Lost children
Autumn 1985
1 September
During the party to celebrate Thomas’s fifth birthday, a child came over and sat on my knee. At first, I thought it was Lizzie, but as time went by, I became more and more uncertain. I reached the point where the only way I could be sure was by asking, ‘What’s your name?’ I shrank from this in case it really was Lizzie. She would then know that I had not recognised her. This was rather a puzzling and even distressing situation.
When a child opens a birthday present, everybody admires it. It is silly for me to join in these cries of admiration, because everybody would know that I was pretending. I tried sitting Thomas on my knee so I could get some idea of what the object was, but the trouble is that my hands get in his way, and without touching I do not know. In any case, it is seldom that after a moment or two of touching you can give a gasp of surprise and delight. Knowledge by touch takes time. In any case, the child will not stay on your knee, but keeps running off to get more presents and to show them to other admirers. It is impossible not to experience a creepy sense of remoteness at such a time.
After the children had all gone, Thomas came running up to me with a new set of mathematical puzzles in the form of playing cards. He wanted me to do this with him. I tried to explain that I could not help him much, and he pulled from his pocket another puzzle. This is set into a clear plastic case, and is one of those puzzles where you have to roll little silver balls around until they come to rest in little holes. With a sick feeling, I tried to explain that this one was even more difficult for me. Undeterred, he produced a board game. We opened it. With a sinking heart, I realised that all of the counters were exactly the same. They must have been different colours but they all felt alike. The board was completely smooth. I suggested that Mummy would help him later. I tried to enthuse over all these presents, but it was hard work. I fell asleep that night like a worn-out ghost.
In the morning I took a new initiative. When Thomas ran in at about seven o’clock, I told him to go and get all the things he had been given for his birthday, bring them all up and spread them out on the bed, and I would go through every one of them with him. He was delighted and this worked very well. Laying things out on the bed, one by one, in the quietness, I was able to get his description of every toy or game while I had time to explore each item carefully, discovering all I could about it, and working out whether there would be any way that I could use it with him. Without the social pressure to express premature admiration, I could enjoy this very much. To some extent, I had entered his birthday world.
6 September
Two or three times this week I have walked with Thomas to his school. Perhaps I should say that he has walked with me, for he is getting quite good at guiding me. He walks nearest the road holding my hand, while I use the cane to keep me clear of the front fences. He is old enough not to walk out on to the road, and in any case, provided that I keep close to the walls and fences, I can hold him well inside the footpath. He has learned how to give my hand a little tug towards him when he sees that I am about to walk into a hedge or gatepost. He is, however, unreliable about this, and if I am not alert with the cane, I will sometimes walk smack bang into a post because he is watching something else.
I have also worked out a very satisfactory way of saying goodbye to him at the school gate. As he runs off through the playground, he calls back to me, ‘’bye’. I respond by calling out, ‘’bye’, and we exchange these calls, getting fainter and fainter as he runs further and further away, until at last his calls disappear into the general background noise of the school yard. As I am turning round to go, having waved as hard as I can, I hear one final, faint little call, ‘’bye’. This game avoids the abrupt and disconcerting disappearance which is the usual experience of a blind person saying goodbye to someone. The echoing calls provide an intermediate stage for a gradual disappearance, and this is almost as good as seeing each other wave.
Lizzie is also interested in leading me, and there is a certain good-natured competition entering into this. Often I have Thomas on one hand and Lizzie on the other. I enjoy this very much, but it makes it difficult to use the cane. I am all right provided they don’t decide to walk one on each side of a post. Daddy in the middle collects it. Lizzie is very proud of her skill, and calls out to Marilyn, ‘Look! I am leading Daddy. I’m showing Daddy. I’m showing him.’
7 September
Blind person’s Ludo has been a great asset. I played happily with the children all day until four in the afternoon. After the Ludo, we played ‘Reversi’ on a board also designed for the blind, but just as good for sighted people, and then Thomas and I listened to some old Goon Show cassettes, with satisfactory results all round. We then played a card game called ‘Jumble Sales’ and several other board games.
Even when we are not playing a game which is adapted for the blind, I do not seem to find it as upsetting as once I did. I seem to be more content just to sit there, and be told what to do, to shake the dice, to keep up an enthusiastic commentary, which the children seem to find a perfectly adequate kind of participation. The truth is that often I have little or no idea what the rules of the game are, and sometimes I am not even sure which game we are playing.
8 September
Gabriel is less than a month old, and I am enjoying his company very much. I love the smell of him, and the way he breathes in rapid, little pants when I call his name. I love to feel the way his head twists around when Marilyn enters the room, and the way he turns back to look at me. I love the feel of him when he goes to sleep in my arms, the change in the sound and pattern of his breathing. I love holding his tiny hands and putting my own hand on the warmth of his head. I like to feel whether his hair is growing and I like feeling his little nose. I like holding one of his feet and I like the feel of his whole body as I hold him over one shoulder. All of these things are very much less spoiled by the lack of sight than was the case with either Thomas or Lizzie. I have some pangs of regret when somebody remarks, ‘He’s smiling at you’ or, ‘What a bright, alert baby you’ve got there!’ Provided that such thoughts do not come to the front of my mind too much, I find that I am getting much more genuine and immediate pleasure from this little baby. He is well named.
Last night I dreamed that the family and I were shopping in a supermarket or department store which was built over a cliff. A huge wave crashed down on the store, separating us all. I rushed back to the flooded shop, looking for the children. There was debris everywhere, flooded bales of cloth, merchandise and dead bodies. Marilyn, Gabriel and Imogen were safe at the top end of the shop. It was Thomas and Elizabeth who were missing. They had been down, below the level to which the water had come. I searched for them everywhere, in growing despair, finding nothing. I came back and told Marilyn there was no sign of them. We were all full of grief, and continued to search everywhere, but it was hopeless. They had simply disappeared. We erected a small plaque in memory of them. There was a lot of discussion about what we should say. Should we simply say that the sea took them?
Now I am down on the cliff-edge myself, still searching for them. The cliff is very rugged and steep, and is composed of masses of thin layers of slate or shale. This seems to have been loosened by the impact of the wave, and as I clamber around the edge, hanging out over the wild sea, huge pieces of shale slide off under the pressure of my feet or fingertips and crash down. I am scrabbling around for my toe-hold, wondering if the entire cliff face will crumble and collapse. As I stretch out, trying to obtain a grip, huge slabs of rock slide away with a rush of rubble and debris. Other people are clambering around, higher up. At last, somehow, I manage to scramble up to where the cliff face seems less affected by the wave and storm and to be reasonably solid. So I manage to escape, but still there is no sign of Thomas or Lizzie.
This dream seemed to be immensely long. I awoke from it very gradually. Indeed, I am not quite sure at what point the dream ended and the nightmarish fantasy began. There was no sharp sense of division between the dream and reality, and the dream flooded my waking consciousness with a sense of dread.
Earlier in the summer, a group of school children had been swept off the rocks in Cornwall. This incident made a deep impression upon me, as did a dream which one of my colleagues recently told me, in which her children had been drowned on the rocks. The dream is basically about the loss in family relationships which blindness causes. Thomas and Lizzie, who are just learning to understand blindness, are drowned beneath it. Imogen was born before the shock and Gabriel after it. The dream also suggests that fragments of my old life, my conscious, sighted life, are sliding and crashing down all around me into the all-engulfing world of blindness.
13 October
We went to a party to celebrate the ordination of one of our ministers. A singing group called Wild Geese had come down from Glasgow to take part. Twice during the evening, this choir of a dozen or so young people gathered on the stairs of the house and sang African liberation songs. I stood very close to them with Thomas on my shoulders. He was beating to the music, and clapping his hands. The music was so rich and exciting. I felt exhilarated and blessed. Over the noise of the clapping and singing, Thomas shouted into my ear, ‘What are they singing about?’
‘They’re singing about freedom’, I replied. He laughed with delight and so did I.
Later in the evening somebody said to me, ‘John, you might like to know that all those young people look so radiant, their faces are smiling, and they are dressed in such bright colours! Some are in red and orange, others are dressed like harlequins with alternate squares of coloured cloth, and they all look so happy!’
I was glad to have this information, because I had pictured them as dressed in tartans with white blouses and lots of lace. I do not suppose I will ever be able to avoid forming some mental image or other, and since this should always be as realistic as possible, I am always glad to have more information.
What moved me, however, was the sound. I do not think that my pleasure at the noise of the singing could have been increased by sight, or by a description at some earlier point of what I would have seen. I do not believe that my feeling of blessedness lacked anything because the visual element was absent. I felt slightly upset that some people might think that there would be some deficiency in my enjoyment of all this.
As one goes deeper and deeper into blindness, the things which once were taken for granted, and which were then mourned over as they disappeared, and for which one tried in various ways to find compensation, in the end cease to matter. Somehow, it no longer seems important what people look like, or what cities look like. One cannot check at first hand the accuracy of these reports, they lose personal meaning and are relegated to the edge of awareness. They become irrelevant in the conduct of one’s life. One begins to live by other interests, other values. One begins to take up residence in another world.
I think that I may be beginning to understand what blindness is like.
28 October
Marilyn and I were invited to the wedding of a friend. This took place in a village church, which had been chosen because of its picturesque qualities. As we were leaving the building, the mother of the groom said to me, ‘What a pity that you can’t see the church! It really is so lovely. It’s such a sweet little church. It is a pity you can’t see it.’ I smiled vaguely and we walked outside. The bells were ringing. Someone else approached us, remarking on how beautiful the ceremony was. Again, the groom’s mother said, ‘But what a pity it was John couldn’t see the church!’ After the photographs had been taken, with the pretty little church as a background, I found myself again with the groom’s mother, this time with Marilyn. For the third time, the same observations were made. ‘What a pity John couldn’t see the pretty church.’ Marilyn and I laughed it off and changed the subject.
This makes me reflect on the psychology of sighted people. Our benign hostess, who had chosen the church because it looked so pretty, felt slightly frustrated because she was unable to be a good hostess as far as I was concerned. The whole point of having the ceremony was lost on me. The site had been chosen to give visual pleasure. I could not derive such pleasure. Therefore, it was a pity. The pity, to be quite accurate about it, was not so much that I couldn’t see it, but that all the trouble had been gone through, as far as I was concerned, for nothing. It was a pity to do all that work and make all those plans for nothing.
This raises the additional reflection that I am not recruitable by sighted people. I am not entertainable, in the way sighted people know entertainment. It is impossible to draw me into the general admiration of what has been laid on to be admired. This becomes a pity.
When I am in such a place, I am not preoccupied by the thought that there are things I cannot see. My attention and my emotions are occupied by what actually presses in upon me.
In this case, it was the bells. I could have stood there, listening to those bells, for a long time. The air was full of the vibrations. My head seemed to be ringing. The ground seemed to be trembling, and the very air was heavy and springy with the reverberations. I tried to count how many different patterns they were ringing, and, without success, to work out how many bells must be in the tower. I thought that I really must become more expert in this lovely thing. I tried to describe the qualities of the sound to myself, mentally comparing it with other bells I had recently heard. Again and again, the descending peals chimed out, over the babble of conversation, cutting up the cool autumnal air, weighting everything with a strange, solemn expectancy. I was flooded with joy, and repeated again and again in my heart, ‘Yes, I hear you, dear bells, I hear you.’
I might not have reacted in this way had I already known the place. When I return to a familiar place, like the chapel of King’s College in Cambridge, I am often full of a very strong sense of loss. In a new place, however, I usually don’t bother much about what it might look like. I just write that off as unavailable, and concentrate upon those parts of it which can get through to me. Indeed, it disturbs me to be given information about the appearance of something, unless I specifically ask for it. Often, I do ask, because I am curious. There may be certain details I want to know. There is no value in ignorance. Sometimes, on those occasions, I will interrogate a sighted friend in some detail. The initiative, however, has to be mine.
I do not know whether the sighted people even noticed the bells. At best they could have been only an extra item of atmosphere, added to the autumn leaves and the Norman tower as the bridal party gathered in their beautiful clothes. To me, the very air I was breathing was bell-shaped.
15 November
Sitting at the dining-room table the other day I became aware of heat falling upon my face. I traced it to its source by moving my face and hands around, and finally located it in the light bulb which was hanging from the ceiling above me. I cannot remember ever having had this experience before. Since then, I have been paying attention, and I find that I can often tell whether the light in a room is on or not just by standing beneath it with my face uplifted. I am also much more aware of rays of sunlight falling across my face. Indeed, the whole of my skin seems to have become much more sensitive to changes of pressure and temperature, to wind and sun.
The other day, I attended a meeting of about twenty colleagues. The speaker seemed to be a particularly kind-hearted person, very sensitive to the needs of a blind person. She drew me into her talk by offering special explanations of things. As she held something up, she would remark, ‘Now you wouldn’t know this, John, but so and so and so and so’ or, ‘John, you might like to know that this coloured so and so …’ or, ‘For your benefit, John, I’m holding up a …’ or, ‘It grieves me more than I can say that you can’t see this beautiful flag, John, but it’s a so and so and a so and so.’ I nodded politely to all this, trying to look intelligent and appreciative.
No doubt, people who value me regret that they cannot recruit me to admire the things they admire. Still, facts must be faced. Since I am not recruitable, it seems pointless to draw attention to it in this way, with lamentations and expostulations of grief. This has the effect of making me feel an outsider. Just as I am getting interested in what is being said, there comes the stabbing reminder, again and again: you are outside this; you are not one of us. Is it possible that sometimes this is intended? Is it possible that this could be a sighted person’s defence against the power of my powerlessness? How do you successfully put down a blind person?
22 December
Was there a meaning in it? Was I meant to go blind? People often ask me questions like these.
My blindness was the result of thousands of tiny accidental happenings. These were not a ‘path’ and I was not being led along it towards blindness. Looking back, I can see the chain of events, and it looks a bit like a path, but any trackless waste is laid out with paths once it has been crossed. When you look ahead, there is no path but only an almost infinite number of possibilities.
The word ‘providence’ means ‘looking ahead’ and traditionally refers to the idea that God leads you along a path. I believe that we should call this doctrine retrovidence, or looking back, because it is only as we look back that the fortuitous is endowed with meaning. Meaning is conferred after the event. This is why the question ‘why did this happen?’ is rather a misleading one. It happened because I happened to be born in the twentieth century and not in the nineteenth. If I had been born a hundred years ago, no doubt I should have lost my sight at a much earlier age; if I had been born a century from now, no doubt my sight would have been saved. In other words, I could describe a thousand little ifs and buts which could give some account of how it was that this event took place in the life of this individual. But if by ‘why’ one is asking about the overall purpose, as if blindness itself was my fate, I do not believe it.
Each of the events which preceded the big event was fortuitous, and the entire sequence had no more probability within it than was accumulated as each accidental event prepared the way, more or less, for the next.
Faith is a creative act. It is through faith that we transform the accidental events of our lives into the signs of our destiny. Happiness is fortuitous but meaning is conferred when chance is transfigured through a rebirth of images.
This, however, is not an achievement, or at least it is not experienced as the result of effort. Images have their own energy, and the meaningful life is experienced as those images restructure the accidental content of life. The most important thing in life is not happiness but meaning. Happiness is the product of chains of accident which tend towards our well-being. Blindness does not make me happy. I did not choose it, nor was it inflicted upon me. Nevertheless, as an accidental event it could become meaningful.