inch-thick custard-yellow timetables: Merry Maker trips across the aching moorlands of Yorkshire, rambling tours of Cornwall’s sea-blathered cliffs, Weekend Specials to the ghost-filled churches in Lanarkshire, Magical Mystery Tours of the elfin forests of Northumberland. Stashed on the locker’s shoe shelf: fat towers of unused shilling-return bus seats held together by elastic bands; dangling from the coathook, an epiphany of Ordnance Survey Trailfinder maps crammed into Woolworths bags.

  Simon insists it was nothing of the sort.

  Ask him directly what he found that day and he gives a Grunt Number One (the Mother/Loveliness Grunt), swelling momentarily to an unexpected Number Two (Father/Puzzled) and concluding, allegro, with a staccato riff on Number Four (Frustrated).

  “I’m sorry, but when I came across the London Transport folders I had no idea that I would be asked to remember every detail of the incident forty-four years later.”

  To get fuller details, you’ve got to write to eSimon.

  Explanation for Grunt #1: “As I say, it was when I was taking my degree that I really felt I came out in terms of public transport…What you can say is that I did NOT have a sudden epiphany. I remember there were exactly six different types of folder in the locker. I kept one of each, and gave the rest to the office which had issued me with the key to the locker.”

  Explanation for Grunt #2: “They were free publicity. But I didn’t know that until I had looked through it and was confused. I decided to follow up the sources of information mentioned in the folders (e.g., go to London Transport’s publicity office and buy area timetables). It was this process that initiated my lifelong fascination with public transport.”

  Explanation for Grunt #4: “I wish that every fourteen-year-old had had a chance to discover the joys of buses the way I did—if so, this country wouldn’t be in the mess it is, and incidentally…”

  “Yes?”

  “Why have you not included a Grunt Number Three?”

  That’s all Simon has to say about his time as a London schoolboy undergraduate. With the close of this single, dazzling memory, London University, Simon’s alma mater, is gone.

  Sunday Times, August 3, 1969.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “But you used to play it, Simon! All the time, at Eton. Three-dimensional chess. It says so here in Kenneth Spencer’s obituary.”

  We were in my study; Simon was working through his “backlog” of post. He’d been in Canada at a Monster conference for two weeks, and in that time several hundred letters, some from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, had pile
d into the house. To his left, beside his knee, was the pile of unopened letters. He had thrown them down in preparation, like the toy bricks he used to play with as a baby, and was now picking them back up, item by item, and investigating each with forensic delicacy—its lettering, stamps, emblems (if from the government or royalty), postmarks. He was sniffing for interest, although that must be the wrong word, because Simon has no sense of smell; but this dog-like detective work appeared to be led by his nose. If the packet he was analyzing at that moment had been human, it would have punched him on the conk for a perv.

  I snatched up the photocopy and shook it at Simon’s nose. “Here, paragraph four: ‘He used to play three-dimensional chess with Norton and another mathematical scholar, Campbell…’”

  “I don’t know what he’s talking about, hnnnn.”

  He took the sheet, pressed it still closer to his eyes, and studied the print as though the letters weren’t to be trusted even now. “Written by a journalist. Someone in your line of work,” he said maliciously.

  “Nonsense. Obituaries are written by people who knew the person, especially obituaries of Eton types.” I still felt rather bitter about the fact that when I’d sent my obituary of my last biographical subject, Stuart, to the Telegraph, they’d wanted to change the words round to portray him as a grateful, reconditioned savage, and cut my favorite comments (on grounds of “house style,” if you please; then, when I protested, on the grounds that they were rotten sentences). But the Telegraph does not make up long-winded, independently verifiable facts about Eton beaks. If the obituary says Simon used to play three-dimensional chess with his tutor, Simon played three-dimensional chess with his tutor.