CHAPTER 5

Guglielmo’s happy voice

My excitement about a new life in Australia lost its edge when I thought I might go blind. In the ship taking us to Adelaide, a veil of brown had suddenly clouded my vision. Since I was a small child, I had been virtually blind in my right eye, and now this blurring curtain had descended over my left.

The young eye-surgeon’s face was pressed so close to mine I could feel his breath. My left eye ached from the white light shining into it through a large magnifying glass. When Dr Peter Stobie had finished his examination, I was too blinded to see him deliver the news.

‘You have a detached retina.’

I had no idea what these words meant, but the doctor’s voice was grave.

‘We must operate right away.’

I learned quickly that the retina layers the back of the eye, and without it you cannot see. It is a medical emergency when a retina detaches, and within two hours I was a patient at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. For the next five weeks I would be blindfolded, confined to bed, and required to keep my head in the same position at all times — elevated and leaning slightly to the left.

Through an opening he would cut through the bottom of my eye, Dr Stobie would attempt to re-attach my errant retina by performing a diathermy, a process involving heat and electricity that was a common remedy at the time, but abandoned long ago.

My eyes had always been trouble. After catching measles at the age of three months, I developed a disorder known as strabismus — crossed eyes. Years of operations and eye patches failed to cure this condition, and by the age of 10 I was essentially what doctors describe as monocular; my right eye was almost useless. With my good eye alone to lead me through life, its unemployed partner had drifted lazily off to the right. While one eye took perfect aim at a person’s face, the other gazed sightlessly over their left shoulder. People I spoke to would look back thinking I was addressing someone else.

Being unable to make eye contact with people is a handicap one has to suffer in order to understand. Through the years, it was a source of pain, and other people’s amusement. I would be called ‘Cyclops’ and the ‘man with one eye on the world’. ‘Here’s not looking at you, kid’ was common. Even my loving mother was entertained: ‘You’ve got one eye and a ball of fat.’

It was a handicap with many drawbacks. At parties, my friends could catch the eye of a girl they liked. When I tried, it would be the girl’s neighbour, the one less interesting to me, who reacted. When reading on trains, women sitting opposite would fiercely tug down their skirts, certain I was sneaking an uninvited look. On the other hand, when I was admiring their legs, they never knew. Approaching strangers as a young reporter, I would sometimes resort to closing my blind eye. This must have looked odd, but at least guaranteed I could make immediate contact without having first to explain my deformity.

I considered wearing a black eye-patch, which, as well as having a practical benefit, was certain to supply mystery and allure. I imagined enjoying the fascination of beautiful women as they learned the story of my lost eye. I could tell them how I defended my family against a maddened attacker in the dangerous backstreets of Tripoli; or fought off a gang armed with flick-knives surrounding me and my girl in Singapore’s seedy Bugis Street, as the famous transvestites parading there cheered on my bravery. I had a long list of other colourful story ideas, but decided there was a high risk that no one would believe a word of them. I forgot the eye patch and settled for the dull truth. My story of catching measles as a baby never once brought a glitter to a pretty girl’s eye.

But my eye problems were never more alarming than when I was 15, lying in an echoing ward in the Royal Adelaide Hospital, where I had been blinded in order to see.

It was an unexpected lesson in life, becoming a refugee from the sighted world, learning what it was to have no eyes. It amplifies the senses that remain, but leaves the main canvas blank. I knew I was in a ward with 15 other patients because I had been told as much. But I could not see them, or the colours of the ward, or the owner of the soft woman’s voice that described it to me. I began to wonder how people existed in this new world, what it must be like to live with smells, tastes, and sounds, yet unable to attach them to an image. I had been able to see, so I had memories, and the ability to guess at and shape pictures in my head. But was it better for a blind man to have once been sighted, or more merciful to be blind from birth? What is beauty if you have never been able to behold a face, or a cathedral, or a bird on a branch? Was it better never to have seen these things than to have them snatched away?

When I put my thoughts about blindness to Bob, whose bed was across the ward, I could tell he was hearing nothing original. Bob had been blind all his life. ‘Everything is clear enough to me,’ he said.

I was an unhappy visitor to Bob’s world. I knew the surgery had come without guarantees, that my five prostrate weeks were key to the cure. But why was Bob teaching me Braille? ‘One dot equals A, two vertical dots B, two horizontal dots C,’ he would tell me. Had the hospital asked him to prepare me? Was I recovering, or rehearsing to be blind forever?

I started thinking about what Bob had meant when he said everything was clear to him. I decided that the unseen hospital space could become whatever I wanted it to be; the faceless people could look however I wanted them to. The world would be at my command, and having invisible friends would provide infinite flexibility. Eyes, hair, height, shape, skin — each doctor, nurse, patient, hospital orderly could be designed in my mind to the last detail. They could be tall or short, thin or fat, redheads or blondes, pretty or ugly, and wear whatever I chose. It would be like dressing dolls.

I engineered a vision for each voice. Bob sounded tall and big shouldered, with lank blond hair slightly matted across his forehead and bony cheeks, and skin like parchment. Guglielmo, the young Italian in the next bed who was to become my best friend in the ward, was short and wiry, with cropped black hair, blue eyes, and crooked teeth. The nurse who held my hand and told me I looked much more than 15 was petite and blue-eyed, and her hair a lovely crowd of chestnut curls. The booming senior sister whose arrival always hushed the ward was definitely short and stout, with white hair.

I could change my mind about people who displeased me. A beautiful person could be condemned to ugliness. One nurse became Marilyn Monroe the moment we first talked. She had a low and throaty voice, so the image fit perfectly. I had a crush on her, which she didn’t reciprocate. When I tried to chat she never had time for me. My revenge was to make her plain — narrow-faced, small-mouthed, hook-nosed, and skinny.

The best of my imagined designs never changed, but seemed more perfect as the weeks passed. It was dedicated to Sophie, whose soft voice had described the ward to me. This voice came to my bed sometimes and read me stories, and I fell in love with it. It belonged, I decided, to a woman with shining raven hair descending to the bottom of her long neck without reaching her shoulders. Her skin was smooth and clear and the colour of cream; her smile wide and white; her lips full, red, and mobile; her breasts just large enough to see as they began to cleave apart at the top of her uniform; her legs tapering at the bottom towards slim ankles.

For five weeks, I lived with these conjured images, but there was one I did not need to manufacture, and I never forgot. Every third day, my eyes had to be uncovered and cleaned, and when this happened the same vision interrupted the darkness.

I will never forget the first time. Rolled slowly on to my back, I had to look straight at the ceiling, to fix on a single spot, and on no account turn my eyes. As I lay there, two warm hands touched my face and peeled away the dressing. Reflexively, I shut my eyes against the strange, sharp light, squinting tightly until they could bear the brightness. My freed eyes finally fixed their open stare on the ceiling. And then they arrived, hovering above me: two beautiful saucers of blue. Big and deep and dazzling. Perfect kaleidoscopes of sapphire, flecked with sky blue; disembodied, flying objects suspended between a nurse’s starched cap and a surgical mask. The most magnificent eyes the world had ever seen now leaned very close, less than a foot away, searching deeply into mine. As a 15-year-old, it is a dream come true being looked at like that with eyes like those.

Touch and smell matter a lot when you are a teenage boy trapped in bed at the mercy of invisible nurses who are as beautiful as you choose them to be.

A bed-bath must normally be a humiliating experience; naked, rolled from side to side, swabbed head to toe by an unsmiling nurse, seeing from the scowl on her face that the task was high on the list of things she most hated. But Sophie of the raven hair and red lips administered my bed baths. Each day, she took a tender journey down my body, a warm flannel touching my face and neck and shoulders, progressing softly to the very tip of my toes. Sophie never took long enough at the task before drying me with a towel and combing my hair. But then, finally, she would lean across me, stroking and straightening my cover of sheets and blankets, so close I could smell her freshness and feel the brief breeze of her breath.

My neighbour and new friend, Guglielmo was 25 years old and had arrived soon after me, temporarily blinded by using an oxy-acetylene torch without eye protection. He had immigrated to Australia from Italy, leaving his family behind. Guglielmo was loud, laughing, and funny, the bright heart of our ward of sufferers. He was a dreamer who talked non-stop and at high speed. His fractured English demanded total concentration.

‘Jeez, mate, slow down will you,’ Bob would say, ‘You sound like a chicken being bloody strangled.’

But Guglielmo was never deterred, and his answer was always the same. ‘All right, tell me, how good you speak Italian?’

He was engaged to be married, and each night his 17-year-old fiancée would sit beside his bed. This was the only time Guglielmo did not speak English. None of us understood what they said to each other, and they talked in whispers.

Guglielmo and I would dream together about what we would do with our lives in Australia, and what would become of us.

‘Les, this is a beautiful country. It is good we both came here. In Italy my people are poor, but here I will be rich. I will have my own company and I will build houses. Many people will come here, like we have. They will need houses and I will get rich building them.’

But first he would marry. ‘I will save money and marry Anna. You should see her, Les, she is beautiful, very beautiful. Then I will take her home to meet all my family in Italy. We will not go by ship but by jet plane. For my honeymoon, I will fly in a jet plane all the way back to Italy with my wife, Anna. I will work and save to do it. And Anna will have children and we will live in a big house.’

And I would tell him what would happen to me, how I would become a newspaper reporter and travel the world, visiting every continent, meeting famous people — film stars and prime ministers — and that my name would be seen by millions of readers.

When he left hospital, Guglielmo stood beside my bed. ‘Les, don’t forget me when you are a big important newspaper reporter and we are both rich. One day, when you are old enough, I will teach you to drink. We will go to the pub and I will buy you a schooner. You must drink it slowly. Maybe you will bring along one of these pretty nurses. They like you — really, they do. Oh, if only I was not engaged.’

He took my hand and kissed it, then patted my chest. ‘Good luck, Les, good luck.’

Guglielmo’s voice faded as he walked away, down the ward, joking with the other patients he was leaving behind, and teasing the giggling nurses in his flirty, broken English. Everyone shouted goodbye to Guglielmo, and when he was gone the ward was very quiet.

As the day approached when my blindfold would come off, I became afraid. My only vision for weeks had been those brilliant blue flying saucers, the dazzling eyes of the nurse. Now the real world out there was waiting to shatter my imagination.

The nurses were enjoying it. ‘You don’t have a clue what anyone looks like, do you?’ said beautiful Sophie of the breezy breath.

‘You don’t know what I look like either,’ said Bob, my braille teacher. ‘But I don’t suppose even I know what I look like.’

I was convinced being blindfolded had changed my personality. Freed of the lifelong burden of being Les with the lazy eye, I had shed my shyness. It had been a liberation never having to see strangers discover I couldn’t look straight — those looks of blank confusion, that searching glance over the left shoulder. I was now an extrovert. I could talk with easy charm and sparkling humour. Older women — some as old as 20 — found my company irresistible, and would sit at my bedside laughing at my jokes. I had become bolder with a blindfold.

Actually, this entire feeling turned out to be a drug-induced illusion. A few years later I could recapture that sense of invincible charm by drinking a couple of glasses of wine. I had clearly been under the influence of mind-altering medication designed to get me through those weeks of bedridden stillness.

I hadn’t yet worked that out on the day Dr Peter Stobie, my eye surgeon, arrived to remove the blindfold. After hating the darkness, I was dreading the light.

The first face I saw was no surprise. The last person I had seen before the general anaesthetic took me away was Dr Stobie. Here he was again — balding, pallid and serious. Immediately after removing the blindfold he replaced it with a pair of strange spectacles; the lenses were covered but for two tiny circles of light at the centre of each frame. So I re-entered the seeing world through these two tiny portals; they were intended to stop my eye moving too much while it continued to heal.

The ward was vast, like a great hall, with a soaring ceiling, yellow walls, tall windows, and a floor of polished brown linoleum. The beds were spaced far apart, their frames made of black iron, and nurses paced along the wide middle passageway dressed in light-blue uniforms under starched-white aprons.

As I squinted at it all, I could see in a blur one blue-and-white nurse waving far across the ward as she walked in my direction. She stood beside my bed, smiling. She was short, a little over five foot, with an ample figure, very ample. Her cheeks were full, very full, and her short hair frizzy and unkempt, as if she did not take much trouble with it. But her smile was a warm and caring smile, and her bright hazel eyes were smiling, too. ‘Hello, Les,’ she said, taking hold of my arm. ‘I’m Sophie.’

This was the real Sophie, the raven-haired beauty of my imagination, with the long neck, red lips, and perfect ankles. Nothing I imagined about her was true. Yet the warm and gentle voice was still there, and the kindness. And I could never have imagined her beautiful smile.

One by one, reality replaced my imagination. The stern, stout senior sister was statuesque, slender, and beautiful; Bob, my braille teacher, was very short with a big round stomach, and almost entirely bald; the petite, handholding nurse was not petite, and her chestnut hair was black and quite straight. I got only one right. Marilyn Monroe really was blonde and shapely. She also remained uninterested in chatting to me. As a 15-year-old, the gift of those five weeks was that it gave me no choice but to get to know people from the inside first.

After five weeks in bed, the body grows accustomed to being out of use. My ignored muscles had atrophied. My legs were useless. I could not walk, or even stand. I took my first shower sitting in a chair because my legs would not bear the weight of my body.

The operation had saved my sight and stemmed the damage, but the shadow across the top right of my vision had not gone, and distortions also remained, and colours were less sharp. I was also unable to recognise a face at 50 paces, but presumed after the operation that this was a handicap I must learn to live with. For some reason, no one thought it might be a good idea to test me for spectacles — not until I was learning to drive and my brother-in-law Don refused to continue with his lessons until I had my eyes tested.

In 1960, the requirements for a driving licence in Adelaide were undemanding — probably no stricter than those needed to drive a horse-and-carriage 100 years before. You did not need to take a driving test at all, and could be given a licence without ever sitting behind the wheel of a car. I was asked about 20 questions on the rudiments of the road. It was not a challenging examination — red lights mean stop, don’t accelerate driving past a school, don’t rev your engine to hurry old ladies crossing the street, when it’s dark turn on headlights.

Also, reasonably enough, you were not allowed to drive if you were blind. For me, this was the tricky part. In a doctor’s eyesight test I might have nailed the big letter at the top, but it would be pure guesswork after that. Luckily, this test was not so sophisticated.

The examiner just took me into the street, and pointed. ‘See that street?’

I could tell from the direction he was pointing where the street must be — beyond the large garden in front of us.

‘Yes.’

‘OK, tell me what model car that is.’

Since I could hear engines but see only blurring movement, I had to think quickly. At that time, by far the most popular car in Australia was a local product called a Holden. So I replied: ‘It’s a Holden, sir.’

‘That one?’

‘Another Holden.’

‘That?’

‘Holden.’

After the same question had been followed 10 times by the identical answer, the examiner wrote something on his clipboard.

‘Seven out of ten — that’ll do,’ he said.

And I was let loose on the roads of Adelaide.

What alarmed my brother-in-law was not so much my inability ever to take a corner without mounting the pavement as my failure to notice any approaching stop sign until I was within 20 feet and travelling at 35 miles per hour. My first pair of spectacles changed everything, and I have driven accident free, more or less, ever since.

Although safe to drive, I still didn’t see all that well, and imperfect vision has many drawbacks. Sports, for instance. Seeing through a single eye does not aid hand-eye coordination, or help in judging the direction of a fast-moving ball. Cricket did not come naturally to me. Facing a fast bowler, my only defence was quiet prayer, since I had no chance of seeing the approaching missile.

People who didn’t like me exploited this weakness. I was sometimes played at a position called silly mid-on, which requires the fielder to stand suicidally close to the batsman. I only ever stopped one ball while playing in this position, and that was when it scored a direct hit a little below my throat while travelling at least 100 miles per hour. The only sound I heard as I lay near death at the batsman’s feet was my captain’s cackle and his words: ‘Well stopped, Les.’ That was 50 years ago; I finally forgave the captain five years ago — when he died.

Watching sport was not easy, either. Even with spectacles, it was difficult to identify players. In Adelaide, I earned an additional £3 10s a week writing about soccer. These were the days when soccer was a minor sport in Australia — so minor no one else wanted the job. But being the soccer writer for The News made me a big-shot in a small world. I joined a panel to judge the man of the match at every game. I enjoyed the prestige of this position until the day I forgot to bring my binoculars. There was an awkward silence when I handed in my choice for best player: ‘Err, Les — he wasn’t playing today.’

—

I was old enough to drink when I heard the news. It was 7 July 1962, and I was an 18-year-old cadet reporter arriving for a Saturday shift on The News’ sister paper, the Sunday Mail. Before I could find a desk, the Sunday Mail’s chief reporter, Bill Reshcke, hurried towards me. ‘There’s been plane crash. An Alitalia jet flying out of Sydney has crashed in India, and it looks like there are no survivors. We need to check if any locals were on board.’

Alitalia Flight 771, bound from Sydney to Rome, via Bangkok, Bombay, and Tehran, had 94 people on board, and had been approaching Bombay through a blinding summer monsoon when it crashed into a jungle hilltop 50 miles northeast of the airport. Search parties trekked through miles of rough terrain to reach the wreckage. Two days later, only half the bodies had been recovered, but it was clear everyone on board had died.

Four victims had begun their journey in Adelaide: a six-year-old girl, Dagmar von Brasch, had been flying to Frankfurt to visit an aunt, and Luigi Monti, 70, was going home to Forli, Italy, after a three-month visit to see his daughter and two grandsons. They were two tragic stories, but by now I was learning the necessary detachment; too much terrible misfortune filled the columns of a newspaper. At times, however, bad news breaks through your defences, and that is what happened when I learned the names of the other two victims. They were Mr and Mrs Guglielmo Proietti of Frederick Street, Stepney, newlyweds who were flying to Rome on their honeymoon.

Guglielmo, my hospital friend, had worked and saved, and gone home in a jet plane, not a ship, to introduce his new bride to his Italian family. It was just as he had promised himself as we lay in our hospital beds plotting our lives. He had talked to me of becoming wealthy building homes, but Guglielmo had started his own trucking business. He would have been so pleased with himself climbing aboard that plane, off to see the poor relatives he talked about, to arrive with his beautiful bride and tell them of his new life in a lucky country.

The grainy photo we published had been taken two weeks before, on their wedding day. A tiny tiara pinned to the beaming bride’s dark hair held in place a long white veil. She was beautiful, just as Guglielmo had said. The groom to her right was neatly combed, with a big knot in his dark tie, a slight smile, and delighted eyes.

But it was the face of a stranger. I would always remember my vibrant unseen friend as short and wiry, with close-cropped black hair, blue eyes, and teeth askew. And his happy, hopeful voice.