by Emma
Yet once seriously down to the business of shopping, Emma
was quite amazing. Her mind was an encyclopaedia of shop's
names. I would have only to say the word, and we were there.
She was equally astonishing, if not more so, in a big store such
as the Co-op. She knew not only how to get there but also the
location of every department and every counter. I would have
only to say,'Find the Food Hall, Emma', or'Find the Chemist'
or 'Find the Shoe Department', and I would be taken there
with never a mistake, and no hesitation, through the mill of
other shoppers, and the various tempting smells.
She also knew what the words 'stairs' and 'lift' meant. She
enjoyed using the lift in the Co-op, but did not much like the
stairs. When I gave her the word to find the lift she made a
vigorous dash, dragging me with her, in order to be first in,
whether or not there was a crowd waiting. Occasionally I
would want to go up only a single floor, so I would say, 'We
won't wait for the lift, Emma, we'll go up the stairs. Find the
stairs.' Find the stairs? At this word of command Emma
would head immediately for the lift.
One evening in the spring of 1969 Anita came home and
seemed very subdued. 'Sheila,' she said, 'I've got something
to tell you: the office is going to move me to Grantham.'
'Oh,' I said. 'When?'
'Not until July,' she said, 'but I feel dreadful because I
know you can't afford to keep the flat on by yourself.' This was
true. I earned œ9 a week at the time, and the rent we shared
was œ6 a week. The whole thing came as a shock, and it was
sad to be suddenly presented with the prospect of breaking up
our happy partnership.
I
Of course, what I longed to do more than anything else was
to marry Don. But he still wanted to wait because he had a
young daughter, Susan, and he felt he had a responsibility not
to leave home until she was older and could understand what
was happening. He felt we should wait until she was fourteen,
and she wasn't ten yet. He was desperately afraid that Susan
would not accept me, and would grow up blaming him for a
breach in her family life. As it happened, I did not agree with
him, but I respected his reasons. Yet the waiting was hard on
both of us; it seemed like eternity.
There was a lot of waiting for Don, because he invariably
did not finish at the surgery until about nine in the evening,
and very often was kept even later by patients. Sometimes, if
it had started to rain, Emma and I would be just about wet
through by the time he arrived. Don once told me that it was
seeing us both standing there waiting, and looking like orphans
-me with my woolly hat soaked, and Emma's coat dark and
her tail down-that made him realize how much I cared for
him. He told me, 'I was drawing up by the kerb, and you
hadn't heard the car because of the rain, and the pair of you
looked a pitiful sight, it was terrible, and I thought, "That
girl, she must love me".'
The prospect of living alone filled me with misgivings. It
was ofcourse the ultimate step towards genuine independence:
but it also meant I really had to be able to fend for myself. I
had no fears of being lonely, because Emma was there, and
with her help I felt quite capable of coping. But there would be
no one to read my letters for me, no one there to tell me the
instructions on a packet of instant soup, or cake-mix. What
would I do if a fuse went? The light did not matter, but the
iron or a power point did. On the plus side, I would be able
to plan the flat so that I would know exactly where everything
was: how the settee lay in relation to the table, and
the table's position relative to the door, and no one would
make even the slightest alteration to things as I had left
them.
There was nothing for it but to set about looking for some
~
l
88 EMMA AND I I INDFPENDENCE 89
where else to live, and at least there was a bit of time in which
to do it. Luckily, I had been for some time on the local council
housing list; I went to the housing officers, but there was
nothing available. However, they were very pleasant, and
noted my circumstances. The weeks ticked by. There was
nothing I could afford in the local papers, or through the
house agents, so I went to see the council again: with time
running out I was getting desperate. This time they said
they would do what they could as quickly as possible; but I
think I probably owe the result more to Emma sitting in the
office looking pathetic than to my own powers of persuasion:
the man who interviewed me on this occasion made a great
fuss of her, and she responded in her most appealing way.
Within a week I had a letter offering me a flat in a block on
the Ilkeston Road, about four miles from where we were living
at the time.
I was greatly relieved; but then came the bad news.
Animals were not allowed in the flats, and, though an excep
tion could be made because Emma was a guide-dog, I would
have to part with Tiss. Rules apart, it would have been cruel
to keep him in the block, but it did not make me any less
downhearted. He and Emma had become very attached to
each other. Tiss would always wait for us in the evening, sitting
on the gate of the Peel Street house, and often spent the night
sleeping on top of Emma. I wondered what the best course
was, and then decided to put an advertisement in the Notting
ham Evening Post. After a day or two there was a phone call from
a family in Beeston. I questioned them very closely about their
background because I was determined Tiss should go to a
good home. They seemed the right sort of people, and we made
an appointment for them to come along and see him. The
strange thing was that on the day they were due to arrive,
Tiss seemed to know what was afoot, and he disappeared.
We finally found him in the attic. I heard from the family
later that Tiss had settled down and seemed quite happy, but
I could not bear to accept their invitation to go and visit him.
He had been so much a part of our lives, and I think I should
I
have been overcome at meeting him again in strange
surroundings.
When the time came near for us to move out of Peel Street,
there were cardboard boxes all over the place, and Emma
knew what was going on. Far from being upset at the prospect
of another move, she was determined not to be left out of what
appeared to her to be an exciting game. Every time I started
to pack a box, she would bring all her squeaky rubber toys
and bones and so on, and drop them one by one into the box.
That was constructive as far as it went. Unfortunately, as soon
as I filled one box, and started on another, I would feel down
into what should have been emptiness, and find that it too
was being filled with squeaky toys, etc. So I had to go
<
br /> solemnly through the ritual of packing up all Emma's
belongings, then unpackirig them, and transferring them to
the next box along the line. It was time-wasting, but Emma
did not care. She stood by and approvingly wagged her
tail.
When the new flat at last fell vacant, my mother came along
to help clean it up. We got to the block of flats, and it seemed
they were all the same, each one a little box on what I
imagined to be a never-eriding series of floors, all identical,
and to which there was access by lift, or steps, or ramp. It
was a gloomy experience, this first encounter with our new
home. It took my mother ages to find Number I03, the flat
we had been allotted, and when at last we got in and put our
luggage and cleaning gear down, she said: 'Sheila, this is
terrible. I'm so worried. You'll never find your way in and out
of this block. Whatever possessed the council to give a blind
person a flat on the fifth floor?'
'But, Mum,' I said, 'I've got Emma. I don't need a special
place because I can't see. I just don't want that sort of thing.'
But she persisted. 'No, I'm going down to the council
tomorrow to see about it, and get it changed.'
I pleaded with her. 'No, Mum, don't. I really don't want
special treatment. It's perfectly all right. Emma's quite
capable of taking me in aritd out.'
go EMMA AND I
I finally persuaded her, and we got down to cleaning round
the place and getting it ready for the furniture to arrive in a
niini-van which Bob, a friend of ours, was lending us. In the
preceding weeks I had managed to round up, through the
goodwill of all sorts of people, some furniture that would
at least start me off after the furnished tenancy in Peel Street.
My mother let me have a settee and a bed, friends had turned
up trumps with tables and chairs and so on. Don gave me a
table for the phone to stand on when it was eventually
installed, and the only thing I had to buy was a gas cooker.
When we had cleaned the flat more or less to my mother's
satisfaction, we stopped for tea. But there were no provisions
as yet, so one of us had to go out to the grocer's. My mother
immediately said, 'I'll 90.5
'No, no,' I said, 'I'll go with Emma. We'll make a start on
getting to know the area.'
She was horrified, and it was evident that she was also still
worried. 'No , Sheila,' she said, 'I'm not letting you go down
there on your own.'
So, back to the old argument. 'But, Mum, I shan't be on my
own. I've got Emma. We've got to start some time, it might
just as well be now.'
I knew that Emma, in fact, was probably more capable
than my mother and I put together, but I did not say so. At
last, after further persuasion, she finally grave in. As Emma and
I went down the hall, my parting words were, 'If we're not
back in three days, call the R.S.P.C.A.'
To be fair, my mother had not seen Emma's skill at working
in a new area, because she had brought me to the new flat,
and Emma had had an off-duty spell. It might almost have
been better, and quicker, if I had relied on Emma to begin
with. Anyway, we set off along the open-sided landing.
Emma had no difficulty in finding the lift, and we got out at
the ground floor. But since I did not know the surroundings
at all, I could not follow my usual procedure of asking Emma
to find a particular shop. Instead, I had to ask her to find a
shop, any shop, where I could ask for directions. I said to her
INDEPENDENCE
qi
as we went along, 'Emma, we're going to buy some tea, and
sugar, and milk.'Whether by fluke, or because Emma actually
recognized its appearance I shall never know, but the very
first shop we tried was a corner grocery store. After we had
bought the things we needed, we set off back: into the lift
(I had to count the buttons to the fifth one up), along the
passageway, and back without hesitation to the right door.
My mother was amazed, and, in spite of the evidence, still
found it difficult to accept Emma's ability.
I went out to ring Don. My mother had told me where she
had seen a call-box. It was just across the main road outside
the flats. Emma knew the words 'phone-box' and she took me
straight across the road and to the kiosk I wanted. But when I
got inside and felt for the receiver, it was missing. I ran my
fingers down the wire, and this soon came to an end in my
hand. The box had obviously been vandalized. I felt terribly
frustrated and, worse, had no idea what to do. I was desperate
to ring Don and tell him how the move had gone and what the
new flat was like. I said to Emma, 'There's no phone, Emma.
What are we going to do?'
I finally decided we had better search around, and hope
that someone would come by who could tell us where another
public telephone was. So I told Emma to take us along the
road. But she did not respond. Instead she took me back
across the main road, and I imagined she thought I had made
MY call and we were heading back to the flat. 'No, Emma,' I
said, 'I haven't made my call. We've got to find another box.
Come on let's go down this road.' So on we went, but she made
no attempt to turn in where I judged the flats would be, and
we carried on with me protesting. She then took me down a
strange side road that had a rough feel to it underfoot, with
bricks and bits of rubble (I learned later that both demolition
and building were going on here at the same time). I tried to
get Emma to stop, but she went on relentlessly, across the
uneven ground until she turned left into another road and then
sat down. I sensed that there was something there, put my
hand out, and felt the ridged metal ribs and glass of a kiosk.
92 EMMA AND I
'Ernma,' I said, 'how can you be so clever? How could you
know?' She beat her tail on the pavement, but how she had
managed to get us there has remained an unsolved mystery.
Neither of us had ever been along that road before in our
lives.
CHAPTER EIGHT
EVENING CLASSES
THE EVENING CLASS that I hadjoined with Anita reflected
our separate passions for writing and reading. My reading was
done mainly with the help of talking books, a marvellous
system of cassettes for the bhnd, recording a huge range of
authors from Thomas Hardy to Ian Fleming.
Subsequently, however, a new suggestion came up. Kath
Hill, another guide-dog owner rang up one evening and said,
'Sheila, what do you think. about beginning evening classes
specially for the blind?'
My immediate reaction "as, 'It sounds a marvellous idea.
But what kind of classes?'
'Make-up and beauty,' she replied. 'I've had a call from
someone who wants to stairt a class for blind people on this
sort of thing, provided there-'S sufficient support. Do you think
enough people would be interested?'
others would as well.'
We talked a bit more aboout the possibihties, and the more
we discussed it, the more attractive the idea became. I had
always worn some make-u]p, but had never been able to do
anything elaborate. I used foundation cream and lipstickfoundation
cream was easy to put on because it went all over
the face, and lipstick, too, v.,-as quite simple because I was able
to feel my lips and so not smear it. The prospect of other
beauty aids was very appeahng.
0
94 EMMA AND I
I
I
I
So the course was arranged by the Derbyshire Education
Committee, and, in particular, by David Selby, who at the
time was head of the Adult Education activities. He was a
very forward-looking man, someone who thought beyond the
confines of the subjects normally taught at evening classes,
and he had a particular interest in catering for the blind.
The numbers had to be limited, of course, so that the teacher
could cope. I rang round all my blind friends, and there was a
good response. One of the major problems-how to get to
Sandiacre, about ten miles away, just over the Derbyshire
border-was being tackled in advance. An approach had
been made to the Nottingham Blind Institution for a mini-bus
to take us there.
The first evening brought great excitement. About ten of us
had enrolled including six with guide-dogs, and as we joined
the rnini-bus much greeting and tail-wagging went on, particularly
between Emma and Kath's dog Rachel.
Our teacher was joan Dickson and in spite of the fact that
she had no experience with the blind, she was very encouraging.
That first evening she dealt with basic skin care. She told
each of us what skin-type we had, and what colour hair;
she explained which colour eyes usually went with which kind
of hair, and how the foundation cream to be used was
determined-for instance a peach foundation, medium tone,
being required for brown hair and dark eyes like mine.
She also told us about face-packs, something blind people
would normally never think of using. But the best part of the