Sight and sound

As a baby, just diagnosed as blind, Henry’s future looked bleak to his mother who despaired that he would never grow up to lead an independent life. Now, though, he has been given the chance to live as any other child, by learning how to navigate the world through his other senses. ‘He takes the world in much smaller pieces,’ says his mother, explaining that Henry takes his time to work out what the pieces mean, whereas a ten-year-old with normal vision will rush ahead, devouring the world around him. ‘My understanding of the world was much more lacking than Henry’s, which is sharp; sharp indeed as a razor, registering all the time.’

The staff of this unusual school, set up in the 1970s, are mostly conscientious objectors who chose to work at the school as a non-military form of national service. They arrived at the school with no preconceived ideas about how to teach blind children. ‘We can do a lot of things without eyesight,’ says the low-vision therapist. ‘We overestimate how much we use our eyes.’ (I’m not so sure about this; whenever I wander the house in the dark, unwilling to switch on the light in the middle of the night for fear of waking everyone else, I invariably end up with a bumped knee or bruised elbow.) Another staff member who designs the learning materials needed by the pupils has collected 32 CDs from the BBC sound archive as an illustrated encyclopaedia of the world. Some crucial ‘images’, though, were missing; such as ‘Sauna’, so much part of Finnish life, or the sound of birch twigs brushing away snow.

Snow falling echoed through Book at Bedtime this week on Radio Four as Indira Varma read from Thomas Teal’s new translation of Tove Jansson’s novel, The True Deceivers. Jansson is best known for her Moomintroll stories for children set in her native Finland. But she also wrote fictions for grown-ups; stories that are scraped clean of any self-deception. ‘People woke up late because there was no longer any morning...’ writes Jansson with such deceptive simplicity. Two women struggle to get along in a tale that perfectly fits the mood of midwinter, searching desperately for that sliver of light in a brooding, steel-grey sky.