When I was three, my father was three. When I was six, he was six... he needed me to escape from being 50.
— Christopher Robin Milne
Just as the great composer is seldom also a great player, so is the great mathematician seldom also a great teacher.
It was not to learn about politics that I had gone to Cambridge. I was there as a mathematician, having won a major scholarship to Trinity College the previous year. Perhaps if there had not been quite so many things to distract me, I might have remained a mathematician.
When one is a child, one has little say in the matter: one's parents decide. Mine chose Cotchford, and they chose the various schools I was sent to as I grew up.
One can never be sure whether a very early memory is a real memory or just the recollection of something which you were told happened.
So much were we together that Nanny became almost a part of me. Consequently, it was my occasional encounters with my parents that stand out as the events of the day.
I like to have around me the things I like today, not the things I once liked many years ago.
My father was an individualist, and I took after him. At school, however, one is forced to be gregarious. I didn't resent this, but I didn't particularly enjoy it, and whenever I could, I withdrew into my own private world.
Mathematics is like music. Neither needs to be useful. It is enough that each gives delight to those who seek delight from it.
My father did not drink beer. He said he didn't like the taste, and I was prepared to accept that I wouldn't like the taste either. So I stuck to bottled cider.
I live at the bottom of a valley. I have a small bookshop in a small town, and I seldom venture far afield.
I enjoyed playing with my mother. This was something she was good at. There were plenty of things she couldn't do, had never been taught to do, didn't need to do because there was someone to do them for her, and she certainly couldn't have coped alone with a tiny child.
In pessimistic moments, when I was trudging London in search of an employer wanting to make use of such talents as I could offer, it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.
Some people are good with children. Others are not. It is a gift. You either have it, or you don't. My father didn't.
My father had always hoped that one day I would be a great cricketer, captaining the Stowe Eleven, perhaps, or even playing for Cambridge.
Fractions, decimals, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, mechanics - these are the steps up the mountain side. How high is one going to get? For me, the pinnacle was Projective Geometry. Who today has even heard of this branch of mathematics?
War and love - they have much in common. You can theorize about them, but until you have experienced them, you cannot know them, for the emotions that they engender are as complicated and as conflicting, as noble and as ignoble, as any that life has to offer.
If I seem to write most happily about the ordinary things that boys do who live in the country, it is because this is the part of my childhood that I look back upon with the greatest affection.
The Christopher Robin who appears in so many of the poems is not always me. This was where my name, so totally useless to me personally, came into its own: it was a wonderful name for writing poetry round.
When a child is small, it is his mother who is mainly responsible for the way he is brought up. So it was with me. I belonged in those days to my mother rather than my father.
