The next thing - which must have been a good couple of weeks later - is being taken to have a blood test at the hospital. Although I was a bit better by then we took the absolutely unheard of & unprecedented step of going by taxi. It had a very small, high rear window of smoked glass, which fascinated me
I was well enough to leave the hospital on foot. As a reward for my bravery we went to WHSmith & I got a new Noddy book - number 4. I remember feeling cheated that I did not get numbers 2&3 to complete my set
I was off school for 6 weeks altogether. The nearest we ever got to a diagnosis was glandular fever without the fever. When, some months later, my glands came up again, the doctor who came was not my beloved Dr Hayward - with his tweeds, mustache & smell of tobacco - but a thin young man with dark hair & hornrims. As soon as he tried to feel the back of my neck I, uncharacteristically, ran screaming to hide behind the settee & refused to budge
Some of the 6 weeks I spent at my Nanas. To keep me amused she taught me to play patience - the simple 7 card kind that used to come free with Windows (which version always annoyed me because it played to the wrong rules) As a 6 year old I used to have trouble keeping track as I laid out the cards. It was tedious to start over, but too complicated to try & work out where I had gone wrong if I ended up with the wrong number of cards in one of the rows or columns
Somehow I very gradually worked out (it must have taken over a year) a way of checking as I went along. All I had to do was keep count of the total number of cards & do a simple check at the end of every line
I had discovered the formula for the sum of the first n integers
To this day I remember it most easily in the form I devised
Half the number
Plus a half
Times the number
***********
I have been reading an awful lot of Victorian memoirs, lives & letters, & biographies in recent years. Someone, I cant remember who, told how his elder brother had told him Theres a formula for that when he struggled with a similar problem. The boy was enchanted & went on to a career as a mathematician
Might the same have happened to me if I had been that lucky? Probably not, to be honest. Though I usually understand, dimly, what mathematicians are on about, I have no real wish to join them
Anyway, I was a girl. And, as a boy called Keith Boden once said to me, quite viciously Girls arent supposed to be good at maths. I was 12 & just thought that proved how silly boys could sometimes be
