It was on one of the hottest days of the year that I made it to the cashpoint only to have my request rejected because the amount I entered wasn’t a multiple of ten. I didn’t know what a multiple of ten was. I still don’t.
It all began a long time ago, this problem with numbers, and though I have just found out there is a name for this condition* and that it is just as common as dyslexia, I haven’t yet looked into it and cling to my own theory which is that it all began because I missed a few days of school when I was six years old.
At the little school in Ilkley, while bombs were falling on London and many of the major cities, we were knitting scarves for ‘our brave servicemen’ (see above) while learning to read and write and ‘do arithmetic’.
The key to the reading and writing was the alphabet and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know my ABC, but I still don’t have the Times Tables – key to the universe of numbers – at my command. We learnt the tables by rote. I missed a few days and never caught up. That SEVEN TIMES SEVEN IS FORTY-NINE I can still hear in my head but, beyond that, all is silence. The doors that open onto fractions and decimal points have remained for ever closed.
But when one door shuts, another opens. In their majesty, Oxford, Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin, were prepared to consider me when none of the other universities were open to someone who had failed to matriculate. To matriculate, you had to pass three subjects. Maths was one of them.
So it was being innumerate that led me to Oxford and from Oxford to a job where Reading and Writing were the only requirements. Even so, there are times when Arithmetic raises its ugly head, but they can usually be managed by the time-honoured practice of counting on my fingers.
And there is always help at hand. There are friends. There are accountants. There is Google. And just one block down from that cash machine – tucked away, at the back of a gift shop – the remains of a Post Office. The bank, of course, closed long ago.
* Dyscalculia: a condition, according to Google, that makes it hard to do maths and tasks that involve maths. Not as well known or as understood as dyslexia .