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PICKING UP THREADS

This was written in
2007
so is now very dated

Jackets and sweaters followed fast. The designs were all geometric as you might expect from someone more used to dealing with Mathematics than with anything ‘arty’. Geometry was, and still is, my first love in Maths. It was a love born out of fear. When I went to the Grammar School, at the age of eleven, Maths was taught as three separate subjects, Arithmetic, Algebra and Geometry, by three different teachers. The Geometry teacher was terrifying. He was an ex-army Sergeant Major so had the voice and discipline you might expect. He was also enormous, or so I thought at the time. Teachers still wore academic gowns and there was something about the way he walked, or marched, that made his gown billow far more than any other teacher. He also wore the loudest imaginable shoes so if you failed to see him approaching you couldn’t miss hearing him. Pupils would scatter in front of him, everyone in terror.

At the first Geometry lesson, at age eleven, he listed the equipment we MUST have at every lesson. I had the obligatory geometry set in a tin, so common in those days, with compasses, dividers, protractor, set squares and so on but, until now I had never been introduced to the finer points of pencils. As far as I was concerned a pencil was a pencil. Not so! For Geometry we were required to have a 2H pencil. There is a good reason for this and I expect it was explained at the time but it was only when I began teaching myself that I realised how right he was. Lines should be drawn as finely as possible because, in theory, they have no thickness. It is much easier to draw a fine line with a hard pencil.

The rules for pencils didn’t end there. He had another and again I know now how right he was. It was a rule bred from long experience. We had to have two 2H pencils, or one and a half pencils, or even two halves. For use in a pair of compasses only half a pencil was allowed. It makes sense because as you turn the compasses a long pencil hits your fingers and makes the curve inaccurate. This doesn’t happen if the pencil is shorter than the legs of the compasses. We all had pristine uniform and equipment bought for the new school and it seemed like sacrilege to chop a brand new pencil in half but we were terrified of the consequences if we did not comply. Having the wrong pencil was a major crime and meant instant detention. To this day, if I am doing a geometric drawing with anything but a 2H pencil, I think that he is somewhere noting down this sin. Despite the fear, I loved Geometry. I was good at it and that teacher must have played a large part in my journey through life and, more particularly, knitting.

5c. HANGING BY A THREAD continued