In another corner of the country, a little girl was also learning that the world was not as straightforward as she had been led to believe.
She was sitting on a thick comfortable rug by an open fire at her father's feet. A minute ago he had been idly struggling through his sudoku puzzles and half listening to the girl practising her homework. She had said something. He had dropped his newspaper and was staring at her, with wide, questioning eyes. Her mother was absently embroidering a hideous cushion cover, or other such ghastly upholstery decor for their already over-decorated living room. She too, had dropped her work and was watching the girl, warily.
'What do you mean, Kathy?' asked her father. He sounded amused, but a little bit curious. Kathy felt the familiar flush of embarrassment sending a wave of redness up her throat to her cheeks. She clutched Alice, her little red-haired rag doll to her chest and tried to encourage an answer to her reluctant, trembling lips, to somehow explain what she had meant without seeming too silly.
They had been going through her times tables and something had happened, she'd managed to get one of the numbers wrong. What was it? She struggled to remember, to relive the moment and find out what had made her mother tut so loudly, and her father lean forwards in great excitement.
Two, four, six, eight, ten - no that wasn't it.
Five, ten, fifteen - no, not that either.
Three, six, green - The little girl gasped and put her hand over her mouth. Her father raised his eyebrows and caught her eye. He winked.
'Come on, love, you can tell Daddy. What do you mean; 'green'?'
'No! I-' Kathy looked down at her exercise book, running her fingers along the row of numbers. 'I meant gree- ' She paused again, her heart beating furiously, the rush of blood pumping through her ears making her head spin. This was all getting a bit much. She'd only started having these problems a few weeks ago, and it was not normally this difficult. She took a deep breath and concentrated on the page as hard as she could.
'N-Nine!' she managed at last. 'That's what I meant, nine! Not green! That would be silly, wouldn't it daddy? Three, Six, GREEN!' She began to giggle a little too earnestly, her desperate eyes searching his face.
'Yes dear, it would be silly,' he said gently, leaning down and lifting her onto his knee. 'And do you know why?' The little girl shook her head, still giggling desperately. Her mother sighed pointedly, exasperated at the child's silliness.
'Why Daddy?'
'Because "Nine" is a yellow-ochre colour, not green. "Three" is green!' He sat back, triumphantly. The little girl's giggling stopped abruptly. She stared at her father, stunned, her mind in overdrive. His words rang out in the suddenly silent room with only the crackle of the wood on the fire as accompaniment. Kathy watched them fly around the room and get sucked up into the chimney, their oscillating colours contrasting with the golden red of the fire. Was he joking? Was he making fun of her?
'No,' she said carefully, 'Nine is definitely green, look!' She turned the page in her exercise book and wrote a large nine on it. She held the page up for him to see.
'Green,' she said, settling the matter.
'I'm sorry sweetheart, I just don't see it the same way you do,' he said, shaking his head and laughing. 'It still looks yellow to me.' A disapproving cough erupted from her mother's seat on the other side of the fire.
'What are you two on about?' said Kathy's mother crisply, 'I've never heard such nonsense!' Her father gave Kathy a reassuring hug.
'I'm sorry dear,' he said, 'I know you've never believed me, but I think our little Kathy has the same synee responses as I do.' Her mother rolled her eyes, but had stopped embroidering and was watching the little girl nervously. Kathy wondered what she was really thinking.
'Syn- what?' she asked.
'Tell me about the other numbers, love,' her father said. The little girl told him.
Over the next few months the two of them devised a system of categorising the numbers and letters by colour, according to the way the little girl saw them. She discovered that now everything had a place she was able to find the answers to mathematical problems without having to go through the tedious process of writing out the workings. She could see the answer right there in her mind's eye, the shapes and colours of the different numbers twisting and merging together so there could only be one possible answer. The most difficult thing was keeping the whole process a secret from the other children.
'They wouldn't understand,' her father had told her. 'It is best if we keep it between us.'
But keeping her skill a secret proved quite impossible.
Within a year, the little girl had completed - and rewritten in places - all of the maths books the small village school had access to. Furthermore, mathematics was not the only thing that Kath understood better than everybody else. She quickly developed a remarkable sense of electronic engineering, such an affinity in fact, that rumours of her conversing in binary sent ripples through the country.
In the autumn of 1989, Kathy received an invitation to present her latest project to the Royal Society of London. Her father was more excited than she was, but Kathy thought that it was probably time to share her creation with the world.
They had no idea that the Seekers were watching.
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