From: “Harriet Rose”<[email protected]>
Date: 06 July 2023 22:54
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: The Interview
Hello there,
Sorry it’s taken so long for me to reply but your email was a bit of a bolt from the blue to be honest. I really wasn’t expecting to have to even think about all this ever again, let alone get together with everyone. The last ten years have been pretty difficult for me as you can imagine and it’s only the boys who have kept me sane. Douglas is now 23 and Jeffrey is 19 and they have been a tower of strength to me and helped me forget about the pain and humiliation of Ashborough.
I really think it would be best for me not to meet you and I hope you will understand. I realise that you are trying to make sense of everything and you’ve probably got kind intentions but I really don’t want to go through all of this again. What I will do is try to write everything down for you in the twin hopes that it is of use to you for your book and is a form of catharsis for me.
So here goes. I’m going to start from before the beginning because there are certain things about the way that I am that you will need to understand if my behaviour of ten years ago is going to make any sense.
I think my earliest memory is of my Dad when I was about four years old. I was on the floor of the front room at home. I lived in that house for eighteen years and I can still see it clearly although exactly what was in the room in 1981 I can’t remember. There was a red sofa which must have been fairly new at that stage. There would have been my sister in her carry cot and my Mum and Dad would have been there. I’m guessing this because I don’t remember everything but what I can remember is some building bricks. They were different colours – red, blue, green and yellow – I can see them clearly in my mind. There were twenty four of them and I was building a wall. Six blue bricks in the first row, six yellow bricks on top of them in the second row, the red ones on top of those and I can quite clearly remember putting the sixth green brick in place in the top row. I remember feeling really pleased with myself because I had finished the wall and it was an achievement; it looked good and my Mum and Dad were going to be really pleased with me. My Mum was beaming at me but my Dad came over to the wall and criticised it.
“That’s lovely darling,” he said, “but they’re not all exactly in line – each brick is supposed to fit exactly over the top of the one below it and you’ve gone a bit wrong. Why don’t you try again.”
He kissed me on the forehead and very gently took each brick down and placed it on the floor. All I remember is staring at him. I was so surprised that I didn’t even cry. I thought he would be really pleased but you see, I hadn’t done it perfectly and he wanted me to be perfect.
I think this was the beginning of my need to be a perfectionist. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in therapy recently and I’ve asked my therapist why it’s so bad to be a perfectionist because I always thought that the reason I did so well at school and University was because I used my perfectionism in a positive way. I always thought that I had great energy and paid meticulous attention to detail and these were characteristics of a good mathematician. My therapist asked me how I felt when I did things that weren’t perfect. I told him that I couldn’t really think of many times when I wasn’t perfect. This sounds very narcissistic I know and I learned over time to be very self-deprecating to my friends so they don’t think I’m vain but I couldn’t really think of times when I didn’t succeed. My therapist asked me to describe things that were perfect so I told him of the test scores I got in my Maths lessons. I kept a notebook, which I still have, which contains all my test results and dates of tests. Mostly I got 100%. There were a few times when I got less than that but as I explained to my Dad, these were mainly because the teacher marked the test wrong or didn’t understand my methods. Every time I got full marks in a test, my Mum and Dad would present me with a certificate which I would pin up on the wall of my bedroom. They were small certificates but each signed “with all our love in deep admiration of our lovely intelligent daughter Harriet – Mum and Dad.” I’ve still got them. Does this make me sound crazy? I guess it does, but it’s the way I was brought up. There has been a huge amount of love and support poured over me for the whole of my life from my parents. They were kind and generous and fun and they brought me up to show proper respect to other people. But my Dad wanted me to be perfect. I always thought that was a good thing.
Here’s a story that explains everything really. There was a boy in my class at junior School called Steven Lomas. His parents knew my Mum and Dad through Church. I don’t remember how it started but it started off that we knew each other and then later on we were good friends who confided in each other until in Year 11 we were on the verge of a romantic relationship. I always took him for granted and he was someone I could talk to about anything although I had lots of girlfriends too. Well, some girlfriends – to be honest, most of them irritated me quite a lot – I suppose the perfectionist in me found things to dislike about all of them. But Steven was OK – he listened to me, he was funny – quite cutting about other kids at the school and he was casually clever. He never seemed to have to work very hard at anything and yet he always scored highly in tests. Never as highly as me – I bet he only every got a dozen 100% results in his life but he was clever.
Definitely.
I know this next bit is a bit like a coming of age teen movie but it’s true.
When I was in Year 10 I found out that there was a GCSE in Statistics. Obviously I was taking Maths GCSE and doing brilliantly but I saw an interview on the television with a very clever girl who was reading Maths at Cambridge and she mentioned all the GCSE exams that she had taken and she mentioned Statistics. The next day, I asked Mr Rogers, my Maths teacher if he knew anything about it and could I take it? A couple of days later he gave me the syllabus and a textbook and told me that the school would pay for me to enter the exam but I would have to teach myself. This was brilliant. I quickly learned all the stuff I needed to know and I phoned up the exam board and paid for some old exam papers. They were all pretty easy. The only complication was that there was some coursework to complete. I read through all the material and decided that I would do my coursework on the connection between birthdays and achievement at school. I had this theory, which I proved true, that children who were born early in the school year – say between September and December – were, on average, higher achievers than people born later in the school year – between May and August. I had to do a lot of data collection and I had to use all the statistical techniques in the course as well as learn some stuff that was really A level work.
It was a very substantial piece of work and the deadline was February 15th of Year 11. Mr Rogers explained that I would automatically fail if I handed in the coursework after that date. I had started the work the previous Summer in Year 10 and I had given four hundred kids at the school a Maths test.
Anyway, Steven Lomas phoned me on February 7th and asked me out on a date on February 14th. It was a real surprise but not a surprise if you know what I mean. It was a bit of a bolt from the blue (just like your email) but suddenly everything clicked into place and made sense. It was Steven and maybe I could love him. I told him that I would go out with him.
I bet you can see where this is going can’t you?
He said that we could go to the cinema and there was a new film out called “Groundhog Day” which was supposed to be good. The coursework was nearly done so everything was looking good. But the next evening, disaster struck. As I was reading through my work I saw a basic error in my standard deviation calculations which I had repeated twenty times. All my conclusions were based on these figures. I phoned Steven to explain.
“Do you know what the correct answers are?”
“Of course I know.”
“Well, just cross out the wrong answers and put in the right answers.”
I laughed because I knew he couldn’t be serious.
“What are you going to do then?”
“I’m going to re-write the coursework with the correct numbers in.”
“But that’s two hundred pages.”
“Yes, I calculate that it will take me 40 hours to re-write.”
“Don’t be daft. When are you going to do that?”
“Well, if I work four hours every evening for the next four days and ten hours each on Saturday and Sunday and four hours on the evening of the 14th, I’ll get it done for February 15th. Rewriting it will also allow me to check it.”
“There’s no point in me arguing with you, I suppose.”
Steven knew me well.
“No”
“And this is more important to you than anything”
“Yes, obviously.”
I really had no idea at the time that he was asking me to choose between him and some messy work because it never occurred to me that messy work was an option.
So I handed in the work on time and Mr Rogers said he was blown away by it. When I got my results, I got a grade A, obviously. (By the way, there were no A* grades in those days. I keep having to remind people of this). Anyway, I went into the Sixth Form at my school and in early September, Mr Rogers gave me a letter which was addressed to me from the exam board. My coursework had been the best in the country and they wanted me to go to a special presentation ceremony in London to receive a certificate. My Mum and Dad could come too. We went up to the ceremony a month later and it was in The Guildhall in London. Very posh. I got my award and my Mum and Dad were very proud. In the train on the way home, my Dad asked to look at the certificate. It gave my name, school, subject (Statistics), title of the coursework, position in the country (1st) and my mark (99%). My Dad didn’t say anything to me; he handed back the certificate and spent the rest of the journey staring out of the window. When we got home we had our evening meal with my younger sister. My Dad said “That was a lovely day Harriet. We are so proud of you for coming top in the country. I’m a little surprised that nobody in the country got 100%. Where do you think you lost one mark?”
I gave an answer which was based on Spearman’s coefficient of rank correlation which you probably don’t want to know about but deep down, I was also disappointed. I so wanted my parents to be proud of me and they said that they were, but I knew that my Dad was fixated on that missing 1%.
Recently I’ve been having therapy (I think I said that earlier) and I’ve learned to celebrate my successes more and not dwell upon my failures. Well, until the interview, I don’t think I’d ever encountered failure before. I certainly wasn’t equipped to deal with failure. Anyway, losing 1 mark out of 100 isn’t failure – I’ve got to learn to say that to myself. I remember when I first started teaching, students of mine would get 97% or something and I wouldn’t say ‘well done’ to them; I would talk to them about the missing 3%.
Ultimately, I believe my perfectionism has led to deep unhappiness in my life. I’ve always worked incredibly hard to achieve perfection and I’m not sure what that has turned me into. I have unwanted feelings of grandiosity; I believe that I should be able to do things that other people find difficult. I don’t particularly enjoy hard work – I just focus on the finished product – I didn’t enjoy doing that piece of coursework, I simply enjoyed looking at it afterwards and believing it was perfect – which it wasn’t! My perfectionism has meant that I’ve given myself a really hard time when I’ve found things difficult; I’ve been reluctant to ask for help; I’ve kept my feelings bottled up inside and I’ve called myself stupid and thick on many occasions.
You know, this is really painful for me to write about and the thought of writing any more is unbearable. I certainly can’t go into the circumstances surrounding the interview. I hope this helps give you some background into why I acted the way I did.
Please don’t contact me again.
Harriet
PS I’ve just read through this and there’s only one detail missing and that’s about Steven. You probably want to know what happened to him. Well I married him and along with Douglas and Jeffrey, my sons, he has been the main reason I’ve survived since the interview.
Date: 06 July 2023 22:54
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: The Interview
Hello there,
Sorry it’s taken so long for me to reply but your email was a bit of a bolt from the blue to be honest. I really wasn’t expecting to have to even think about all this ever again, let alone get together with everyone. The last ten years have been pretty difficult for me as you can imagine and it’s only the boys who have kept me sane. Douglas is now 23 and Jeffrey is 19 and they have been a tower of strength to me and helped me forget about the pain and humiliation of Ashborough.
I really think it would be best for me not to meet you and I hope you will understand. I realise that you are trying to make sense of everything and you’ve probably got kind intentions but I really don’t want to go through all of this again. What I will do is try to write everything down for you in the twin hopes that it is of use to you for your book and is a form of catharsis for me.
So here goes. I’m going to start from before the beginning because there are certain things about the way that I am that you will need to understand if my behaviour of ten years ago is going to make any sense.
I think my earliest memory is of my Dad when I was about four years old. I was on the floor of the front room at home. I lived in that house for eighteen years and I can still see it clearly although exactly what was in the room in 1981 I can’t remember. There was a red sofa which must have been fairly new at that stage. There would have been my sister in her carry cot and my Mum and Dad would have been there. I’m guessing this because I don’t remember everything but what I can remember is some building bricks. They were different colours – red, blue, green and yellow – I can see them clearly in my mind. There were twenty four of them and I was building a wall. Six blue bricks in the first row, six yellow bricks on top of them in the second row, the red ones on top of those and I can quite clearly remember putting the sixth green brick in place in the top row. I remember feeling really pleased with myself because I had finished the wall and it was an achievement; it looked good and my Mum and Dad were going to be really pleased with me. My Mum was beaming at me but my Dad came over to the wall and criticised it.
“That’s lovely darling,” he said, “but they’re not all exactly in line – each brick is supposed to fit exactly over the top of the one below it and you’ve gone a bit wrong. Why don’t you try again.”
He kissed me on the forehead and very gently took each brick down and placed it on the floor. All I remember is staring at him. I was so surprised that I didn’t even cry. I thought he would be really pleased but you see, I hadn’t done it perfectly and he wanted me to be perfect.
I think this was the beginning of my need to be a perfectionist. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in therapy recently and I’ve asked my therapist why it’s so bad to be a perfectionist because I always thought that the reason I did so well at school and University was because I used my perfectionism in a positive way. I always thought that I had great energy and paid meticulous attention to detail and these were characteristics of a good mathematician. My therapist asked me how I felt when I did things that weren’t perfect. I told him that I couldn’t really think of many times when I wasn’t perfect. This sounds very narcissistic I know and I learned over time to be very self-deprecating to my friends so they don’t think I’m vain but I couldn’t really think of times when I didn’t succeed. My therapist asked me to describe things that were perfect so I told him of the test scores I got in my Maths lessons. I kept a notebook, which I still have, which contains all my test results and dates of tests. Mostly I got 100%. There were a few times when I got less than that but as I explained to my Dad, these were mainly because the teacher marked the test wrong or didn’t understand my methods. Every time I got full marks in a test, my Mum and Dad would present me with a certificate which I would pin up on the wall of my bedroom. They were small certificates but each signed “with all our love in deep admiration of our lovely intelligent daughter Harriet – Mum and Dad.” I’ve still got them. Does this make me sound crazy? I guess it does, but it’s the way I was brought up. There has been a huge amount of love and support poured over me for the whole of my life from my parents. They were kind and generous and fun and they brought me up to show proper respect to other people. But my Dad wanted me to be perfect. I always thought that was a good thing.
Here’s a story that explains everything really. There was a boy in my class at junior School called Steven Lomas. His parents knew my Mum and Dad through Church. I don’t remember how it started but it started off that we knew each other and then later on we were good friends who confided in each other until in Year 11 we were on the verge of a romantic relationship. I always took him for granted and he was someone I could talk to about anything although I had lots of girlfriends too. Well, some girlfriends – to be honest, most of them irritated me quite a lot – I suppose the perfectionist in me found things to dislike about all of them. But Steven was OK – he listened to me, he was funny – quite cutting about other kids at the school and he was casually clever. He never seemed to have to work very hard at anything and yet he always scored highly in tests. Never as highly as me – I bet he only every got a dozen 100% results in his life but he was clever.
Definitely.
I know this next bit is a bit like a coming of age teen movie but it’s true.
When I was in Year 10 I found out that there was a GCSE in Statistics. Obviously I was taking Maths GCSE and doing brilliantly but I saw an interview on the television with a very clever girl who was reading Maths at Cambridge and she mentioned all the GCSE exams that she had taken and she mentioned Statistics. The next day, I asked Mr Rogers, my Maths teacher if he knew anything about it and could I take it? A couple of days later he gave me the syllabus and a textbook and told me that the school would pay for me to enter the exam but I would have to teach myself. This was brilliant. I quickly learned all the stuff I needed to know and I phoned up the exam board and paid for some old exam papers. They were all pretty easy. The only complication was that there was some coursework to complete. I read through all the material and decided that I would do my coursework on the connection between birthdays and achievement at school. I had this theory, which I proved true, that children who were born early in the school year – say between September and December – were, on average, higher achievers than people born later in the school year – between May and August. I had to do a lot of data collection and I had to use all the statistical techniques in the course as well as learn some stuff that was really A level work.
It was a very substantial piece of work and the deadline was February 15th of Year 11. Mr Rogers explained that I would automatically fail if I handed in the coursework after that date. I had started the work the previous Summer in Year 10 and I had given four hundred kids at the school a Maths test.
Anyway, Steven Lomas phoned me on February 7th and asked me out on a date on February 14th. It was a real surprise but not a surprise if you know what I mean. It was a bit of a bolt from the blue (just like your email) but suddenly everything clicked into place and made sense. It was Steven and maybe I could love him. I told him that I would go out with him.
I bet you can see where this is going can’t you?
He said that we could go to the cinema and there was a new film out called “Groundhog Day” which was supposed to be good. The coursework was nearly done so everything was looking good. But the next evening, disaster struck. As I was reading through my work I saw a basic error in my standard deviation calculations which I had repeated twenty times. All my conclusions were based on these figures. I phoned Steven to explain.
“Do you know what the correct answers are?”
“Of course I know.”
“Well, just cross out the wrong answers and put in the right answers.”
I laughed because I knew he couldn’t be serious.
“What are you going to do then?”
“I’m going to re-write the coursework with the correct numbers in.”
“But that’s two hundred pages.”
“Yes, I calculate that it will take me 40 hours to re-write.”
“Don’t be daft. When are you going to do that?”
“Well, if I work four hours every evening for the next four days and ten hours each on Saturday and Sunday and four hours on the evening of the 14th, I’ll get it done for February 15th. Rewriting it will also allow me to check it.”
“There’s no point in me arguing with you, I suppose.”
Steven knew me well.
“No”
“And this is more important to you than anything”
“Yes, obviously.”
I really had no idea at the time that he was asking me to choose between him and some messy work because it never occurred to me that messy work was an option.
So I handed in the work on time and Mr Rogers said he was blown away by it. When I got my results, I got a grade A, obviously. (By the way, there were no A* grades in those days. I keep having to remind people of this). Anyway, I went into the Sixth Form at my school and in early September, Mr Rogers gave me a letter which was addressed to me from the exam board. My coursework had been the best in the country and they wanted me to go to a special presentation ceremony in London to receive a certificate. My Mum and Dad could come too. We went up to the ceremony a month later and it was in The Guildhall in London. Very posh. I got my award and my Mum and Dad were very proud. In the train on the way home, my Dad asked to look at the certificate. It gave my name, school, subject (Statistics), title of the coursework, position in the country (1st) and my mark (99%). My Dad didn’t say anything to me; he handed back the certificate and spent the rest of the journey staring out of the window. When we got home we had our evening meal with my younger sister. My Dad said “That was a lovely day Harriet. We are so proud of you for coming top in the country. I’m a little surprised that nobody in the country got 100%. Where do you think you lost one mark?”
I gave an answer which was based on Spearman’s coefficient of rank correlation which you probably don’t want to know about but deep down, I was also disappointed. I so wanted my parents to be proud of me and they said that they were, but I knew that my Dad was fixated on that missing 1%.
Recently I’ve been having therapy (I think I said that earlier) and I’ve learned to celebrate my successes more and not dwell upon my failures. Well, until the interview, I don’t think I’d ever encountered failure before. I certainly wasn’t equipped to deal with failure. Anyway, losing 1 mark out of 100 isn’t failure – I’ve got to learn to say that to myself. I remember when I first started teaching, students of mine would get 97% or something and I wouldn’t say ‘well done’ to them; I would talk to them about the missing 3%.
Ultimately, I believe my perfectionism has led to deep unhappiness in my life. I’ve always worked incredibly hard to achieve perfection and I’m not sure what that has turned me into. I have unwanted feelings of grandiosity; I believe that I should be able to do things that other people find difficult. I don’t particularly enjoy hard work – I just focus on the finished product – I didn’t enjoy doing that piece of coursework, I simply enjoyed looking at it afterwards and believing it was perfect – which it wasn’t! My perfectionism has meant that I’ve given myself a really hard time when I’ve found things difficult; I’ve been reluctant to ask for help; I’ve kept my feelings bottled up inside and I’ve called myself stupid and thick on many occasions.
You know, this is really painful for me to write about and the thought of writing any more is unbearable. I certainly can’t go into the circumstances surrounding the interview. I hope this helps give you some background into why I acted the way I did.
Please don’t contact me again.
Harriet
PS I’ve just read through this and there’s only one detail missing and that’s about Steven. You probably want to know what happened to him. Well I married him and along with Douglas and Jeffrey, my sons, he has been the main reason I’ve survived since the interview.
