accepted and felt very flattered. I replaced the phone, lit a
cigarette, sat down and, rather in a daze, said to Emma who
was stretched out by the fire: 'Well, Emma, what do you think
about that? We're going to London.'
London! The more I thought about it, the more I didn't like
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it. But if I showed more apprehension than excitement, Don
made up for it when I told him. 'Marvellous,' he kept saying,
'what an opportunity.'
By the time the day arrived for Emma and me to catch the
London train from Nottingham, he had practically convinced
me of how marvellous it all was. And London, though it did
not rid me of my dislike of big cities, was not as formidable
and scary as I thought it would be. Margaret Howard met me
at St Pancras, but it was Emma who really helped to calm my
nerves. She got into the waiting taxi as if she had been doing
it every day of her life, and, curling up on the floor, proceeded
to take no further interest in our journey to Portland Place.
Emma, I thought, you've got the right idea. That's the way to
deal with London! Nor was she any more impressed by the
BBC, where, to my surprise, we had to fight out our customary
'No Dogs' tussle with the commissionaire. In the studio, once
again Emma took it all in her stride, and after a preliminary
sniff of inspection round the sound-proofing settled down by my
feet as I sat at the microphone for the interview.
It all went very well, and afterwards one of the producers,
who was pleased with the result, said to me: 'You ought to
write a book about it all.' And I smiled, took it as a graceful
compliment and thought no more about it.
But fate has a way of providing coincidences to emphasize
the way life is meant to go. A few days later I was turning out a
cupboard and came across a folder full of braille transcriptions
on foolscap-size brown card. At first I couldn't think what they
were. I ran my fingers over a page and then it all came back:
my poetry, written years ago when I was blind. I sat down and
re-read the poems, and it struck me how sad they all were.
Some were about myself and blindness, and many were about
animals. Here is one I had written back in 1969:
The Tunnel
I stumble and there I lie resting and in
My tunnel of darkness I cry.
Only the black damp walls
Echo back in reply.
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Despair and hope are feelings
Long since gone.
The fear of dying in my loneliness
Is driving me on.
With jagged rocks and sharp stones
My path is lined
Tearing at my soul and
Piercing my mind.
The only way is forward
My tunnel has no retreat
No words of encouragement
Only threat of defeat.
It's hard to remember my reasons
For coming to such a place.
Was it to hide?
No, not to hide
My face.
No, I did not choose this fate
And yet I came this way
Surely not in search
Of such misery and decay.
If death lies in my path
There-'II be no fear nor regret
But life is too cruel a thing
To relinquish her debt.
No life or death is here
just a never-ending void.
No sleep, no peace until
My very being is destroyed.
I put the poetry aside. How did I write it? It was as if someone
else, certainly not the present me, had written the poems. I
could not write poetry now. I realized what a different person
I had become with sight. I had not written a line of poetry
since being able to see, and the folder that I had just closed
contained r-iostly, it seemed, a rather sad insight into the
person I once was. Not that I actually felt sad or self-pitying
at the time, but the poetry proved that inside I must have
55
been miserable without recognizing what it was like to be
miserable.
Never having had real sight, I wasn't like the person who has
been fully sighted and then goes blind, so therefore understands
the outside world and also understands what they are missing.
I thought I was quite happy as a blind person, and I did all the
things that I felt I wanted to do--or, putting it another way, I
didn't think that my blindness stopped me from doing anything.
Yet I was not free. I was not free from people wanting to help
me, or that constant, 'Oh, she's blind so she can't do this,' or
people apologizing for saying, 'Did you see so and so?' They
would often ask me if I had seen a programme on television,
then: 'Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot. How awful of me.' And that was
more embarrassing than ever.
Now that process has been reversed, and when I first got my
sight back people would say, 'Did you hear the television last
night?' or, 'Feel this.' And follow up with, 'Oh, of course, you
can see now. I'm sorry.' They apologized to me until they got
used to the idea that I could see. And, of course, people treat
you differently when you can see. They treat you, at last, as an
equal. However well people used to know me when I was blind
there was never that equality, and if I asked them to do something
for me-even if it was quite unrelated to my blindnessI
always felt that I was inferior and that the sighted person
could, in superiority, wave the magic wand and give me what
I wanted. So I was beholden to the sighted world for the things
I needed, and now it's so lovely because whenever I ask someone
to so something for me it'sjust that in itself, and I am equal.
I put the folder of poetry back in the cupboard wondering if
all poets were sad by nature. Byron and Browning were two of
my favourites and I realized that they showed anguish and
longing in their poetry. But they also wrote about happier
moments as well. At the same time my mind went back to the
producer's remark at the BBC, and I thought: If I no longer
feel capable of writing sad poetry, why shouldn't I write a happy
book ?
That was the first thought I had of writing what eventually
became Emma and I. And the more I thought about it, the more
tempting and exciting the idea became. I remembered all the
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evening classes I had been to when I was blind learning about
writing, and I became more and more confident. By the time
Don came in from the surgery, I was bursting to tell him.
'Fantastic,' he said, and listened to all my ideas. Yet all the
time we were talking I had the notion that his mind was not
entirely on my great project.
It transpired that while I had something to tell him, he also
had some news for me, but I had got in first. At last he explained.
'Harold rang this afternoon,' he said. (Harold was his cousin
who lived up in Yorkshire.) 'They're thinking of going to Skye
for their holidays and they wondered whether we would like to
go with them-round abo
ut the end of the month, after Easter.
What do you think?'
I didn't really know what to think. The idea of writing a
book had, in only an hour or two, become such a huge balloon
of fantasy that a holiday in Skye seemed a strange, alien signal
beaming in from another planet.
'Well,' I said, as the idea began to sink in, 'it sounds terrific,
but I don't know much about Skye. Could we get some
brochures?' Then I added, having suddenly remembered that
Harold and his wife Betty had a Weimerana dog called Zelda,,
'I suppose they're bound to be taking Zelda with them. And
Emma could play with her. That would be nice.'
In fact, although I didn't want to disappoint Don, I was not
as thrilled as I might have been at the idea of a holiday. Apart
from being keen to start the book, I also had misgivings about
holidays in general. I remember how, when I couldn't see, we
had set off for holidays with the highest hopes but they had
never failed to turn out, in all honesty, a total waste of money
and time.
Once we went to Cornwall. Don had picked a very picturesque
old inn by the River Fowey, with a balcony so that he could
watch the big ships, the yachts and the little boats going up and
down to the sea. But I would just sit there and be so bored,
and not know how to occupy myself. It used to make me feel so
sad, because we would go for a walk and Don would say, 'The
scenery's beautiful here. The sea looks really blue, and it's lapping
against the cliffs and up the sand, and there are so many
wild flowers.' But for all Don's lovingly-meant descriptions, I
57
could not visualize what Cornwall was really like. It could have
been the moon. So holidays were a bit of a sad time and I was
always glad to get home, because I knew my home and it
didn't matter there that I couldn't see.
However, in due course, Harold sent the brochures on Skye.
They looked wonderful and we decided we would go. I persuaded
myself that in the mountain air I might get even more
inspiration for the book; but I also knew it would be yet another
test of my experience with sight, and, although life had taught
me never to look forward too much, I just hoped that this
might turn out to be the first holiday I had had without
disappointment.
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CHAPTER FIVE
DESPITE MY MISGIVINGS, I was excited about the holiday.
And it would be a holiday for Emma too-Emma's first real
holiday, when she would have absolutely nothing to do except
romp, nobody to worry about, and, what is more, another dog
to play with.
We had arranged to meet Harold and Betty with Zelda at
the end of the motorway north of Stirling. It was a sparkling
spring day as we set off, and as we came up into Scotland I was
fascinated by the way the land started to rise, not really in
mountains, but fells as they call t,~em. And as we reached
Callander it was me this time saying lo Don, 'Look! just look at
that. Isn't it fabulous! Look at that mountain.' I didn't realize
then that it was not truly a mountain in that part of Scotland,
but to me it looked like it: beautiful golden green, stretching
up into the sky. In Callander, the Dr Finlay's Casebook town, I
saw the incredibly tiny streets and houses with windows that
were bowed and had lots of different little panes-it was like a
dream, but one I could never have dreamt because I had no
inkling of its existence before that moment.
As soon as we got to our hotel I made sure all the luggage
had been taken inside, and then we went out to explore. I
couldn't wait. Luckily Don was also just as keen to see the
sights because he had never been to Scotland before either. So
we left Harold and Betty to unpack while we went off into the
streets and the little narrow alleys of Callander. Emma was as
excited as we were. She always loved different places, different
surroundings, and she didn't care where she was as long as we
were all together. But Callander was something else again,
something altogether different from anything she had previously
experienced. Grass was growing out of the sides of the
pavements. There were lots of dogs about, and even the lampposts
were different and somehow very Scottish-looking. With
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the dogs she could stop and discuss the time of day, or simply
bark at them and it didn't matter. Her harness was hundreds
of miles away in a south-easterly direction. We let her off the
lead as we climbed up the hillside behind the town to look at
the little cottages. It was so wonderful to be able to watch
Emma rummaging in and out of the hedgerows, popping into
the little garden gates and back out again, and being thoroughly
and hurriedly busy, quartering here and there with her nose
down, and suddenly stopping from time to time at a specially
interesting and new Scots smell.
The houses nestled at the sides of the roads that climbed up
steeply into the sky. They were not like any houses that I had ever
seen before-they were tiny cottages, all cleanly painted in white
or sometimes pink. How different from the red brick terraces of
Nottingham which was how I imagined all houses were!
The next day we set off from Callander on the last lap northwards,
to take the ferry over to Skye. On the way we started to
climb into the really mountainous area: suddenly they were
there, above us as we started to climb a snake-like bend. TO
someone who had not seen anything like it before it was wonderful,
but to Don it was marvellous as well. It took our breath
away as we saw all the mountains, reaching up, stretching
away to the distance, all snow capped. The sun was out and it
glistened and seemed to stream down the mountain nearest us,
like icing streaming down a cake. Then it was gone, hidden
behind a mountain on the other side, and I could see the grass
again which was golden rather than green. And down lots of
the mountains ran streams, falling and dancing down the
mountainside like cascades of diamonds.
'Don,' I said, 'it's so beautiful. I never thought anywhere so
beautiful was so near to home, in the same land I live in.'
We climbed up little roads and looked down, right down
below us, into lochs that mirrored the mountains in them, and
the grasses round their sides, and the sun and blue sky. Nearer
to Mallaig the roads were even narrower with only enough
room for one car, and trees hung right over so that for much of
the time we were so shaded it was almost like night. It was like
entering into a fairyland where no one lived, but people were
just allowed to come and look.
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At Mallaig we drove on to the ferry, and I watched the seagulls
come and alight on the guard-rails round the boat. That
was marvellous. I had never seen them so close; I could have
touched them. I wanted to hear that song Over the Sea to Skye so
strongly that it took me over, and Don and I stood there and
sang-and it was like a honeymoon really to us, again.
As the Scottish mainland got smaller and smaller, I saw that
Emma had become very alert. She was watching the seagulls
very intently. People on the ferry were feeding them scraps.
'Oh, Emma,' I said, 'you wouldn't want to steal dinner off
those poor seagulls, would you?' She looked up at me, indicating
quite clearly, 'Yes, I would,' and with a lust in her eyes as
if food had been invented in that very moment. 'Oh, Emma,
how wicked of you!'
When we reached Skye, I saw that the green had gone and
had been totally replaced by the golden-brown colour of what
I supposed was bracken or gorse. There was green on the trees,
but a completely different green from anything I had ever seen.
Even the flowers seemed to be different colours. After a drive
over more mountain roads we reached the inn where we were
staying. It was an old shooting lodge at the foot of a mountain
and in front of a loch surrounded by rhododendron bushes,
which gave it, to me at least, an appearance of deep mystery.
One of the things that struck me as soon as we landed on
Skye was the presence of so many sheep. I had never really seen
sheep before. I had been aware of them at a distance, in fields,
but had been conscious only that they were part of the landscape,
never that they were individual beings. Now here they
were, right in front of me as I sat in the car.
'Don, look at those sheep!'
'Yes, aren't they tame? They don't move out of the way at
all.'
'Well, they'll get run over.
Even Emma was taking an interest and sat up on the
back seat, peering curiously out of the window and obviously
wondering: 'Strange! What strange creatures. Whatever are
they ?'
As we got nearer to the sheep they moved out of the way as
Don pipped his horn and slowed down to let them move to the
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verges. We were lucky to be there in spring, for there were a lot
of lambs as well. Even if there had been no other scenery on
Skye I think I should have been quite happy spending my week
emma vip Sheila Hocken Page 7