Anna and the Black Knight: Incorporating Anna’s Book
Though her short life was vividly presented in Mister God, This is Anna, its huge success led to Fynn being inundated to write more about his experiences with her.Anna and the Black Knight introduces us to Mister John, a veteran of World War I and local schoolmaster, who was to have a profound effect on Anna. Anna's astonishing capacity for looking at things from fresh perspectives, and her fascination with mathematics and Mister God, stands her in good stead as her life is opened up to new things, such as school, priests and motor cars.This sequel also includes the full text of Anna’s Book, reproductions of her own letters and writings. Her artless and transparent conversations speak to the heart and are recorded using her own unique and colourful spellings. The book is again illustrated throughout with Papas’s unequalled drawings.
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Anna and the Black Knight
Incorporating Anna’s Book
Fynn
Illustrated by Papas
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by William Collins & Co. Ltd 1986
This revised edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005
Text © Fynn 1986, 1990
Illustrations for Anna’s Book © Papas 1974
Illustrations for Anna and the Black Knight © HarperCollinsPublishers
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein and secure permissions, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future edition of this book.
Fynn and Papas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780007203000
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2013 ISBN ISBN: 9780007542901
Version: 2018-05-15
In Mister God, This is Anna Fynn told the story of his friendship with this extraordinary child, and of her relationship with ‘Mister God’ and the world around her.
Anna’s story, with its timeless truths, lives on in the minds and hearts of countless readers. But after her death, little was left of Anna herself – except the abiding memory of her presence, and a few treasured fragments of her writing. In Anna’s Book Fynn shares these with us.
Anna’s spelling and punctuation were, like herself, uniquely original and exuberant. In a few places we have altered these slightly, for the sake of clarity, but in no way do these alterations detract from the flavour of Anna’s language.
The Publishers
I told the story of Anna in Mister God, This is Anna. This is how it was. Anna and I found each other in one of these pea soup, foggy nights in November. I can’t remember the precise date, it was probably in 1935. I used to wander around the docklands of East London night after night. It was a nice quiet thinking place, and often I needed to think.
It wasn’t at all unusual to find a child roaming the streets at that hour – in the 1930s it was just like that. When I had taken her home, and after she had washed the dirt from her face and hands, I really saw her – a very pretty little red-haired child, but as she later told me, ‘that’s on the outside’. It took me a very long time to know her on the inside, as she demanded to be known.
The relentless pursuit of beauty engaged the few short years of Anna’s life. It was at first a little strange to be told that a picture smelt good, but I soon got used to that. Anything that delighted all your senses at once was, for Anna, God! And the microscope was a special way of seeing him.
So it was that Anna found God in the strangest of places – tram tickets, grass, mathematics and even the dirt on her hands, and then somebody told you to wash it off!
Whatever satisfied Anna’s idea of beauty had to be preserved, written down by anyone who was prepared to do so, and saved in one of her numerous shoe boxes. Every so often these boxes were placed on the kitchen table and the contents sorted out.
Where she got the idea of beauty I do not know. In those years the East End of London was, for most people, a grimy, dirty place, but for Anna it was just beautiful. Anna spent most of her efforts in turning the ugly into the beautiful. This often meant inventing a whole new situation into which the ugly facts could be transformed.
It was beauty that really drew Anna and me together. I can’t remember a time in my life when I haven’t been totally absorbed with the subject of mathematics. In fact, I’d rather ‘do’ mathematics than eat or sleep. Old John D., who taught me mathematics for seven years, once defined it as ‘the pursuit of pure beauty’. Although I liked that as a definition, it wasn’t until Anna had been with us for about two years that I really grasped what that meant. Anna and I were sitting at the kitchen table whilst I was working out the reciprocal of seventeen, which is another way of saying one divided by seventeen, which in the nature of things gave me another number, which was what I was after.
