emma and i - Sheila Hocken Read online

  EMMA AND I

  EMMA AND 1

  by

  SHEILA HOCKEN

  LONDON

  VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD

  1977

  (0 Sheila Hocken 1977

  ISBN 0 575 02349 X

  Some names of people and places have been changed,

  and certain painful events in my life have not been

  mentioned since they are not central to this book.

  ~3 ,

  1

  Printed in Great Britain by

  The Camelot Press Ltd, Southampton

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  7-hz*s book is dedicated to

  John E. Coates

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  1

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Following page 96

  Sheila aged five

  Sunday School Whitsuntide Walk

  Emma at three weeks

  Emma at eight weeks

  Leamington Spa (photograph: Walter Watson)

  Paddy Wansborough

  At work (photograph: Nottingham Evening Post)

  Sponsored walk through Nottingham

  (photograph: Vottingham Evening Post)

  Sheila, Don and Emma

  Ming and Ohpas (photograph: Layland Ross)

  Emma and Ming (photograph: Oliver Hatch)

  Emma now (photograph: Oliver Hatch)

  Emma-retired (photograph: Oliver Hatch)

  Kerensa Emma Louise (photograph: Oliver Hatch)

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  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  I wish to thank Lieutenant-Cornmander Jack Waterman,

  RD, RNR, without whose kind advice and help this book

  would not have been possible.

  S. H.

  i

  1

  EMMA AND 1

  CI-IAPTER ONE

  A CHILD APART

  I H AD NO idea that 1 could not see normally until I was about

  seven. 1 lived among vague images and colours that were

  blurred, as if a gauze was over them. But I thought that was

  how everybody else saw the world. My sight gradually became

  worse and worse until, by my late teens, I could just about

  distinguish light from dark, but that was all. Even in my

  dreams the people had no faces. They were shapes in a fog.

  From my earliest recollection, waking or dreaming, the fog

  had always been there, and it slowly closed in until it became

  impenetrable and even the blurred shapes finally disappeared.

  I was born in 1946 in Beeston, Nottingham. Both my parents

  had defective eyesight, and so did my brother Graham, who

  is three years older than I. The eye defect is hereditary:

  congenital cataracts, which in turn cause retina damage. I

  inherited this from my father. My mother's complaint was

  not the same, but neither parent could see much at all. The

  picture conjured up of the four of us-none able to see

  properly, yet all living together as a family-must be a strange

  one to a sighted person. Had I been the odd one out, a child

  with defective eyesight in a family where everyone could see

  perfectly, things would almost certainly have been otherwise.

  But in my family no one ever talked about blindness, or not

  being able to see properly. It was accepted as a fact of life,

  and no one mentioned it. Perhaps my mother and father kept

  up a sort of conspiracy of silence about it for the benefit of

  Graham and me, and if that was so, it was wise. What purpose

  could it have served to tell a boy and a girl that they were not

  like other children? We were spared having our confidence

  knocked out of us in this way.

  Only in retrospect do I realize that much of what we took

  for granted in day-to-day life would have been considered

  unusual by other people. At mealtimes, knocking over a sauce

  bottle while feeling over the tablecloth for the salt was such

  a frequent happening that no one said anything when it

  occurred.

  I must have been five or six, I suppose, before I began to

  think about why other children didn't run headlong into brick

  walls, or trip down stairs as frequently as I did. Falling down

  and colliding with things had always been so much a part of

  my life that I accepted it, and in my earliest years probably imagined

  myself a bit clumsy. I furnished my own explanations

  and excuses. At the same time, it never really bothered me.

  What eventually brought home to me the fact that I was

  a child apart, was seeing my friends watching television. At

  home the whole family could not sit down to look at a programme

  together, because each of us had to be very close to

  the screen to see it at all. Suddenly I realized that other people

  could sit well away from the set and still see it.

  My present memory of those very early days, however, is

  as hazy as daylight itself used to appear to me at the time. I

  suppose sighted people have quite a few vivid recollections of

  their childhood, but I can't even remember images of my

  mother and father then except in terms of touch and sound.

  And just as I don't have any visual memory of my parents,

  or at least, nothing that could be conveyed with any significance,

  I cannot remember any visual impressions of the house

  where we lived, which was in a little town called Sutton-inAshfield,

  near Mansfield. We moved there soon after I was

  born. As a home I knew it by the smell of bread baking and

  pies cooking, and the warmth and sound of a coal fire

  crackling and hissing in the grate. But no more.

  My father was away a great deal, travelling round the

  country selling drapery at markets. No doubt his poor sight

  was a big handicap but he would never admit it; the only

  time he would ever discuss the problems was to tell us of the

  funny things that happened to him.

  I remember him coming home one evening after a long

  train journey and telling us about going into the railway cafe

  between trains for a cup of tea. After finding a seat in the

  crowds of travellers he spotted what he thought was an

  ashtray. He leaned forward and stubbed out his cigarette,

  but much to the amusement of his fellow passengers and to

  his own embarrassment the ashtray turned out to be a jam

  tart.

  It wasn't long before my father had to admit defeat with

  the markets, owing to the rapid deterioration of his sight.

  We had very little money and in no time at all we were

  broke. The family moved to Nottingham from Sutton-inAshfield

  and took a small draper's shop in the St Arm's

  Well Road, which, for those who do not know Nottingham,

  can be described most politely as the roughest, shabbiest and

  most down-at-heel area of the whole city-in other words, a

  slum. I remember thinking constantly, 'If only I could get

  people to come into the shop and buy something'. But trade

  was not brisk and we ate accordingly. The highlight of the

  week was on Fridays when somehow there was always

  enough saved to buy pork-pie and tomatoes. On other days

 
; we would be lucky to get a boiled egg.

  Father could not help very much and-a tremendous

  blow to his pride-he finally had to give in to the blind way

  of life and make brushes at the Midland Institute for the

  Blind. Luckily brush-making didn't last long, for soon after

  starting at the Institute my father picked up a guitar for the

  first time. He was a natural from the very beginning, not

  simply strumming well known folk-songs but also writing his

  own words and music. And now he earns his living introducing

  a country and western programme called Orange

  Blossom Special on Radio Nottingham. He also travels all

  over the British isles playing in country and western clubs.

  But there is no fear of the jam tart incident recurring-he's

  given up smoking.

  My mother used to play with me a lot. I had a Teddy who

  had only one eye (ironically, it may seem) and I remember

  feeling permanently sorry for him. My mother and I used to

  play endless games with him. She took me shopping, and if

  we went to Woolworth's I would always want to feel the

  toys there. I could see them as shapes, but I could attach no

  identity to them unless I touched them, which was possibly

  a problem for my mother, because the universal rule for

  children in those days was 'Don't touch!' But somehow she

  must have got the shop assistants on her side so I could feel

  the dolls or woolly animals or boxes of bricks. And even to this

  day I still do not know any object fully until I have touched it.

  I had a little tricycle too, though I was never let out of the

  garden with it. But when Graham got a proper bike, I

  desperately wanted one as well. I plagued the life out of my

  parents. But, as in everything else, my mother would never

  say to me straight out, 'You can't have one because you can't

  see properly.' She would invent all sorts of excuses. It was

  almost as if she did not want to admit even to herself that my

  eyesight was not right; it was something she wished to remain

  buried, and never revealed. And I think my father was silent

  because he was disappointed that I had inherited his eye

  defect. I suppose that when I was born, he had hoped against

  hope that my eyes might be normal. But I had followed the

  family pattern, and I think that in a way he retreated into

  himself because of it, and paid less attention to me as a result.

  Knowing his own difficulties, he realized that things would

  not be any easier for me.

  Yet all this simply added up to the fact, as far as I was

  concerned, that my brother was able to have a bike and I was

  not, and I didn't understand why. So, one day, I 'borrowed'

  my brother's shiny new Hercules. How I got on and rode it,

  and what followed, makes me shudder to remember even to

  this day. But I took the bike and wheeled it out of the gate

  into the road. There I rode it after a fashion without even

  realizing that traffic kept to the left-hand side of the road. It

  had never struck me that cars and other vehicles kept to a

  specific lane. But somehow, miraculously, nothing hit me, and

  not knowing how to stop going down a slight hill, I turned off

  the road, went up the kerb, and into a wall. Time has now

  blotted out precisely what happened when I got back home

  and had to face my mother. All I remember is that it took

  hours before I could pluck up courage to confess what had

  happened when my brother discovered his bike was missing.

  It might be wondered why there were no attempts then

  to have my eyes operated on. The answer is that the state of

  eye surgery in those days was not as advanced as it is today,

  and the family had not been well served by the methods that

  were then available. My father had had a series of unsuccessful

  operations. My brother Graham had returned from hospital

  having entirely lost the use of one eye as a result of surgery

  (although his remaining eye was better than both of mine put

  together). In turn, I had had an operation; but this was not

  a success, and my parents, particularly with Graham's

  experience in mind, decided against any further attempts.

  By the time I was five, the question of my education arose.

  I was a registered blind person and the education authorities

  were adamant that I should be sent away to a special school.

  My parents were very strongly against such a move. The

  attitude in schools for the blind when my father had attended

  one as a boy was that however much or little sight the child

  had, he or she had to be taught the blind way. That is, in

  braille. My father was not encouraged to make use of his

  existing sight. Things, I am very glad to say, have completely

  changed since then, and any child with the least bit of residual

  vision is encouraged to develop its use in such schools today.

  When my mother met my father, he could only read braille

  and it was she who had to teach him to read visually with the

  use of large print. My father, who had himself gone to a

  special school, had led a sheltered childhood and found it

  difficult later to integrate into a sighted world.

  The Nottingham Education Authorities, however, had

  their own ideas. At first they tried persuasion, then a touch of

  heavy-handedness, and finally they threatened legal action if

  I were not 'voluntarily' sent away to a school for the blind.

  To this, my mother's reply was, 'Well, if I can get Sheila

  accepted at an ordinary primary school, then she will be

  receiving education, and that will be that. There'll be nothing

  you can do about it.' That did not go down well at all, but

  then we had quite a stroke of luck. It turned out that the

  headmaster of the local junior school that my mother

  approached was blind in one eye. He therefore had some

  understanding of the problem, but over and above that, he

  had compassion. He agreed to accept me, and to see how I

  got on. I have never stopped thanking my stars for this

  decision, which made such a difference to my life.

  So I started at Bluebell Hilljunior School, and I remember

  little about it, except that it was old, noisy and overcrowded.

  What I do recall is how terrified I was at the swarms of

  children in the playground. They all seemed to be running

  everywhere and screaming at the same time. It was very

  frightening, like a sudden access to an unexpected, mad

  world, and at playtime I used to sit on the wall and keep out

  of the way, listening to the banshee noise, and at the edge

  of my vision seeing endless wild moving shapes. I was a small

  girl in a blue velvet dress who imagined herself to be one with

  the rest of the school, but in reality was not.

  When I was eleven, I moved to Pierpont Secondary

  Modern. By this time I used to go to school on my own, and

  the walk there was a bit like facing a 'Wall of Death' ride

  every day of my life. Apart from knowing I would stumble

  over odd objects such as milk crates left outside terrace doors,

  and even the steps of houses
, there was also at the end of the

  road a crowd of boys who sometimes used to wait for me and

  jeer as I went by, the most complimentary of their names for

  me being 'Boss-eyes'. I can hear them now-'Look at 'er ...

  boss-eyes . . .' But, strangely, these lads had a mongrel

  dog who took to me, and I to him. I used to pat and make a

  fuss of him, and sometimes he would walk to school with me.

  Needless to say, there were difficulties at school. The

  attitude was, 'Either you get on without any major additional

  help from us, or you really will have to be sent away to a

  special school.'

  One of the big problems I had was not being able to see

  the blackboard, even if I sat in the front row. On one particular

  day which sticks vividly in my memory, our English mistress,

  Miss Pell, gave me permission to come out and look at the

  board more closely. What was written was a long piece on

  parsing, which was very hard to take in anyway, so I had to

  read it a line at a time, try to remember the line, then go back

  to my desk to write down what I'd seen. The trouble was the

  class got more and more fidgety and exasperated, because

  every time I went out to the board I blocked off whole bits

  of the entire exercise that everyone else was writing straight

  down from their desks. Fairly soon the classroom was full of

  cross little requests: 'I'm doing that bit, Miss, can't you move

  her?' 'She's in the way, Miss.' 'Miss, she's in the light.'

  Miss PeH was very good. She told them, 'Well, you'll just have

  to wait a moment.' But the tension was building up, and after

  about three trips to the blackboard I gave up, and heard

  frustrated protests give way to sighs of reliefœ The silence was

  broken only by pens scratching while I sat back at my desk

  vowing I'd rather be illiterate than go through that again.

  The only compensation was that I was beginning to develop

  a very well-trained memory.

  Yet for every teacher or pupil who had no consideration or

  proper understanding, there were as many who did, and

  these have very much remained in my mind. I remember a

  geography master who realized that I could not see the very