Sign
BY 2006 I WAS AS USED to the deafness as I was ever going to be. I’d developed ways of dealing with it, and ways of circumventing it. If I was walking down the street beside someone I’d automatically swap places so I was on the clearer side of them. If we were going anywhere in the car I’d be the passenger because I could hear better with the right ear. When I met someone new I’d learned that it was much easier to explain that I was partially deaf, and I was glad now when people felt they could ask questions about it. I didn’t go sailing so often and I’d developed a fondness for foreign films with subtitles. I had laser eye surgery to correct short-sightedness, which meant that I could actually see what people’s faces were saying.
I also signed up for a weekly evening course in Level One BSL. In the end I never completed it – work commitments got in the way – but I did learn some of the basics, plus extras besides. As usual, what seemed most interesting was not the content of the course but the other people on it. The tutor was prelingually deaf, but all the students were female, youngish and – apart from a few who had a family member with age-related hearing loss – had no particular connection to deafness. They were taking the course not because they were losing their hearing themselves, but because they were actors curious about the physicality of BSL, or because they were studying languages, or because they worked in some sector which brought them into contact with the Deaf.
Once we’d got past finger-spelling we moved on to individual signs. For a couple of weeks all of us struggled with this new sensation of conveying concepts through our bodies. To begin with it seemed so counter-intuitive, scrunching up our faces and silently mouthing words at the same time as shaping signs with our hands. Normal speech required standing stock still, but this was all about motion, balance, expression. Sometimes, getting our point across required touching the other person, sometimes we communicated with our eyes or through our breath. We laughed a lot, partly to cover our embarrassment, but mostly because we all felt a curious sense of release. Signing was like dancing; it had rhythm.
Signing between the Deaf has always existed. Both Socrates and St Augustine make passing reference to it, and in the seventeenth century a young doctor named Bulwer composed a complete lexicon of hand signs which he called a chirogram. He picked out 64 basic signs from which others could be composed, including the traditional gestures of supplication, blessing, applause, surrender and triumph.
A century later a young curate in Paris, the Abbé de l’Épée, became the legal guardian of two young deaf sisters. He decided that he could either allow them to remain as they were – which would restrict them to a life spent communicating only with each other – or he could try and find a way for the outside world to reach them. To begin with he tried the obvious route; pointing to objects (tree, table, glass) and then naming them in writing. Verbs were covered by the same method – if, for instance, he wanted to say ‘take the glass upstairs’, he had only to mime the various objects and actions, and the sisters would understand. His method worked fine until he got on to the subject of God. The Abbé’s intention had always been to teach the girls about faith, although this was more difficult since faith was not a tidy noun. Somehow, he realised, he was going to have to find a way of physically expressing an abstract concept. Frustrated, he stopped teaching for a while and instead just sat observing the way the two girls interacted. Both already used signing to communicate with each other and both, he realised, were able to convey everything they wanted to – a complete grammar of love, irritation or puzzlement all perfectly linked and all perfectly comprehended between them. And so, just as his contemporary Samuel Johnson was doing with written English back in London, the Abbé took language and began to systematise it.
Within a few years, the Abbé had begun to accept more deaf students and to establish an academy offering tuition in both signing and writing. ‘Teaching the deaf is less difficult than is commonly supposed,’ he wrote. ‘We merely have to introduce into their minds by way of the eye what has already been introduced into our own by the ear.’ He was not without his critics; others had already come up with a system called dactylology which spelt out the individual letters of each word in order to communicate. The disadvantages were clear; it was a slow method and to a deaf child, an object’s written name seemed to bear no relation to the object itself. De l’Épée’s signing method, by contrast, was fast, elegant, efficient and did its best to match the sign to its meaning – he could illustrate a cat, for instance, by stroking an imaginary set of whiskers, or show reverence by putting the hands together in prayer.
A couple of centuries later, there are now several different sign languages in use and fluent signers often say they prefer signing to spoken language for its ability to convey complex concepts or great depth of feeling. ‘You want not speech,’ as Bulwer wrote, ‘who have your whole body for a tongue.’
Just as with the Abbé de l’Épée’s method, British Sign Language uses signs which have an obvious link to the thing they’re trying to describe: the sign for drunk, for instance, is two fingers on the right hand tottering across the palm of the left. ‘Hope’ is the first two fingers of both hands crossed, ‘love’ is both hands flat against the heart. Occasionally, the directness is a little too direct; the sign for Jew was once a hooked nose, and the sign for America had to be changed after 9/11 because it looked too much like a flying plane. The sign for Prince Charles remains a pair of flappy ears.
Amanda, one of the interpreters at the Birmingham unit, began signing aged seventeen when she heard that there was a need for more BSL interpreters and thought it sounded interesting. Her grandmother is from Sri Lanka but speaks Punjabi. Amanda doesn’t, so the two of them couldn’t really talk to each other. ‘I thought if I became an interpreter then it would at least help someone else to be able to communicate.’
She signed up for the BSL Interpreting degree at Wolverhampton and found that it suited her – as a dyslexic, signing was so visual it felt much easier to learn. She now works for an agency who send her out to interpret all over Birmingham, which means working at the unit two days a week and then wherever and whenever she’s needed – the police, GPs, the courts, colleges – ‘Anywhere and everywhere. It’s busy and it can be quite challenging as well.’ Partly because interpreting for, say, someone Deaf who has just been arrested and who can’t communicate properly with either the police or their solicitor is always going to be difficult, but also because ‘Deaf people can be very blunt. It’s not meant to be rude – it’s just the way they say things, so I then have to culturally mediate that message.’
So what are the moments she’s really remembered? ‘There’s memorable in different ways. Some of the worst are appointments where people are given bad news. So when I’ve interpreted “You’ve got breast cancer”, or something like that – those appointments stick out. I’ve also interpreted for someone who had a stillbirth. That was a sad one. They’d had a baby, and the hospital were just trying to say, “Do you want us to investigate this? Do you want us to find out what caused your baby to die?” But having that conversation so soon after the birth, it was like …’ She exhales.
She hasn’t done much police work but is very much aware that the way she translates has the potential to have a major impact on someone’s life. ‘It’s having that pressure of knowing that your work affects them. So you’ve really got to take care with every word you interpret. So for instance with a car crash, whether you say a bang, a tap, a smash – all of those things mean very different things though the sign might be the same. And then we’ve got to make sure we pick the right word. We tend to go either with the person’s body language, the facial expressions, the speed that they sign something or – worst-case scenario – we’ll tell the police, “Look, they’ve used a sign which could mean this, this or this, do you want that clarified?” And then they can go in and get a bit more detail.’
IN THE STAFF ROOM of the Deaf Mental Health Service in Birmingham everyone is talking at once. The unit’s two psychologists are going over the progress of each of the eleven patients on the ward, one of the two interpreters currently on duty is handing over to another, a nurse is discussing shift handovers with the admin staff and the other is talking through the timetabling of an assessment later this week.
Put ten hospital staff having seven separate conversations in one small room and it should be mayhem. But only two of those conversations are being conducted in spoken English. The other five are either in BSL or in interpreted BSL, so there’s no sense of competing volume or of one voice pushing against another. Everyone seems to be conveying exactly what they need. There’s a sense of motion in the room, of hands pulling shapes out of the air and meaning out of those shapes. Because BSL requires the use not just of both hands but of the face and the body, it becomes a three-dimensional language in which each speaker uses the whole of themselves.
I’m standing by the door and having an interpreted conversation with Jenny, the unit’s deaf nurse. Because I can’t really sign, it’s taking me a while to work out how this goes. I’m asking Jenny questions but those questions are going through the interpreter Helen, so Jenny is looking at Helen rather than at me. But when Jenny replies, I naturally look at Helen because it’s Helen who’s speaking. So I look at Jenny all the time because she’s the person I’m talking to. Jenny looks at Helen all the time because it’s Helen who’s turning my words into meaning, and Helen is looking between the two of us. When Helen gets to the end of one of Jenny’s sentences and lets her hands empty out, waiting for the next thought to flow through her into motion, it’s a peaceful moment, and it makes me want to start talking in three dimensions too.
Later that day Jenny has a moment from her duties to talk properly so the three of us find an empty room and sit down with a cup of tea. Jenny is 40 but looks about half that, bright and elegant with dark curls and an easy smile. The edge of the frames of her glasses are covered in sparkles and the fronds of one or two leafy tattoos curl out from the edge of her shirt. That sense of noticing is there again in the care she’s taken to put everything together: the shoes, the well-styled trousers, the ingenuity with which she’s managed to get her NHS uniform to look good.
Jenny has worked on this unit for six years, though the journey to get here hasn’t been easy. She was born deaf to hearing parents who thought her lack of response to sound was due to some kind of psychological problem and who chose not to get her hearing tested. It was Jenny’s grandmother who realised that there was nothing at all wrong with Jenny’s intelligence; she just couldn’t hear. She took Jenny to the GP, who ran some basic tests and confirmed her hunch but told her that a more comprehensive assessment would only be possible with the consent of the parents. Jenny’s parents continued to refuse to give that consent, so it wasn’t until the age of three that she was officially acknowledged as profoundly deaf.
Even with the diagnosis, Jenny’s parents still chose not to treat her as anything other than a hearing child who was somehow making things up. Instead of learning BSL and communicating in sign, her parents both tried to teach her to speak. For deaf children, sign is intuitive because it bypasses sound to express concepts in the quickest and clearest physical form possible. But teaching speech to someone born without the biological kit necessary to process sound is notoriously difficult. A deaf child might understand instantly what you mean if you point to a cat or a lamp, but if they have no idea what sound sounds like, how can they then turn that cat or that lamp into a recognisably articulated word?
Home life became increasingly tricky. If her mother or her father needed Jenny’s attention, they’d shout at her. If they wanted her to learn a word, they’d just repeat it at higher volume and then, when she struggled to articulate, get frustrated. Meeting her now, it’s very clear that Jenny is a natural extrovert. But with only her grandmother providing any kind of emotional back-up during her childhood, she grew up anxious and introspective, shy of other people and wary of social contact. Jenny had no siblings because both her parents were scared that they might have another ‘faulty’ deaf child. They lived in a quiet area with no Deaf community and no one who she knew who was deaf. By the time she started mainstream school she had taught herself to lip-read and, because she was perceptive and clever, was speaking to a reasonable standard. In fact, school proved some kind of refuge from the situation at home. The other kids accepted her as she was and the staff did their best to make sure she got what she needed.
It wasn’t until she had left school aged eighteen and moved to Birmingham that she made the discovery that not only were there plenty of other people like her, but that they had a complete language of their own. When Jenny first encountered the city’s Deaf community, she also discovered BSL. Her new Deaf friends were astonished to discover that Jenny had managed to get so far on lip-reading and speech alone. Over the next five years Jenny went from strength to strength, becoming fluent in BSL, going to college, qualifying as a specialist psychiatric nurse and starting work in one of Britain’s three Deaf Forensic Units – secure units for the treatment of deaf patients, particularly those with a history of violence. During that time she went home and told her parents she preferred now to live as a deaf person rather than a deaf person struggling to conform to a hearing world. Her parents weren’t pleased. Even now they still both continue to deny that Jenny isn’t just being awkward. Instead of tapping her on the shoulder or turning the lights on and off, her mother still shouts, and it is Jenny’s young daughter who alerts her to the fact that her grandmother is talking.
BY MIDDAY, THERE’S NO ONE in the patients’ lounge except Gregory, who’s stretched out on the sofa watching telly with subtitles. He’s tall and good looking, but there’s something clunky in the shape of him, as if he doesn’t fully fit the body he’s in. Gregory has been staying here for a while, and may be here for some time to come. Having given me a sign name – right hand down, fingers tucked in, thumb and little finger out to the side and shaken side to side like a bell – he tells me he used to manage a light-engineering metal components factory with 30 staff, that he never had any issues managing such a large company because actually he can hear most of the time, that he’s been engaged for the last 40 years, and that he and his long-suffering girlfriend are going to get married next year. In fact, Gregory’s working life has been piecemeal, the staff are unaware of any girlfriend – long-suffering or not – and so far Gregory has not shown any knowledge of either engineering or other long-term employment. One of the daily tasks for everyone here is to jog Gregory back from his conviction that he can speak (his lip movements are clear, but his speech is unintelligible) into signing again.
Gregory’s fictitious life may be unusual, but his light hold on BSL is not. The reaction of Jenny’s parents may seem extreme but it’s a relatively common experience for many people on the unit. In fact many of the psychological issues dealt with by the staff here are consequences of the entirely preventable sensory deprivation of patients when they were young. Sometimes, as in Jenny’s case, it’s parents refusing to sign. But, since 90 per cent of deaf children are born to hearing parents, sometimes it’s just overwhelmed families with no background of deaf awareness and a lot of other children to deal with. Often, parents don’t learn formal BSL but come up with their own private gestural language to communicate with their child.
Thus all the patients currently on the ward are capable of signing, though almost all learned it later in life. Toby, for instance, who’s playing a video game on the patients’ computer, grew up in Spain. Both his parents were deaf, but though his mother embraced Toby’s deafness, his father refused to sign and continued to communicate with him through speech. Toby came to Britain aged thirteen and, like Jenny, experienced a revelatory moment when he arrived at the (now demolished) Edgbaston Royal School for the Deaf and discovered a whole world of people communicating in sign.
Maureen was born deaf but also has a late-developing condition called Usher syndrome. Over a period of time her sight tunnelled down to a diminishing field of vision until it disappeared completely. But while she still had some sight remaining, her brain tried to compensate for the lack of visual information by filling in the gaps. So, for instance, if she thought she could see the outline of a table then her brain would magically apparate a chair to sit beside it even if no chair was actually there. Because in Ushers the brain is doing its best to compensate for diminishing sight, it’s a condition which often gets misdiagnosed. After all, if someone is trying to run for invisible buses or talking to Vulcans in the coffee queue then it’s reasonable to suppose that what they have is not a neurological condition associated with progressive blindness, but straightforward old-fashioned bonkersness.
Which is what happened to Maureen. She was born to hearing parents who did both sign and had been living as a deaf person for most of her life until she began going blind in her thirties. When during visits to her doctor she started talking about trees in the waiting room, the GP came to the conclusion that she was becoming psychotic and so referred her to mainstream mental health services. It was only because she was also deaf that she was then referred to this unit, where someone spotted the discrepancy between true psychosis and Ushers and began giving her the treatment she needed.
Maureen is sunny and cheerful, happy to chat for hours and keen to talk about her upbringing in a rural area with no Deaf community, and her daughter, who is hearing but bilingual in English and BSL. When I ask Maureen a question, Helen the interpreter conveys it by taking her hands and allowing her to physically trace the shapes that those words make. There’s something gentle and intimate about that taking of hands. All through the day I keep being reminded of how very un-British deafness can be, with its open, easy physicality and the absolute obviousness of touch. Speech, by comparison, begins to feel stifled, as if all hearing people are doing is focusing on the things they’re trying not to transmit.
ANDY HEARN is a senior software engineer who I first contacted because of a blog he’d written about his commute to work. His deafness is of a type known as Connexin 26, a gene mutation which causes deafness with no other symptoms. He’s the fourth Deaf generation of his family, though both of his sons are hearing.
The first time we met was in a crowded pub opposite Victoria station – travellers loaded with suitcases, office workers going for a pint, theatregoers in sparkly dresses meeting their dates. Andy had come straight from work. He’s late thirties with a long face, a trim beard and a hearing aid behind one ear. His eyes have laughter in them, and an open intelligence. He was sitting at a table facing outwards towards the door, perfectly positioned to see what was going on but directly below a speaker bellowing out music. Over to the left was a TV screen relaying BBC News 24 muted with the subtitles on, and a couple of games machines were beeping by the door.
Neither my lip-reading nor my signing is good enough for fluent conversation so I got out my laptop and we sat next to each other reading what we’d written as it came out, with all the laughs and reactions and ‘No! Reallys!?’ included. Sometimes either he or I would sit there for a second, fingers hovering over the keyboard, trying to work out how to express an idea or a thought, and sometimes both of us were clearly itching to grab the laptop and respond to something the other had said. Some parts were serious, though much of it degenerated into ‘Everything You Ever Wanted to Ask a Deaf Person But Couldn’t Figure Out How To Ask’. Real-time conversation in print was an entirely familiar concept to Andy, but I found it exhilarating – a dialogue full of gestures and laughter conducted silently in the centre of a mess of sound.
When I’d been talking to Amanda, the BSL interpreter, she’d said that the police occasionally get called to pubs or bars because people find signing too ‘aggressive’. Is that really true?
‘Yeah,’ writes Andy. ‘True. Police have been called to disperse us Deafies. I’ve been involved a number of times. Looking back, and despite the fact that some of the pubs discriminated against us, we were hard to evict after closing time. We descended on pubs in hundreds – sometimes thousands for the bigger places.’ The problems generally started at closing time. ‘We hang about, we’re slow to leave the premises, the police then arrive and order everyone out. We’ve had something to drink, so we think it’s a good idea to try getting the police to sign.’
What follows can then become a splendid example of double-sided miscommunication. Faced with a large group of people waving their arms around and apparently refusing to respond to direct orders, the police wade in. Because they’re trained to deal with gang situations in which direct eye contact is seen as confrontational, when they think a situation is about to escalate, they look away. ‘But that only works us up. An incident at Waterloo stands out. We had to leave the pub and one guy wanted to finish his drink, so he walked out with a glass in his hand. The policeman by the door told him that he couldn’t do that, but obviously the guy never heard him, so the police tried to arrest him. Us Deafies, being the nosy lot we are, started to move forward to see what was happening, so we were all closing in, the police were screaming into their two-ways, “Back up now!”, the vans and dogs arrived and then a few of the dogs started becoming friendly with some of the Deafies who had been on animal welfare courses – we suss out animals better perhaps.’ He grins. ‘It all got a bit out of control.’
Another glass of wine, and we go back to the reason I’d first contacted him. Hearn’s daily route to work takes him through Gatwick Airport and over a period of several months he kept finding himself being pulled aside to be searched by airport police. The first thing he’d know would be a hand on his chest and an armed officer moving him out of the stream of people up against a wall. Once he’s in a stress position – and now with a large group of spectators surrounding him – he’ll be searched. Though he tells them repeatedly both in sign and speech that he’s deaf, the information appears to make no difference until the police have found his wallet and driving licence and phoned back to base. After that, they become a lot more friendly. ‘I suspect that they realise that I’m not who they want, or I don’t have a criminal record. At the end they just give me a piece of signed paper to prove that I’ve been searched in case another squad stops me. By that time I’m just relieved to be let go.’
He’s been pulled over when driving too. How many times has this happened?
‘At Gatwick, I think five or six times. Driving – three or four times. Security portals – loads of times. It was almost guaranteed until I became a father. Having kids with you is a great way of slipping through. I think now each time I expect it, so maybe my behaviour changes slightly.’
But what is it that the police see in him? Hearn says he looks serious and walks quickly, but then so do a lot of people in airports. What may set him apart is his attention to human and spatial detail. Hearing individuals are often stressed by the whole business of airports and flying, but that stress generally reflects inwards. If you’re deaf, you’re focused outwards, registering visually all the information which might otherwise come to you aurally – announcements, warnings, communication from those you’re with. Those who can hear are accustomed to using their ears as eyes in the back of their heads, so if they’re walking through an airport and a luggage cart comes beeping up behind them then they move out of the way without needing to turn around to verify the cart’s existence. Hearing has given them a three-dimensional comprehending. But those who are deaf can only be aware of that cart because they’ve seen it. One sense must do the work of two.
So what was it he did to change his behaviour? ‘Now each time I see an armed cop, I take a deep breath, try to relax, and walk looking straight ahead.’ In other words he no longer does what would be natural to him. Instead, he behaves like someone hearing – he keeps his lights dipped and his eyes on the destination. ‘They’ve left me alone, though I’ve caught a double-glance at me now and again.’
Deafness is as much a part of Andy as maleness is, so it’s almost impossible for him to isolate the ways he understands the world differently. But, he says, ‘Our other senses do become enhanced when one goes. I think it was last week when [he and his wife, also deaf] were driving, we were in slow traffic and I was the first to move out of the way for an ambulance. I reckon we catch the flashing lights before others do. And I have to be very careful where I look in very crowded places such as the Underground – we Deafies glance slightly longer than the next person and are more sensitive to the periphery of our vision. At work I used to sit opposite a guy with Tourette’s. The gesture kind, though I’ve caught him coughing over his swearing. Anyway, each time he jumped up to wave or fist the air, I kept on being distracted, yet colleagues next to me weren’t bothered. Comes with growing up with people waving to get attention I suppose.’
So, I write, can you explain something to me? How do you communicate in situations where you’ve got your arms full? How do you sign while driving, or when you’re holding one of the kids? Andy grins. ‘I’ve had hearie passengers pointing to the road ahead when we Deaf are in the front. But with signing in cars, again, the peripheral vision comes into effect. Apparently, we’re statistically safer.’ As for domestic duties, ‘There’s an American comic strip drawn by a deaf dad and written by a hearing mother. One strip had the guy asked by his mates how come his wife let him go to the pub so often. The reply was, “Ask her when she’s doing the washing up.”’
Andy has been MRI-scanned a few times as scientists search his brain – his fourth-generation brain, now totally adapted and enhanced – to work out in what ways his sensory topography has been remapped. ‘Anything for languages and science, me,’ he types. That extrasensory perception also has its uses within coding. ‘My work colleagues [all hearing] do think more sequentially. I have to craft my emails more carefully for them. My whiteboard scribbling is more pictoral than organised and mind maps suit me more. I’m not sure whether it is me or it is because of my spatial thinking, but others seem to give me the most devilish software bugs to hunt down. But when I’ve caught them, the reward is … amazing.’
So what was it like when your first son was born, and you realised he was hearing?
‘He was born six weeks premature so we were worrying about his health, which meant the state of his ears was put aside. By the time he got strong enough to leave the SCBU, we knew he could hear. Ironically his hearing is “exceptional”, ten decibels above average.’ Both he and his wife felt a certain ambivalence about the break in the genetic line. His sons are bilingual in spoken English and BSL, so ‘they appreciate the signing and being able to code-switch’, though he knows that if they then have children who are hearing, it’s probably going to be difficult to maintain that culture beyond one generation.
He and his wife, on the other hand, were brought up with an unbreakable sense of belonging. ‘The best way to describe it, I think, is that when we [he and his wife] were globetrotting in 2006, whenever we came across a Deaf community, we “belonged”, no matter what the written language, and no matter how far away. Nepal, even Lhasa. We went through Russia and China/Mongolia/Tibet where the script isn’t Latin-based just fine, and had a brilliant time watching our other hearie travellers trying to gesticulate. Deafies from other countries have their own sign languages, syntax, grammar, et cetera. But because it’s visual and lends itself to iconity easily, we can quickly grasp the more abstract signs. When deafies from different countries meet, they start to use “international sign”’ – not an official language, but something universally understood. ‘It transcends all creeds and all other distinctions. That too is a recent revelation, something I took for granted until fifteen or so years ago. Deaf first, nationality second.’
The third time we met, Andy Hearn suggested the Churchill Arms on London’s Kensington Church Street, a pub so festooned in flower baskets and frilly-knicker flags-n-jackery it felt like drinking inside a presentation bouquet. They didn’t have a table, so we walked down the road to a restaurant that served good steaks. The previous couple of times, Andy had picked places which were handy geographical meeting points – cheery, good for swinging the laptop between us, close to the station or the tube – but which were difficult audiologically – shouty pubs or very busy restaurants.
I know it seems a bit slow, but I don’t think I understood until that last meeting that Hearn simply doesn’t assess things on the same basis that hearing people do. If you’re deaf, then all sound, of whatever volume, is irrelevant. It’s not there. It’s just not a factor. But if you’re deafened, then that snarkish hunt for the right sort of sound can often occupy a lot of space in your life. So while even now I reflexively search for a good acoustic environment (quiet café, low-ceilinged room), it’s a consideration that doesn’t even feature for Andy – all he’d need to figure out is whether he likes the place.
It took a long time for the penny to drop, but I got there in the end. The difference between deaf and deafened is that, for the deaf, there is no lack, no loss. There’s always just the world as it is, complete.