It’s back-to-school time again – time for getting back into the swing of things and adapting to busy schedules. Summer vacation is over, and it’s back to structured days of homework and exam prep. These rigid fall schedules have probably been the norm for you ever since you were in kindergarten.
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I grew up in a house which lived and breathed mathematics. I was quick at numbers and happy with algebra as it contained letters and therefore writing. But maths was not my strength so it was nigh on impossible to participate in the family past time.
We lived in Hayes, Middlesex, in a small house, in an ordinary street. But inside our house, extraordinary stuff was going on.
I went back to visit this year and in the photo you can just see my old bedroom window, jutting out above the lawn behind me.
My older brother and my father sat at the dinner table every night and talked maths for hours. I was reading on the floor in front of the fire. Words filtered down to me - quantum mechanics, relativity, theorems ( I liked Pythagoras - history was my passion including history of maths), calculus, the atom, the splitting of the atom, anything really to do with the atom.
Then there were all the people - men really - Einstein, Newton, Archimedes - lots of history there. So without really understanding the maths, I was growing up in a home which would give me a backdrop to feed my imagination, my vocabulary, my world view and my thirst for knowledge. This has never left me and I believe it has been a huge influence on my writing.
Fast forward to 2007. My younger brother,
Louis Berk, a keen amateur photographer,( who was much better at maths than me) tells me that we should visit Bletchley Park before it gets properly discovered. Louis reckons our Dad was receiving decoded messages from Bletchley when he drove his radio car around France after D-Day. For quite sometime he was the only link between the British and American lines and got a letter from Eisenhower. I think he's wearing his driving gloves in the photo. He never took a driving test. Just got told to drive round the parade ground until he got the hang of it and then off he went.
One of Dad's hobbies was designing circuits and after he died we framed one and hung it on the wall. He drew the circuits with pencils he sharpened with a Stanley knife. He loved sharpening pencils and I always had a box full of fiercely sharpened pencils for school every day. No wonder I became a writer!
Louis was absolutely right. Bletchley Park was practically empty. We wandered around the huts which looked like the code breakers had literally just walked out the door and took photos. It was like stepping back seventy years. These photos were taken by Louis.
These photos were taken by me - you can see the difference!
I was inspired to write this post after seeing the film The Imitation Game about the work of Alan Turing at Bletchley Park, cracking the German code and shortening the WW2 by two years. They saved 14 million lives. But everyone who worked there stayed silent for decades. This film is about mathematics at its most extreme.
I loved every minute of it. I had learnt at my father's knee, you don't have to know about maths to be inspired by it. My imagination might not have solved black holes but it can soar as far as I need it to and beyond. Growing up in quantum mechanics - what gorgeous words - taught me how to think outside the box and that's what every writer needs.
www.miriamhalahmy.com
It may not be a terribly cheery subject but the inescapable reality of death has given rise to much of literature’s most profound and moving work. We are currently relaunching some of the titles in the Oxford Book of… series, and today I thought I would share an excerpt from the absolutely wonderful Oxford Book of Death. Below are some ‘last words’ from figures throughout history.
ARCHIMEDES (212 BC): (on being ordered by a Roman soldier to follow him) ‘Wait till I have finished my problem.’
BOILEAU (1711): ‘It is a great consolation to a poet on the point of death that he has never written a line injurious to good morals.’
RAMEAU (1764): (to his confessor) ‘What the devil are you trying to sing, monsieur le cure? Your voice is out of tune.’
VOLTAIRE (1778): (as the bedside lamp flared up) ‘What? The flames already?’
ADAM SMITH (1790): ‘I believe we must adjourn this meeting to another place.’
BEETHOVEN (1827): ‘I shall hear in Heaven.’
PALMERSTON (1865): ‘Die, my dear Doctor? – That is the last thing I shall do!’
DISRAELI (1881): (Queen Victoria having proposed to visit him) ‘Why should I see her? She will only want me to give a message to Albert.’
GIDE (1951): ‘I am afraid my sentences are becoming grammatically incorrect.’
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (in conversation some two weeks before his death in 1958, recorded by Sylvia Townsend Warner in a letter): ‘If I were reincarnated, I added, I think I would like to be a landscape painter. What about you? Music, he said, music. But in the next world I shan’t be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.’
JAMES THURBER (1961): ‘God bless… God damn.’
GORONWY REES (1979): (to his son, Daniel) ‘What shall I do next?’
By: Cassandra Gill,
on 9/5/2016
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By: Miriam Halahmy,
on 12/15/2014
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[...] you’re still tempted, OUP’s blog has a few selections of famous last words from some historical figures. For my money (which won’t be spent giving this book to a close friend or relative!), Andre [...]
[...] OUP Blog brings word of the Oxford Book of Death, with excerpts of notable last words. GIDE (1951): ‘I am afraid my [...]