Mister God, This is Anna

But Anna … She was qualitatively different, and she had me puzzled, not so much because of her flamboyant precociousness, but because I needed a good deal more documentation of her uniqueness. To begin with, I found it hard to believe that anyone could have existed at that age who was so untouched by the constraining type of education available at that time, and whose precocity took the form of devastating challenges to the received way of construing things; and more so, when her nascent philosophy went to the heart of some problems of spiritual perception and the nature of being which are precisely contemporary. And I questioned the intimate physical relationship between Fynn and Anna which, even in these permissive days, will undoubtedly be offensive to many well-meaning ladies who are in good standing with the executive committee of the Mothers’ Union.

But these problems began to resolve themselves as soon as I met Fynn. There is another quality about him which transcends his masculinity and femininity; the only word I can use to describe it is Innocence. No doubt he is touched by original sin, whatever that may mean, and many of the things that frail flesh is heir to. He is not amongst the ever-sanctified. But there is about him a touch of that engaging, wide-eyed, winsome innocence which mankind must have had before the Fall, and which would permit a youth and a young girl to snuggle up in bed together in a way which was completely innocent (there the word is again) of any sexuality. In fact the simple honesty of their relationship reminded me of the practices of the subintroductae – those virgins who slept with the early Christian fathers without intercourse taking place – which had to be abandoned in the fourth century because Cyprian and others were worried about SCANDALS; and of which Charles Williams writes in The Descent of the Dove (London, 1939 and 1950, p. 13): ‘It was one of the earliest triumphs of “the weaker brethren”, those innocent sheep who by mere volume of imbecility have trampled over many delicate and attractive flowers in Christendom. It is the loss, so early, of a tradition whose departure left the Church rather over-aware of sex, when it might have been creating a polarity with which sex is only partly coincident.’

The other credibility problems resolved themselves when I realized that Fynn lives on dialectic. It is not simply that he has a great appetite for dialogue with people. He gives the appearance of being in a kind of reciprocal tension with all phenomena all the time. He is a man of furious intellectual energy. It is as though his mind is processing data (and not only that of number) at every moment and perceiving and printing out new and significant patterns of relationships.

It was into this dialectical orbit that Anna fortuitously swam, and suddenly found her spirit lifted up to see the world with different eyes from other children and to refuse the blinkers which both school-ma’am and parson had readily to hand in their pre-packed word-parcels. If Fynn needed Anna, Anna also, and just as specifically, needed Fynn. And it stands to reason that the problems which they teased away at together were the problems which obsessed Fynn. And it also follows that the problems which have preoccupied him over the intervening years have naturally become contemporary. In other words this dialectical relationship shaped the Anna story. An analogy from the Christian story casts some light upon this problem.

The first three Gospels represent the words and deeds of Jesus which the early Church found useful and necessary for their domestic life of living, and teaching, and explaining. With the passage of time the continuous use made the form. So Fynn, continuously reflecting on and remembering and re-evaluating his life with Anna, within the context of his own intellectual growth, formed the Anna story and its meaning. Just as the Fourth Gospel is a theological work, where perhaps one pregnant sentence spoken by Jesus (like, ‘I am the bread of life’) is expounded by putting words into the mouth of Jesus, so, it seems to me, Fynn has taken an Idea of Anna, expressed in a lapidary way and, grasping its meaning, has worked out its significance so that the Ah! of it makes a dramatic impact on bears of very little brain like me.

Even so, some readers may remain incredulous. They will ask, ‘Is it true?’ Now I happen to believe that it is true in the way they are asking the question. But then I know Fynn. I have seen the documents in the case: the notes, the drawings, the essays, the music. But there is a sense in which the relics have nothing to do with the truth of this, any more than the truth of the myth of the Garden of Eden would be enhanced by the discovery of a fossilized apple with a couple of bites taken from it!

What is Truth? Pilate raised the question and wisely declined to answer it, realizing no doubt that all political truth is necessarily tainted. But Søren Kierkegaard did make an attempt at answering the same question; and many people have found it satisfying as a rough-and-ready measure for that kind of truth which cannot be measured on the laboratory bench. The truth, he wrote, is what ennobles. It is, in other words, that which makes you a better being. It is in that realm that the truth of Mister God, This is Anna is finally to be found. It is an ennobling tale which greatly widens our perception and touches the heart. And it does so in a way which defies the processes of logic. We cannot find words to explain how it works its spell. But, as Solzhenitsyn wrote in his Nobel prize speech, ‘Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into the realm beyond words … It is like that small mirror in the fairy tales – you glance in it and what you see is not yourself; for an instant you glimpse the Inaccessible, where no horse or magic carpet can take you. And the soul cries out for it.’

This book has the same kind of transporting magic. Fynn and Anna, with their mirror-book and all their other simple impedimenta, allow us to glimpse the Inaccessible. They would never have won a Nobel prize for literature. They do, however, make me congratulate myself on having joined the human race. Above all they put back the Ah! into that mixture of mess and marvel which makes the mystery of our mortal life.

Chapter One (#ulink_e079026b-f24d-5f02-8895-8582a9dd3dc1)

‘The diffrense from a person and an angel is easy. Most of an angel is in the inside and most of a person is on the outside.’ These are the words of six-year-old Anna, sometimes called Mouse, Hum or Joy. At five years Anna knew absolutely the purpose of being, knew the meaning of love and was a personal friend and helper of Mister God. At six Anna was a theologian, mathematician, philosopher, poet and gardener. If you asked her a question you would always get an answer – in due course. On some occasions the answer would be delayed for weeks or months; but eventually, in her own good time, the answer would come: direct, simple and much to the point.

She never made eight years, she died by an accident. She died with a grin on her beautiful face. She died saying, ‘I bet Mister God lets me get into heaven for this’, and I bet he did too.

I knew Anna for just about three and a half years. Some people lay claim to fame by being the first person to sail around the world alone, or to stand on the moon, or by some other act of bravery. All the world has heard of such people. Not many people have heard of me, but I, too, have a claim to fame; for I knew Anna. To me this was the high peak of adventure. This was no casual knowing; it required total application. For I knew her on her own terms, the way she demanded to be known: from the inside first. ‘Most of an angel is in the inside’, and this is the way I learned to know her – my first angel. Since then I have learnt to know two other angels, but that’s another story.

My name is Fynn. Well that’s not quite true; my real name doesn’t matter all that much since my friends all called me Fynn and it stuck. If you know your Irish mythology you will know that Fynn was pretty big; me too. Standing about six foot two, weighing some sixteen stone odd, close to being a fanatic on physical culture, the son of an Irish mother and a Welsh father, with a passion for hot saveloys and chocolate raisins – not together, I may add. My great delight was to roam about dockland in the night-time, particularly if it was foggy.

My life with Anna began on such a night. I was sixteen at the time, prowling the streets and alleys with my usual supply of hot dogs, the street lights with the foggy haloes showing dark formless shapes moving out from the darkness of the fog and disappearing again. Down the street a little way a baker’s shop-window softened and warmed the raw night with its gas-lamps. Sitting on the grating under the window was a little girl. In those days children wandering the streets at night were no uncommon sight. I had seen such things before, but on this occasion it was different. How or why it was different has long since been forgotten except that I am sure it was different. I sat down beside her on the grating, my back against the shop-front. We stayed there about three hours. Looking back over thirty years, I can now cope with those three hours; but at the time I was on the verge of being destroyed. That November night was pure hell; my guts tied themselves into all manner of complicated knots.

Perhaps even then something of her angelic nature caught hold of me; I’m quite prepared to believe that I had been bewitched from the beginning. I sat down with ‘Shove up a bit, Tich.’ She shoved up a bit but made no comment.

‘Have a hot dog’, I said.

She shook her head and answered, ‘It’s yours.’

‘I got plenty. Besides, I’m full up’, I said.

She made no sign so I put the bag on the grating between us. The light from the shop-window wasn’t very strong and the kid was sitting in the shadows so I couldn’t see what she looked like except that she was very dirty. I could see that she clutched under one arm a rag-doll and on her lap a battered old paintbox.

We sat there for thirty minutes or so in complete silence; during that time I thought there had been a movement of her hand towards the hot-dog bag but I didn’t want to look or comment in case I put her off. Even now I can feel the immense pleasure I had when I heard the sound of that hot-dog skin popping under the bite of her teeth. A minute or two later she took a second and then a third. I reached into my pocket and brought out a packet of Woodbines.

‘Do you mind if I smoke while you’re eating, Tich?’ I asked.

‘What?’ She sounded a little alarmed.

‘Can I have a fag while you’re eating?’

She rolled over and got to her knees and looked me in the face.

‘Why?’ she said.

‘My Mum’s a stickler for politeness. Besides, you don’t blow smoke in a lady’s face when she’s eating’, I said.

She stared at half a sausage for a moment or two, and looking at me fully, she said, ‘Why? Do you like me?’

I nodded.

‘You have a fag then,’ and she smiled at me and popped the rest of the sausage into her mouth.

I took out a Woodbine and lit up and offered her the match to blow out. She blew, and I was sprayed with bits of sausage. This little accident produced such a reaction in her that I felt that I had been stabbed in the guts. I had seen a dog cringe before, but never a child. The look she gave me filled me with horror. She expected a thrashing. She clenched her teeth as she waited for me to strike her.

What my face registered I don’t know, perhaps anger and violence, or shock and confusion. Whatever it was, it produced from her the most piteous whimper. I can’t describe this sound after all these years, no words are fitting. The feeling I can still taste, can still experience. My heart faltered at the sound, and something came undone inside me. My clenched fist hit the pavement beside me, a useless gesture in response to Anna’s fears. Did I think of that image then, that image which I now think of, the only one that fits the occasion? That perfection of violence, that ultimate horror and bewilderment of Christ crucified. That terrible sound that the child made was a sound that I never wish to hear again. It attacked my emotional being and blew a fuse.

After a moment or two I laughed. I suppose that the human mind can only stand so much grief and anguish. After that the fuses blow. It did with me, my fuses blew in a big way. The next few minutes I know very little about – except that I laughed and laughed, then I realized that the kid was laughing too. No shrunken bundle of fear – she was laughing. Kneeling on the pavement and leaning forward with her face close to mine, and laughing – laughing. So very many times in the next three years I heard her laughter – no silver bells or sweet rippling sounds was her laughter, but like a five-year-old’s bellow of delight, a cross between a puppy’s yelp, a motor-bike, and a bicycle pump.

I put my hands on her shoulders and held her off at arm’s length, and then came that look that is entirely Anna’s – mouth wide open, eyes popping out of her head, like a whippet straining at the leash. Every fibre of that little body was vibrating and making a delicious sound. Legs and arms, toes and fingers, the whole of that little body shook and trembled like Mother Earth giving birth to a volcano. And what a volcano was released in that child!

Outside that baker’s shop in dockland on a foggy November night I had the unusual experience of seeing a child born. After the laughter had quietened off a bit, but while her little body was still thrumming like a violin string, she tried to say something, but it wouldn’t come out properly. She managed a ‘You – You – You –.’

After some little time and a great deal of effort she managed ‘You love me, don’t you?’

Even had it not been true, I could not have said ‘No’ to save my life; true or false, right or wrong, there was only one answer. I said ‘Yes’.

She gave a little giggle, and pointing a finger at me, said, ‘You love me,’ and then broke into some primitive gyration around the lamp-post, chanting ‘You love me. You love me. You love me.’

Five minutes of this and she came back and sat down on the grating. ‘It’s nice and warm for your bum, ain’t it?’ she said.

I agreed it was nice for your bum.

A moment later: ‘I ain’t arf firsty.’ So we upped and went along to the pub just down the road. I bought a large bottle of Guinness. She wanted ‘one of them ginger-pops with the marble in the neck’. So she had two ginger-pops and some more saveloys from an all-night coffee stall.

‘Let’s go back and get our bums warm again,’ she grinned at me. Back we went and sat on the grating, a big un and a little un.

I don’t suppose that we drank more than a half of the drinks, for it seemed that the idea of a fizzy drink was to shake it vigorously and then let it shoot up into the air. After a few showers of ginger-pop and a determined effort to do the nose trick, she said, ‘Now do it to yourn.’

I’m sure even then that this was not a request but an order. I shook hard and long and then let fly with the stopper and we both were covered with frothy Guinness.

The next hour was filled with giggles and hot dogs, ginger-pop and chocolate raisins. The occasional passer-by was yelled at: ‘Oi, Mister, he loves me, he do.’ Running up the steps of a nearby building she shouted, ‘Look at me. I’m bigger than you.’

About ten-thirty that evening, whilst she was sitting between my knees having an earnest conversation with Maggie, her rag-doll, I said, ‘Come on, Tich, it’s about time you were in bed. Where do you live?’

In a flat, matter-of-fact voice she exclaimed, ‘I don’t live nowhere. I have runned away.’

‘What about your Mum and Dad?’ I asked.

She might have said the grass is green and the sky is blue. What she did say was just as factual and effortless. ‘Oh, she’s a cow and he’s a sod. And I ain’t going to no bleeding cop shop. I’m going to live with you.’

This was no request but an order. What could you do? I merely accepted the fact. ‘Right, I agree. You can come home with me and then we will have to see.’

At that point my education began in earnest. I’d got myself a large doll, but not an imitation doll, a real live one and, from what I could make out, a bomb with legs on. Going home that night was like coming home from Hampstead Heath, slightly tiddled, a little dizzy from the merry-go-round I’d been on, and not a little bewildered that the beautiful doll I’d won on the shooting-range had come to life and was walking beside me.