Talking Tongues
    Upon my arrival at BAA we all had to take a colour-blindness test under Anne Phillips's supervision. Anne was the Admissions Registrar and Senior Librarian, a very tweedy lady but extremely nice to both me and Margrét. There were spotty numbers in red and green where people with normal vision saw one number and colour-blind people were supposed to see another. I had seen this test before and found that by squinting my eyes I could see BOTH numbers. Anne was very surprised and said she had never met anyone before that could do that trick!
    I also remember that we all had to fill out a form with details about our interests and that sort of thing. Under Hobbies I wrote Languages because I have always enjoyed trying to understand what people are talking about. At school I sometimes listened to Dutch broadcasts after the English pop transmissions on Radio Luxemburg had shut down for the night. I had learnt French (the Belgian variety, fairly fluently) and German at school and also a bit of Latin. I also had a smattering of Flemish as Dad had been in Belgium during the war and had a lot of friends there whom we sometimes went to visit. Most of them were Flemings who only spoke French for Dad’s convenience because he didn’t know any Flemish. They had the habit of beginning sentences in French and ending them in Flemish so of course I picked up quite a lot of it. I found that the technique was not to listen to the words in any connection with their meaning, but rather to listen in the same way that children do, listening to the talking and not the words. I think it’s something like what you do when you’re drawing, looking at the shapes without thinking about what they mean. Different bits of the brain doing different things, or something like that. Anyway, I was always called upon whenever some foreign bumf turned up at the office at the Court and needed translating, thanks to Anne Phillips. And nowadays it’s Icelandic so you never know your luck!