Simon

by Alexander Masters

  Simon acknowledged in a report he was asked to write about himself one term, when the geography teacher was off sick.

  “In some ways he is extremely competent,” conceded the English teacher: “grammar, syntax, spelling & now, even writing. Yet there are definite deficiencies. He has very little general information at his disposal; he neither reads aloud nor recites well; yet he can remember any poem he learns with the greatest ease…He still stoutly refuses to admit that he has enjoyed a book.” His written work was “obscure to everyone but himself.”

  Transcription from the handwritten original. Simon was ten. Discovered under the bedside table in the Excavation, forty-seven years later.

  As the shock of Simon’s precocity wore off, a note of exasperation crept into his teachers’ comments. “He has literally danced his way through, much to the chagrin of his form-mates,” wrote the French master at first, when Simon was still able to get by on just his memory, but he adjusted his views soon after. “He has the most annoying/amazing habit of getting difficult work correct while he spoils it all by making several elementary blunders.” “He knows his grammar thoroughly [but] he is so lacking in imagination that his essays & free compositions are often meaningless.”

  In Greek there was a suspicion by the teacher that in this subject Simon might be extra-terrestrial, but “he makes just the right number of mistakes in his work to show that he is human.”

  If the subject could be reduced to rules, Simon invaded. If it couldn’t, as in geography or history or scripture, he doodled in his notebook and started on impossible sums:

  Aged ten, he triumphed also at music, and wrote a sonata, 100 bars long and pronounced, forty-five years later, by internationally renowned harpsichordist Giulia Nuti at the world premiere in her front room in Florence, “a very peculiar piece of music indeed.”

  “Do you remember Collins?” Malcolm whispered to Simon, as Clive took us upstairs to see the school dormitories. “Did he also put his hand up your shorts and pinch you?”

  “No,” retorted Simon in a loud voice. “He didn’t do it to me. Maybe it was because I was good at playing the piano.”

  Simon’s only continuous error while at Ashdown House was to keep dropping his pen on the floor. But that didn’t stop him if it happened during a subject with rules. Write, write, write…he raced, unstoppable, ink splashing…write, write, write…wrenched, twisted half-nib digging through the pages of his exercise book…write, write, write…

  “The results are fantastic,” cried one teacher in despair, angling and twisting these deranged, splattered pieces of classwork in the light.

  “We have failed—partially failed, anyway—to teach him to live as a component part of a community,” sighed the headmaster, then added: “I wish he would dress, feed and sneeze more tidily.”

  Simon was put in a cage.

  The headmaster ordered it.

  “A metal cage?” I asked excitedly. “Like a canary? What a fabulous idea!”

  It was not a metal cage. It was a cage of books and cushions built up around Simon during his Greek lessons and called, for reasons no one appears to remember, his “Bruton Cage.”

  Billy Williamson had noticed how much Simon enjoyed isolation and compact spaces, so he reasoned that if the peculiar boy was encased entirely in a grotesque mountain of paper and soft furnishings he would feel blissfully alone.

  The smallest things bothered Simon. At that age (seven to twelve) he lived in a billow of superstitions. In the dining room, he would throw a fit if he spotted a knife pointing in his direction (so, naturally, the boys arranged theirs accordingly). He worshipped the number seven.

  “One day,” recollected Clive as, with a church-bell swing of his hand, he scooped us through the front door of the school into the lobby, “Simon came down to breakfast frightfully excited and said he’d just invented a new system of multiplication tables based on seven instead of ten. Nobody knew what he was talking about.”

  Simon doesn’t either. “Hnnn, aaah, no. I don’t remember that at all.”

  “Simon,” I exclaimed, stunned, “are you saying you re-rediscovered modular arithmetic when you were at prep school?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m not saying. I’m saying I don’t remember.”

  Revealed by an unknown genius in the East, in the West “modular” or “clock” arithmetic was rediscovered for the first time by the teenage Carl Friedrich Gauss, the “Prince of Mathematicians.” This was regarded as one of the great achievements of the eighteenth century. “That makes you equivalent to Gauss,” I squeaked, in awed falsetto.

  The mention of the holy name, Gauss, brought Simon back to the land of good temper. “As I say, I was not a Gauss. I was certainly never a Gauss. No, no, heh, heh, huunh. Not a Gauss. I think I’d like to use the toilet now. I’m full of liquid.”

  “He was like a toy,” said Malcolm, relaxing a little with these memories of Simon’s boyhood peculiarity. “It wasn’t ordinary bullying. It was almost communication. If you were standing next to him in the urinals and made a fart noise with your mouth, he’d bounce up and down, all the way down the wall, spraying urine everywhere. It was rather fun.”

  “But when he was in the cage, he was safe?”

  “For a few minutes, yes.”

  “And then?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Somebody made a fart noise with their mouth.”

  All the same, none of this persecution seems very serious—certainly not serious enough to justify Simon saying that the boys here ruined his self-confidence for life. When the Volga Bulgars see a prodigy, they say, “It is fitting for this man that he should serve our Lord,” then seize him, fling a rope around his neck and hang him from a tree until he disintegrates. That’s proper bullying.

  In his forties, Malcolm had attended a Boarding School Survivors workshop to try to come to terms with the bullying he’d endured at Radley. The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article about him. He appeared on an Esther Rantzen program about public schools. The youngest boy at the workshop had been nineteen; at Eton, he’d been dumped in a bath full of shit and piss. That is real bullying.

  And to some extent Simon deserved it. Doesn’t he himself admit that one of the things he did in his spare time was to “reorganize” the school timetable so that “it would be more efficient and not include so much unnecessary time between lessons”?

  “There were other bullying things too,” acknowledged Malcolm, with a guilty groan, as Simon returned from the toilet (“There, now I can start filling up again”) and pattered ahead, up the staircase, toward the dormitories and classrooms.

  “What things?”

  Malcolm shook his head in dismay.

  “Malcolm! What things?”

  We arrived at the attic room where Greek was taught. Simon hurried across to feast on a map, grabbing his arm behind his back in delighted concentration.

  “No. It’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “Malcolm, spit it out!”

  Malcolm peered after Simon, looked at me; peered back at Simon; sucked his lips hesitantly, then whispered quickly:

  “We called him…”

  * * *

  1 “I don’t remember there being a Spanish teacher at Ashdown,” protests Simon. “Of course not, Simon. I can’t say the right name and what he really taught, or it would be libel.”

  2 Rachel Johnson quoted in The Hill, Issue 287, September 2008, p. 66.

  3 I can’t make this come out, although I’ve worked at it all afternoon. Jacob had thirteen children; Zeruiah, the sister of King David, had three sons. Dives was the rich man who refused to give Lazarus crumbs from his table: he went to hell and left behind five brothers. The destruction of the temple occurred in 128 BC. The tribes of Judah were one. It is a tribe. It split from the rest of Israel after Rehoboam’s reign, and set up camp in the south with the tribe of Benjamin, leaving behind the remaining ten tribes.

  13 × 3 × 5 – (–128) + (1 × 10) = 333

&n
bsp; 333? What’s critical about 333 AD in Jewish history?

  The question, agrees Williamson, is “beyond the capabilities of most, I really don’t know why” (Ashdown House Bulletin, December 1964, p. 29).

  19

  “Cabbage! Cabbage! Cabbage!” clanked the bell in the chapel tower.

  “cabbagecabbagecabbage” pattered schoolboy feet rushing to school prayers.

  “Cabbage?” called the dinner ladies. “Cabbage!” roared the school.

  “cabbash, cabbash, cabbash” squished their teeth.

  “Don’t,” said Simon.

  “Don’t,” said Simon, opening his eyes.

  “Carrot.”

  “Phew. Thank you.”

  “CABBAGE!”

  “Don’t.”

  “.”

  “Not in any language.”

  “Cabbage, , Cabbage, , Chou…”

  “Don’t,” said Simon.

  “Chou. Shoe, ,” gesticulated the bullies, grabbing up the pictured object.

  “Don’t.”

  “Cabbage, , Chou, , …”

  No one understood why “cabbage”…

  “Don’t.”

  …upset him so

  much, in any one of five languages: French, German, English, Latin and Homeric Greek.

  “Do you know what I think?” I said as we left the classroom and I brought the subject up with Simon.

  (“Don’t!” said Malcolm. “I really don’t think you should.”)

  “I think it’s nothing to do with cabbages. It’s just that the word ‘cabbage’ somehow, in your mind, came to stand for bullying. When somebody said ‘cabbage’ to you, you knew what he was actually saying was, ‘I’m bullying you.’”

  It’s like × in an algebraic equation. It was shorthand for “I’m too bored to do actual physical bullying in this circumstance: let ‘cabbage’ stand in for whatever that bullying would have been, were I to have done it.” The language didn’t matter, because bullying’s bullying wherever you go.

  I was pleased with this notion of algebraic bullying, and as the four of us creaked along the shadowed floorboards to the girls’ dormitories (named “Boudica,” “Pankhurst” and “Margaret Thatcher”) then back out of the building and into the limpid light of the playing fields, I rephrased it to Simon several times.

  “It’s physical algebra…Like money too, really, when you think about it…£20 stands for any purchase, be it three bottles of wine, a pair of shoes…the currency of bullying…the currency of algebra…”

  But Simon and I never seem to agree on the depth of my insights, on any subject. As we stepped onto the rugby pitch—goalposts padded to reduce collarbone breakage, grass sprinkled with schoolboy leg flesh—his eyes glazed over and he heaved a sigh, which wasn’t bored or upset, but more like the noise a train emits after a long rush between stations: a result of too much air inside the brakes. “Oh dear!”

  Then he perked up. “Last week I went to Spinach, Shrop­shire. Would you like to see the ticket?”

  “I don’t think ‘brilliant’ is the right word,” whispered Clive. We were now ambling past the cricket green, each of us with our hands behind our backs in a contemplative and umpire-ish manner, although Simon had somehow strayed off and got himself entangled in a bit of rhododendron bush. “Not for the non-mathematical subjects. It was a filing system he had in his mind. He was told something, registered it, reproduced it. But he was odd. He was just so out of kilter with anything we’d ever come across. You just couldn’t label him, other than by using the word ‘genius,’ which, of course, a good headmaster very, very rarely used. To go around boasting that you’ve got a genius in the school is not good for anybody.”

  I remembered the French teacher’s comment that Simon lacked “imagination,” and I thought again that it wasn’t quite fair. How could a boy who would grow up to stun the mathematical world with his capacity to explore the fundamental mysteries of the universe lack “imagination”? What was it, if not “imagination,” that enabled a ten-year-old to see instantly (like a painter effortlessly spotting the essential lines of a composition, or a poet picking out resonant metaphors and instinctively disregarding tired and muddied alternatives) five unprecedented ways to arrive at a solution to an abstract problem that the math teacher, with all his step-by-step traditional “workings,” couldn’t clunk through in a year? Who but someone with the “imagination” of a da Vinci would one day understand and describe objects that existed only in 196,883 dimensions?

  It wasn’t “imagination” Simon lacked. It was French that lacked standards and constancy. When Simon began at Ashdown, the teacher had suggested that the essence of communication in French consisted in learning things such as irregular verbs, past and future tenses, the declension of pronouns; and that by the calm and regulated application of these one eventually arrived at fluency. These components sparkled with metallic certitude. But it turned out not to be enough to build up language from such reliable things. The French teacher then changed tack and demanded some of that “imagination” thrown in too—stuff that took an accurate and succinct sentence, correct in all its grammatical particulars, as per the appendices at the back of the book, and turned it into a load of jellyish nonsense that was even more lame than the math teacher’s “workings.”

  Simon’s trouble was that he had a tight aesthetic. He wanted to be right. He found correctness beautiful. Certitude and universality, not floppy talk about sunsets on the Côte d’Azur, were what provoked his “imagination.”

  “I developed the theory,” barked Simon, suddenly behind us, cutting off the sunlight, pieces of rhododendron poking out of his hair, “that when someone punched me, if I couldn’t hit the person back, I could do equally well by hitting someone else. Then they could settle it amongst themselves.”

  “But this is perfect! We’ve had the algebraic view of bullying, now, this is the arithmetical type. Your view was that it didn’t matter which bully got thwacked, just so long as the overall effect was to put the punch back in the bullies’ camp.”

  “I suppose so,” mumbled Simon, suspicious that I seemed to be making sense so far.

  “Which is the same situation as you get in arithmetic sums.” Take, for example, the sum:

  Now add 1 to each side:

  The left-hand side is obvious. It goes up from eight to nine. But which of the digits on the right-hand side gets the one added to it? The three? One of the twos? The one?

  Oh dear, oh dear.

  The correct answer is, it doesn’t make any difference. All that matters is the overall effect, not this silly fussing.

  “It’s the same with you and your punches. There’s you on one side, your bullies on the other:

  “You get a punch:

  “Which means they need a thwack back. But they’re all bullies, so it doesn’t matter which boy you punch back, whether he’s the fat patsy or the knife-throwing son of a Mafia don. Just as with sums, it’s the overall effect, not silly fuss about details that you’re after:

  “You know what your trouble was, Simon?” I said, as we stepped back into the building out of the sun. “You got humans and numbers confused.”

  Despite Simon’s lack of interest in this new idea, I think there’s a profound point in it. Simon at Ashdown had an unbalanced mind. His mathematical genius was impossible for ordinary brains to comprehend, even the brains of adult mathematics teachers. He had raised mathematics out of logic into artistry. His instant eye for the balance and elegance of a solution—I don’t know how better to define it, never having got close to experiencing this myself—was a more effective judge of correctness than the inviolable classroom “workings.” In short, for Schoolboy Simon, mathematics was not a separate subject—it was an aesthetic and a yardstick. You did not “do” mathematics between 11:00 and 12:30 on a Monday and a Thursday, any more than you did “admiration” or “fun.” Mathematics was simply there: the setting for existence; the touchstone for all activity. Mathematics was to Simon what gr
een fields and dark woods were to other schoolboys: the enjoyable places that you rushed to, whooping, as soon as the afternoon bell rang, to have conker fights and muddy your knees. Simon’s little joke about hitting bullies was connected to arithmetic not because Simon was good at a distinct subject called “mathematics” but because mathematics was everywhere, and everywhere was mathematics, and for a few moments, before Simon found himself being repeatedly stabbed in the flowerbeds by the Mafia don’s son, it had been good enough to let him share in its universality.

  (“I think we could insert a campaign reference, here, Alex. You could have me say: ‘Come to think of it, arithmetic bullying is what the government is doing with public services. The bankers rifle our savings, the government has to return the money, and Cameron insists on getting it by axing key public services, including buses. I hope I didn’t give the government the idea unwittingly because Boris picked up a bit of Ashdown folklore.’”

  “You mean Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, friend of David Cameron and an ex-Ashdown pupil, might have passed on the school folklore about your method of dealing with bullies to the Prime Minister, and that would have given him the idea of punishing buses for the bankers’ greed and mistakes?”