Running, jumping, climbing trees…

Remington Typewriter by Timothy K Hamilton

“New boy“ by Kenneth Moore, first published in The New Beacon, 1970.

Back to front

“I expect you’ll enjoy it once you’ve settled in.” So said my son as he drove me in the car towards Torquay. His words were almost exactly those I had used when I took him to his first school.

I felt we were like the characters in Anstey’s novel Vice Versa. This was the book in which the father and son were forced to change places, the father going back to school and the son taking over his father’s business. As I followed my own boy through the entrance door, I expected to hear the call ‘New kid’ and be forced to run about at the Head Prefect’s bidding.

Becoming blind at sixty, I found myself in an impasse-sceptical of being able to take up a new career, too young to live a purely passive life, possibly too old for my fingers to take to Braille, disinclined and with no aptitude for handwork. My predicament was pressed home to me when a kindly relative invited me to stay, adding that I could sit in her garden. In revulsion to this invitation to become a cabbage, I was entering the portals of Manor House on a rehabilitation course.

My misgivings about my use of ‘sense of touch’ were hardly set aside when I came to the woodwork department. Even when fully sighted my manual skill had been strictly limited. I had once constructed a large wooden screen to partition up a room. While superficially it might pass muster, a closer inspection revealed that I had used a multitude of metal angle brackets to achieve my vertical and horizontal lines. No neat mortise and tenon joints for me. So it was that when I was introduced into the workshops and there wasn’t a hint of an angle bracket in the whole place, I knew at once that this wasn’t my metier.

On the other hand, I approached Braille with much more optimism. Just a question of settling down in a comfortable chair with a certain amount of patience, I thought. How wrong I was! At first I felt I should get on famously. A single dot for an ‘a’, two dots merging into a short vertical line for ‘b’ and similarity a horizontal line for ’c’. This was simplicity itself. When, however, I got to letters composed with more than two dots, my troubles began. My fingers seemed so much less able than those of my fellow students. I tried to profit from the advice offered to me. Perhaps my fingers were too cold. I ought to try warming them under the hot tap. I applied my index finger under the tap with such diligence that I all but scalded it, but alas to no effect. I still remained unable to distinguish ‘d’ from ‘f’. Even the more drastic step of rubbing my finger tip with sand paper, though just as painful, was no more effective. My finger remained thoroughly obstinate.

The inscrutable wisdom of the East

I gave up such treatments as futile and have only revived them once since. Recently a Talking Book caused me to try yet again. In the book, the author described his experiences in China. He came across some Chinese experts dealing in objets d’art. He found these people continually exercising their fingers as they sought to keep them supple for handling fine articles. Their exercises consisted of either a walnut or an agate stone being rolled between finger and palm. I eagerly seized upon this message. Perhaps the wisdom of the East, or rather the inscrutable wisdom of the East, would work where the hot water and the sand-paper of the West had failed. Since we didn’t have agates strewn about the house, I had, perforce, to choose a walnut. Alas, alas, the walnut proved no more effective than my previous attempts.

That I acquired any skill at all was due not so much to my own efforts as to the patience and persistence of my tutors. When Miss Helen Smith had done her best in the Braille shop, I was taken, in hand in the evenings by a fellow resident and given further coaching. Thanks to their combined instruction, my fumbling fingers were at length able to distinguish the Braille characters. True, I’m sometimes apt to measure my speed in minutes per word rather than words per minute. At least this limited skill has proved its worth, I am able to label my tape-cassettes, read the titles on Talking Books and finger through Talking Book catalogues.

I found that some of the more adaptable residents were hoping to go in for computer programming. I couldn’t help recalling a lecture that I’d heard. The lecturer, an American professor, had described how in the early days the frustrated programmers had reacted. So enraged were they at the curious results the machine produced that they relieved their feelings by kicking the computer casing. When there was danger of the whole thing being wrecked, a kicking board was placed as a guard. By inviting the programmers to kick this board, the computer itself was saved from destruction. I have a feeling that this principle could be extended. One installed in my home might prove advantageous. Instead of inflicting my frustration and irritation on my family, I could give a few hefty clouts to the kicking board.

Obviously, though I could blame my ineptitude at Braille on insensitive fingers, I could raise no such excuse when it came to typing. It was simply a matter of getting down to ‘QWERTY-UIOP’. Here indeed nemesis had caught up with me. As I painfully learnt the keyboard, I became conscious-stricken when I remembered the grumbles I had directed at the various typists who had worked for me. This typing business was far more difficult than I had thought. As I wrestled with the machine, I wondered why those young ladies had not retaliated. Only one had ever turned the tables on me, when she left to accompany her husband, a soldier, to Singapore, she said: “After coping with your writing Mr Moore, I shan’t have any difficulty at all with the Chinese.”

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image credit: Timothy K Hamilton