Mine was a pretty ordinary childhood. But not everyone saw it that way. One word sums up people's response to the news that my parents are totally blind: incredulity. Incredulity that they could cook, get around, perform the general tasks of everyday life -- let alone raise three children, including twins, while holding down successful professional careers.
My father Fred and mother Etta were both born, fully sighted, in Glasgow in 1937, but lost their sight during childhood. Etta was six when it happened; Fred, 14. My mom was involved in a traffic accident; my dad, I was told from a very young age, "got a germ in his eye." (It was actually a condition called double detached retina.)
They met at the Royal Blind School, Edinburgh, at the age of 15, married at 26 and had three children, all fully sighted, 15 months apart: Gavin in 1966, then, in 1967, my twin brother Leslie and I.
They did not meet overt hostility when they decided to have children. They were not told by a maternity doctor, as one of their blind friends was, that "You shouldn't be having children." All the same, it was a rare thing that they did, and as I approach 40, with two small children of my own, I've begun to revisit my early years, and wonder how on earth my parents coped with three small ones born so close together.
"I was aware of people judging me and people waiting for me to fail," Etta says. "But my mother had 10 of us and she had loads of energy, and I think I inherited that."
My father has a slightly different take on it: "Every blind person in any walk of life, if they've got any kind of desire to succeed, has to work 50 percent harder."
As a schoolchild, I was always asked what it was like to have parents who were blind. I had a stock response: "My parents are just the same as yours."
They weren't, of course, but as far as I could see, my life was pretty much the same as that of my friends, except that we had a few more strange gadgets: the bleepers that let you know you when a mug was full and when a light was on, and one that told you when it was raining so you could bring the washing in; the weird contraption for writing Braille and, later on, a talking microwave. (To this day, I give a very wide berth to the talking scales that announce the user's weight to the entire household.)
AVERAGE LIFE
I did have one major gripe, though: I would have loved us to have had a car. No school run for me. We always caught the bus, cycled or walked.
We lived in a handsome, four-story Victorian house in Kenilworth, a small, affluent town in Warwickshire in northern England. My friends assumed that we children must have had lots of chores to do: "Who does the cleaning? How does your mother turn the cooker on?" But aside from the occasional shopping and washing-up duties and lawn-mowing (which I was paid for), we did little around the house except mess it up.
My mother had weekly hired help with the cleaning, but she still spent all day Friday in a whirlwind of scrubbing and polishing. The stair carpet would be swept at the edges before vacuuming; the entire basement floor would be scrubbed on hands and knees. Windows would be cleaned, light bulbs changed -- Mom thought nothing of skipping up a stepladder.
There was the occasional painless task: Sometimes, on a Sunday night, a basket would be presented to me full of socks waiting to be paired up. And there was one almost daily chore that I hated, as it tended to clash with my favorite TV show: tatty inspection. My mom peeled the potatoes herself, but would worry that rogue "bad bits" would escape her probing fingers, and ask one of us children to check them over for her.
My mom cooked every night.
"I went for a session of 12 cookery lessons for blind people in Glasgow just before I got married," she says. "It included making pastry, cakes, scones, savory flans and fish and chips in the oven, which was safer."
In our house, there were Braille markings on the stove's knobs to indicate the temperature, and the timer also had Braille on it, but beyond that, the job was done with easy precision.
"You knew how long a dish would take, so you would just prod it with a fork to check it was done," Etta says.
She was an adventurous cook, always on the lookout for new meals in her Braille magazine to impress her dinner-party guests with. My dad could cook too, and I really looked forward to his fat chips when mom was away.
Every few years my mother did go away. She would leave for three weeks and return, fully trained up, with a canine addition to the family, a new guide dog. Misty, Candy, Beauty, Roma, Katy, Sheena, Promise, Innis, Wendy, Ralph, Raffles, Rona -- guide dogs were a constant presence during my youth, as both my mother and father had them. We all formed close bonds with these dogs and it was always very sad when one had to retire. For years I harbored an ambition to be a guide-dog trainer when I grew up.
People go weak at the knees when they see a guide dog. They would often stop, uninvited, to pat them, which, I would officiously inform them, was not allowed when the dog was in harness. Sometimes, I'd nag mom to leave the dog at home, anxious to avoid the relentless unwelcome attention.
On these occasions, I would do the guiding -- considerably less well than the four-legged regular. I had not been trained to swerve for overhanging objects, would fail to stop at kerbs and frequently omit to mention that we were about to step on an escalator. (By the way, let me clear up a bizarre misconception of a childhood friend: Misty, Candy, Beauty et al definitely couldn't count the number of bus stops so as to be able to let their owner know when to get off.)
It's probably not an exaggeration to say that my parents were universally admired in our small town, only marginally less than their guide dogs. One particular source of awe was the jobs they did.
Until his retirement, Dad was a lecturer in history at Warwick University. He had been an undergraduate at Edinburgh in 1958, and then did a doctorate at Oxford, before becoming a lecturer, and throughout his studies, he depended on people reading to him. Many of the readers came from the church at the end of the road.
"Nobody volunteered, I just barged in and asked them," he says.
A year into his studies, he acquired, through the generosity of others, a tape recorder, which was new technology at the time and revolutionized his studying -- his readers could record material and Fred could listen, and relisten to it, as and when required.
Dad developed an extraordinary talent for listening to speeded-up tape readings to save time. As a girl, I would often lie in my bedroom, which was next door to his study, listening to the surreal sound of his readers' speeded up voices coming through the wall and wondering how he could possibly make out what they were saying.
As for my mother, she not only cared for us with very little outside help, but also worked as a physiotherapist for 34 years. Her first job was in Oxford, where she was living with Fred after they married. She was employed at the Churchill hospital, which had never appointed a blind physiotherapist before -- and they took some persuading to take her on.
"The doctor of physical medicine, who was in charge of recruitment, was very skeptical. He actually came to our flat and said he was sorry but there wasn't a job for me, as he couldn't imagine how a blind person could function. So we set about talking him into it. Eventually, he said I could have a trial period for three months. After that time, the head of physio said I was just the same as any other person starting off," she says.
CONFIDENCE
Later on, mom worked part-time at the Warnford hospital in Leamington Spa, so as to be at home when we got back from school. She always got the bus to work, whatever the weather. Even during heavy snow, she would venture forth with good boots and make it in to work while many of her colleagues phoned in to say they were stuck on the drive.
Despite some people's misgivings, my parents knew in their 20s that they wanted children, and were confident that they would cope and be good parents.
"We always thought we could," Etta says. "My father didn't want me to get married, because he always looked after me. And he used to worry when I took up with Fred. And my mother said to him, `But you'll not always be there to look after her. She should get married just like everybody else.'"
Fred says that his peers at the blind school used to challenge him about the practicalities of having children. He would argue it out with them and challenge their reservations.
"They'd say things like, `You can't see the spots when they're ill,' and I'd say, `Well, children show other symptoms other than spots; they cry and are in discomfort and so on.' And if you're worried you can confirm it with a sighted person. If you reasoned it out you realized that these were unrealistic fears," he says.
Etta says she knew of one totally blind couple living in London.
"They had a child and I went to visit them when I was a physiotherapy student, [aged] about 24. And they managed perfectly well with their child, who was about a year old. A few years before that, I met a blind woman on a train and she told me that she had five children. And she managed all of them and she did the cooking and everything. So I knew that some blind people had done it," she says.
"The thing is," she says, "you just don't listen to sighted people because they haven't a clue anyhow. They think, `Oh, I couldn't do that if I couldn't see.'"
As my 11-month-old son, Theo, careers destructively around the house, I am increasingly curious about how they coped with the domestic practicalities of three small children.
"When you were really tiny we put you in a playpen when I was busy," my mother says.
"You weren't allowed in the kitchen; there was a sliding panel that we put down between the kitchen and the dining room. There was nothing in there except the furniture nothing on it, and nothing that you could pull around -- and a load of toys," she says.
When I ask mom how she managed to get to the shops with the three of us plus a guide dog, her explanation conjures up an extraordinary picture: "The dog was in front with my left hand and I was guiding the double pushchair with my right hand behind me, with Gavin walking along beside me."
It was a quiet area, she adds. There were wide sidewalks and grass verges and the local shops were a short walk away.
"We bought the house because it was near schools, shops and the park," she says.
Some other adaptations were necessary to bridge the gap between blind parents and sighted children.
Mom says: "We bought the ordinary Ladybird books and we had readers who used to come in, people from Kenilworth who volunteered to be readers, and they would tell me what was on each page and I would write a caption at the top in Braille. I knew the stories anyhow. So I read out the stories reading the caption."
Reading aside, we had the usual array of toys and activities.
PLAYTIME
"Bricks, Lego, Plasticine and Play-Doh, these were great games that anyone could play," Fred says. "That's where it's a huge advantage to have been able to see before."
Dad was a particularly skilful modeller -- he could produce fantastic miniature figures of animals from candy wrappers.
"And I used to play the piano and sing to you and get you all singing and jumping about," says mom, who is a brilliant pianist.
My parents' musicality is a legacy of their time at the blind school.
"However beneficial inclusion in mainstream schools might be," Fred says, "there's no doubt that special schools were able to concentrate on things like music. The musical life in our school was so vibrant."
As we got older, Dad would come home with weird-looking games, such as the chess set with spiky-topped white pieces and a board with raised squares. I remember fondly the chess games I played with Dad as a child, and would find it strangely hypnotizing as his fingers darted around the pieces on the board while he weighed up his next move. The chess set, as well as the dominoes, cards and draughts sets we had, were produced by the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) in London, not for children but for blind adults.
"In those days, the RNIB had few aids or devices to help families where the parents were blind and the children were sighted," Fred says. "We had to fight to get things like snakes and ladders, ludo and Monopoly -- and we got them in the end."
Now that I have Maya, who is four, and Theo, I have the chance to witness my parents with them -- a version of the relationship they had with us when we were small. I remember again the perhaps inevitable embarrassment. During trips to town with my mother, I would sometimes moan about what seemed like the town's entire population staring at us.
"Just stare at them back," my mother would advise. But I was too shy to do that.
There were the weekly swimming trips with my dad. He was a strong swimmer, but keeping a straight line in the water without sight is very difficult. As he dived into the water and set off on one of his tangential lengths, unsuspecting bathers were torpedoed from behind -- the pool would not have cleared more quickly had a shark been spotted in the deep end.
Then, when I was 11, mom decided that the time had come to buy me my first bra by catching me unawares and feeling my breasts (funny now, but I cringed about that one for years). I could go on.
Sometimes, embarrassment spilled over into annoyance -- I was a teenager, after all. At times I would get stroppy about being required to act as a guide. I still do. In our 20s, my brother Les and I accompanied our parents on a series of trips abroad.
"What can you see now?" mom would ask, when she knew that there was a view before us.
Sometimes I would childishly refuse to say.
INFLUENCE
How did their being blind affect us? I think that the experience of providing a running commentary on the world for my parents, for so many years, means that, so my husband Mark tells me, I am unusually observant -- I like to think that this is a quality I might pass on to my children.
More significantly, the general admiration directed at mom and dad -- I grew up hearing the phrase, "Aren't your parents amazing?" on an almost daily basis -- made me feel that I was special. And I was very proud of their achievements.
I was always asked as a child: "Don't you feel sad that your parents have never seen you?" But that thought seemed to trouble others far more than it did me. When I got married, my best woman, Melanie, had a poignant line in her speech that drew spontaneous applause from the guests: "I'd just like to tell Etta and Fred how beautiful their daughter looks today."
Thinking back to my school days, I was always especially keen for my teachers to witness me doing things. Perhaps, I've begun to think in retrospect, that was why I was so sporty as a child. The hockey pitch or tennis court were arenas where I could literally be seen to excel.
The family photo album didn't exist in our house. I am especially thrilled when relatives give me photographs of me in childhood with my family. I was in my late 20s before I saw a picture of myself as a baby because, of course, my parents did not own a camera.
What also saddens me now is that mom and dad can't see my children -- that they'll never see Maya looking so pretty in that special dress, doing her fairy dance, or see Theo flash them one of his melting smiles. And when I see my children's puzzled faces when grandma or grandpa fail to respond to their eye contact, I also get a pang. But when we discuss this, my parents give me their own empowering perspective.
"I'd like to have seen you but I don't think it is as important as people think," Etta says. "I think seeing is so primitive. Even a dog and a cat can see. Knowing a personality and knowing how you speak and what you say and how you say it, I think that's more important than how people look. I don't think seeing is knowing."
Fred agrees: "Sight is a very misleading and beguiling way of understanding people. Philosophers have raised this question: Is sight misleading? Is it possible that listening and touching get you nearer to people than sight does?"
MAKING SENSE
As I watch baby Theo feeling the contours of his grandpa's face, it's obvious that touch is a primary sense for him. And I have started to explore these other ways of knowing with Maya. I recently bought her the scratch-and-sniff book, Little Bunny Follows His Nose, which I loved as a child.
Maya loves playing with Plasticine with her grandpa -- he made her a fantastic racing car recently, a particularly skilful execution of a 1940s model, as he was working from visual memory. Fred laughs.
"I'm stuck in a time warp," he says. "Milton has been described as having the blind man's capacity to remember everything he had ever seen."
A few years ago, at a family Christmas, mom produced a tape recording of Les and me playing the piano when we were about seven.
"Prelude," we announced in turn in a high-pitched squeak, before stumbling through the piece and squabbling over whose was the better performance. It was magical to hear it, and the experience seemed heightened by the fact that it was purely audible, uncluttered by the visual.
During a couple of visits to Kenilworth we have made tapes of Maya, and will do of Theo. I'll produce them one Christmas, God willing, in years to come. And I hope that they'll find them as magical.
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