The teacher spoke to the girl I was smitten with peremptorily.
She said, Who do you think you are, Hedy Lamarr?
None of us had a clue what the teacher meant. The teacher
Was a stout unhappy woman with a face stolen from a toad.
The Toad from Toad Hall,
Bumptious and loud. Illustrated, usually.
The Wind in the Willows.
I sensed envy, although the concept was ill-formed. I was 8.
We all were (pretty much)
I felt how Bernard Bolzano must have felt
When he was fumbling towards symbolic logic
And even touching on Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers.
But then it was gone. Damn. In later life
I will remind myself that the girl and me
We came to nothing. I grasped, ordinal numbers (sort of)
But transfinite remained Double Dutch. Has
It ever occurred to you that the only working class ciphers
In Kenneth Grahame’s fairy-tale were the ferrets
Stoats and weasels? Venal, untrustworthy. Demonstrably bad.
The story was read to us as a treat.
Hedy Lamarr became one of the pioneers
of spread spectrum technology, which formed
the basis of all wireless communications.
The girl qualified as a dental technician.
Steven Taylor
Picture Nick Victor
.