read the Bible in the morning, and it always had to be the bits Mamma
wanted, out of Genesis and the Gospel of St. John.

You had to learn about the one God and the three Persons. The one God was
the nice, clever, happy God who made Mamma and Mark and Jenny and the sun
and Sarah and the kittens. He was the God you really believed in.

At night when you lay on your back in the dark you thought about being
born and about arithmetic and God. The sacred number three went into
eighteen sixty-nine and didn't come out again; so did seven. She liked
numbers that fitted like that with no loose ends left over. Mr. Sippett
said there were things you could do with the loose ends of numbers to
make them fit. That was fractions. Supposing there was somewhere in the
world a number that simply wouldn't fit? Mr. Sippett said there was no
such number. But queer things happened. You were seven years old, yet you
had had eight birthdays. There was the day you were born, January the
twenty-fourth, eighteen sixty-three, at five o'clock in the morning. When
you were born you weren't any age at all, not a minute old, not a second,
not half a second. But there was eighteen sixty-two and there was January
the twenty-third and the minute just before you were born. You couldn't
really tell when the twenty-third ended and the twenty-fourth began;
because when you counted sixty minutes for the hour and sixty seconds for
the minute, there was still the half second and the half of that, and so
on for ever and ever.

You couldn't tell when you were really born. And nobody could tell you
what being born was. Perhaps nobody knew. Jenny said being born was just
being born. Sarah's grandchildren were born in the garden under the wall
where the jasmine grew. Roddy shouted at the back door, and when you ran
to look he stretched out his arms across the doorway and wouldn't let you