by Emma
small print and various signs and symbols on the maps and
diagrams. When it dawned on him what was happening, or
rather what was not happening, he offered to coach me after
school. It was thoughtful and kind of him, and the dividend
for us both came in the exams at the end of the year when I
came second in geography.
So, given the chance, I was able to keep up with the rest,
and the question never seriously arose of my having to leave
and go to a school for the blind-even though my sight was
becoming worse and worse. I managed to stay in the better
streams, and most of my exam results were good, particularly
in subjects where the teaching was to a large extent by word
of mouth and I could rely on my memory. I did especially
well in history and in science, where we had to do our own
elementary experiments. I had little difficulty in remembering
the terms of the Magna Carta, and the names of Henry's
wives; nor, oddly enough, did I have any trouble manipulating
a Bunsen burner. But with such subjects as geography,
unless I had a teacher willing to give extra help, I was no
good. At maths I was quite useless-my skill ran out on the
threshold of long division. This was because I could not follow
immediately the step-by-step instruction that was done with
the aid of the board. The problems I had with decimal points
can be imagined.
I made friends at school, but not as readily as other children,
mainly because I could not play the games. I used to try and
join in, but could never keep up with the others. Although I
was quite useless at tennis, I was always put down for it,
and though I made the effort, standing there on the court in
a vague sea of greenishness dotted with moving white shapes,
waving my racket around, hoping desperately that it would
connect with the ball when it came over the net, I cannot
remember much, if any success. There was a striking lack of
volunteers to be my partner, and I usually found myself with
someone who did not like the game anyway. But I don't
suppose any of this has proved a serious loss to Wimbledon!
Out of school, too, life was complicated. I had friends but,
like me, they were in their teens, and at that age few are ready
to respond to the needs of a blind friend who has to be looked
after, and taken around. When they were going out in the
evening, perhaps to the Nottingham Palais in Parliament
Street, or to jepson's, another dance-hall which used to be in
Hockley, I would want to go with them; but if I did go, it
would mean that I had to do everything they wanted to do,
and go everywhere they wanted to go. The sense of restriction
was overwhelming, but there was no choice, because I would
not go out on my own. When I went to dances I'd sit absolutely
petrified in case a boy asked me to dance. I was so scared I
would make mistakes or would not be able to follow what he
was doing. On the other hand, when nobody came and asked
me to dance, I was still on the edge of the chair with anxiety
because, left on my own, I could not see enough beyond a
blurred sensation of light and colour and shapes moving to
the music, to see where the dancers were. My constant
thoughts were: What if they go off with their boyfriends and
leave me here ? Alternating with: No one's asking me to dance
because they can see I'm blind. I was very mixed~up always,
and confused, and often felt like a wallflower with its petals
closed. I remember one particularly terrible occasion when a
boy called Philip left me standing in the middle of the dance
floor after the music stopped, and I could hear everyone else
moving away. I felt a sense of space opening up around me as
the noise of the dancers receded to the edges of the hall. I
pretended to tidy my hair but inside I was panicking until one
of my girlfriends came to rescue me. After that I gave up going
to dances because it was such a trial. I had come to hate the
whole business, and that cut me off from the rest of my agegroup,
and meant that I had no opportunity at all of meeting
boys. Even when I did meet them, they tended to ignore me,
and naturally I worried a lot that perhaps I would never
marry.
But if life was harsher than it need have been because of
my stubbornness and pride and my simple refusal to be considered
apart from sighted people, there were compensations
in living at home with parents who themselves knew the
difficulties of blindness, and, more important, knew that the
best way of dealing with them was not to give in. I was very
fortunate in this. If I could not see to do something, my mother
would teach me how to do it, and that was that. I would then
have to get on and do it for myself. For example, the business
of threading a needle. My mother taught me this by such a
simple method, and one, I am sure, that a sighted person
wouldn't dream of showing to someone who was blind. The
method was this: take hold of the needle (the eye end can be
found because it is blunter than the point) and take the piece
of thread or cotton, folded double between finger and thumb.
Then push the eye of the needle down between finger and
thumb, and eventually the thread will go through the eye.
Success is not necessarily immediate, of course. It might work
first go, or it might take twenty attempts. But finally it always
does succeed.
I was also taught to sew by being able to feel things. Sewing
on a button, for instance, was easy, and all sorts of other
mechanical actions were made possible for me by my mother
teaching me how to use the sense of touch. 'Feel,' she would
say. This even came down to feeling where the particles of
dirt were when sweeping the floor, and feeling a second time,
and a third, to make sure they had gone into the dustpan. It
was the same with ironing clothes. The creases and folds can
be felt. But, I suppose, had I been a blind child in a sighted
family, I would never have been let near an iron for fear that
I would burn myself In my family, there was no alternative
to everyone making the best of his or her lot, and that is how
I was brought up.
I once asked my mother if she had had any idea before I
was born that I would not have normal sight and I was
appalled when she said she hadn't known one way or the
other, but was willing to take the risk. Seeing my horror, she
then asked me whether I'd enjoyed my life so far, and
whether it had been really worth living in spite of the
problems, and, of course, I had to answer that it had. She
had taken a risk but I realized that she was right and that I
still had the opportunity to live a full life in spite of my
blindness-just as the rest of my family had.
When my last term at school came up, the decision about
my future loomed large over me. What I really wanted to do
was to work with dogs, because I was mad about them. At
managing to cover up the fact that I could not see properly.
One Saturday, I was exercising a big Alsatian in the field, and
he slipped his lead. I had no idea where he had gone and was
immediately gripped by panic. What if he got out and was
run over? I frantically waved his lead and collar and called
and called. To my astonishment and utter relief he came back
as good as gold. When I was interviewed by the careers
mistress, however, and told her about wanting to work with
dogs, she hardly listened. The idea was dismissed as an
impossibility.
Her first question amazed me. 'Sheila, can you tell me
where the North Sea is?'
North Sea? Apart from geography lessons I had been in
person to Skegness, which is on the North Sea. But I could
not answer. Moreover, I could not understand the reason
for the question.
Next I was asked, 'Well then, where is Birmingham?'
That I knew. And the answer to the next one, 'Can you tell
me where Edinburgh is?' After giving the location of Edinburgh,
I summoned enough courage to ask why she wanted to
know.
'Well, if you're going to be a switchboard operator, and
I'm going to recommend you, I must be sure you've got a
sound knowledge of where various places are.'
I was flabbergasted. Switchboard operator! It was the last
job in the world I wanted. I knew that the choice for someone
with my sight was restricted, but in my wildest moments I
had never thought of myself condemned to plugging and
unplugging calls for a living. Even so, when term ended, I
found myself on the way to the Government Training Centre
at Long Eaton to have my capabilities as a switchboard
operator assessed. Under the eye of an extremely brusque
and strict instructor called Ted I was taught the technique of
working a switchboard. Then, with the Centre's aid, I got a
job with a big dress shop in Nottingham. I could still see
enough at this stage to distinguish the lights on the switch
board, but I loathed every minute of it and, though it was
quite easy to grasp where the various plugs went, how to hold
calls, the business of taking messages, and learning extension
numbers, the atmosphere in the place was terrible. Yet I stuck
it for a year before moving on to a rather pleasanter firm
where the people were more friendly.
Coming home from work one evening I had hardly closed
the front door when I heard my mother call, 'Is that you
Sheila? I've got some news.'
'What's that?' I said, feeling for the peg to Put my coat on.
'I've heard of a job that would just suit you.' She couldn't
wait to give me all the details, and, knowing how much she
worried about my going out on my own in Nottingham, I
understood why she was so pleased.
The job was with a firm called Industrial Pumps. They
wanted a switchboard operator. More to the point, they were
not right in the middle of the city and the journey there was
much easier. I rang up the following day and got through to a
Mr Dickson. He didn't sound very encouraging at first, and
my hopes began to fade when he said they had had so many
applicants he did not really think he wanted to interview any
more. But then I told him I was a registered blind person,
and his attitude changed immediately.
'Why didn't you tell me that before? Come along tonight
and I'll see you. Can you make 5.30?'
To my amazement I got the job on the spot, but only later
did I get to know the reason why. Mr Dickson himself was
disabled: one of his legs was shorter than the other and he
walked with some difficulty. In fact, he turned out to be full
of understanding, and not only on this occasion. He was a
wonderful man, and someone who would always listen to one's
problems.
As the months went by, my eyes became gradually, almost
imperceptibly worse, and by the time I was nineteen I could
not see where I was going, either about the house or in the
street. I was now unable to read print, and had to learn
braille. I came to realize how much everyday vocabulary
reflects the predominance of the sighted world. Language is
relatively poor in terms for precise description of sensations
other than sight, and so blind people are not able to describe
their perceptions very accurately. The field of reference I
had become used to was shrinking. Now not only words, but
ideas of time and space were inexact and arbitrary and not
always in line with the notions that a sighted person would
form. To those accustomed to doing it, the placing of a towel
on a rail or a cup on a shelf are automatic. A blind person has
to think, 'Six steps to the door, five paces down the hall to the
bathroom.' Every distance has to be worked out mentally.
It was at this point-when my range of possibilities was
becoming more and more limited, when my future seemed to
be an ever darkening vacuum-that Emma came into my life
and totally changed it. A new world opened up for me.
CHAPTER TWO
ENTER EMMA
I WAS, IF the truth be known, ashamed of being blind. I
refused to use a white stick, and hated asking for help. After
all, I was a teenage girl, and I couldn't bear people to look
at me and think I was not like them. Looking back, I must
have been a terrible danger on the roads. Motorists probably
had seizures; suddenly coming across me wandering vaguely
through the traffic, they would have to step rapidly on their
brakes. Apart from that, there were all sorts of disasters
that used to strike on the way to and from work.
On the evening that made such a difference to my life, I
gotoff the busjust about half-way home where I had to change
buses, and as usual I was walking gingerly along to the right
stop. Almost immediately I bumped into something. 'I'm
awfully sorry,' I said and stepped forward only to collide
again. When it happened a third time, I realized I had been
apologizing to a lamp standard. This was just one of the
idiotic things that constantly happened to me, and I had long
since learnt to put up with them or even to find them faintly
amusing. So I carried on and found the bus stop, which was a
request stop. No one else was there and I had to go through the
scary business of trying to estimate when the bus had arrived.
Generally in this situation, because I loathed showing I was
blind by asking for help, I tried to guess at the sound. Sometimes
I would stop a petrol tanker or a big lorry and as it
29
drew away would stand there feeling stupid, and in the end
usually managed to swallow niy pride and ask someone at
the stop for help.
But on this particular evening no onejoined rne at the stop;
it was as if everyone in Nottingham had suddenly decided not
to travel by bus. Of course I heard plenty of buses pass, or
thought I
did, but because I had given up hailing them for
fear of making a fool of myself I let them all go by. I stood
there alone for half an hour without stopping one, then I gave
up. I decided to walk on to the next stop, hoping there would
be people there.
I got along the pavement as best I could-and that is
another frightening experience difficult to describe to anyone
who has not been blind, because although you are surrounded
by noise you have no coherent mental picture of what is
around you, and are guided only by sounds. The sounds were
of traffic, and people's footsteps, and sometimes I could tell
by the particular quality of the sounds that I was near buildings
or passing an open space. But I had absolutely no visual
conception of what the road might be like, still less what
might be on the other side of it-the houses, the shops, the
people and so on: this might well have been the edge of the
world, or another universe for all I knew. Were there children
playing, people gossiping, wornen buying bread or potatoes;
what did they look like, who were they? I had simply no idea.
I walked along in an enclosed grey little world, a box of
sounds, two foot by two foot square, around me.
Eventually I reached the next bus stop. But once again
there was nobody there, and no buses stopped. So I went on
to the next, and then the one after that, and the one after that.
By this time I was utterly lost, and simply did not know
whether I was waiting at a bus stop or a teleg-raph post. In
the end, I found myself walking about five miles back to the
terminus in the city, because I knew if I got there I would be
bound to catch the right bus. And this is what happened, but
I was between two and three hours late getting home, and
felt pretty miserable and out of sorts when I did get there.
I am a great believer in Fate. It has been the greatest single
influence on my life, and I feel certain that Fate had decreed
that my home teacher was there when I finally reached home
that evening. Home teachers visit the blind. They come
regularly to help, to talk over any problems, and to supply
various aids such as braille paper, braille clocks, egg-timers
