by Emma
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 ,
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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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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