Open Writing

If you know the words of the old song Dem Dry Bones, which goes ‘The thigh bone’s connected to the knee bone, the knee bone’s connected to the shin bone, the shin bone’s connected to the ankle bone’, and so on, you have a simple anatomy lesson, and you don’t even have to bother with the Latin.

I learnt numbers of all sorts, starting in the infants school in 1927, learning my times tables. It wasn’t too bad once I had the nine times table off by heart.

As for these days, -‘A litre of water is a pint and three quarters’ – that’s about as far as me and metric goes. And no, I’m not ashamed to say it. While acknowledging that metric measure, once you have mastered it, is definitely far simpler than old British, I maintain that it was in my use of such frolicking words as gill, ounce, and acre, and the round dependable words like quart and ton, that encouraged my love of the English language.

Sent on an errand up to Honicks, the German bakers in Balls Pond Road, just round the corner from our road, for a Coburg loaf, which was wrapped in tissue paper, I was always given a piece of Russian or Nelson cake. This was a ‘make-weight’ in case the loaf did not match up to the standard weight for a loaf.
You must have heard that thirteen is a bakers’ dozen? Same sort of thing.

In earlier days, to feed those large Victorian families, they used to sell a four pound quartern loaf, double the weight of a two-pound large loaf these days.

On Sunday mornings, out would go Mum to the man with his barrow at the T-junction of our road with Canterbury Terrace. He sold winkles, shrimps and watercress. She would buy two-penn’orth of watercress, a pint of winkles and sometimes half a pint of brown shrimps - and that is how they were measured out, in pint and half pint tankards.

During the week he sold bundles of firewood from his barrow. For threepence he would fill up Mum’s washing-up bowl with loose firewood.

For odd jobs around the house the hardware shop sold nails by the half- pound. Later on, when we moved out to Edgware and had a garden instead of a backyard, Dad ordered sand by the yard, which went with a bag or two of cement to make the base for our coal bunker.

Playing Snakes and Ladders with Mum or Dad, or, when we went to Vera’s, throwing a dice from a small wooden pot on to the board, and then according to the number of spots on the upper face of the dice, moving uour coloured token up a ladder or down a snake. And a sic meant you could have another go.

At Christmas times we enjoyed playing Lotto, or Housey-Housey. The game was called Tombola in the Navy, and these days is known nationwide as Bingo. I had to learn the numbers all over again, as the caller shouted Kelly’s Eye for number one, Unlucky for some, number thirteen, and Clickety-click for number sixty-six.

Mum was clever with her Singer treadle sewing machine and she made my summer dresses. Shopping for the material in Z. Dudley, the John Lewis of Kingsland Road, she would ask for
two and three quarter yards of twenty-seven inch wide cotton, at three and eleven a yard.

Her money and the bill would be packed into a small cylindrical metal canister above the counter. At the pull of a lever it travelled over the shoppers’ heads to the pay desk.
There were no calculators for these odd sums; it was all mental arithmetic. I still use it.

As I began to read more and more, my love of words brought me to realise, that indeterminate numbers have names of their own. While a number of cows or goats or even elephants is called a herd, a huddle of sheep is known as a flock. As for fish, they swim about in shoals, and bees and ants are sometimes seen as a swarm.

It was when I got up into the big girls that I first had to contend with the measurements rod, pole and perch, and to learn that ten chains made a furlong. Remembering that particular table took some doing, but it was phased out long before the Scholarship exam I took in the summer of 1934 at eleven years old, which won me a high school place at Highbury Hill High School for Girls.

Then I was introduced to algebra and algebraic equations, geometry and the isosceles triangle, logarithms, trigonometry with the tables at the back of dog-eared books, handed down through years from other forlorn children wondering whatever it was all meant for.

By the time I was fourteen I was learning about the scoring in tennis, with its love-40. I also learned Roman numerals and how to count in French, cube roots and Pi R squared. Then there were isobars on rainfall charts and gradients in georgraphy.

My numeracy and vocabulary continued to increase. Mum and Dad were assured that I was getting a good edfucation.

I was increasing my vocabulary and you can well imagine, Mum and Dad thought I was getting a good education.