Just sometimes a radio programme comes along that really changes the way you hear — and interpret — the everyday sounds around you.
Just sometimes a radio programme comes along that really changes the way you hear — and interpret — the everyday sounds around you. With perfect timing, on New Year’s Day, Joe Acheson’s programme for the BBC World Service began the year with a startling, pin-drop-sharp lesson on how to listen. Sound of Snow and Ice took us to Finland in midwinter, to the Jyväskylä School for the Visually Impaired. The temperature in my study seemed to plummet as an extraordinary rasping noise echoed through the room, the sound of boots crunching on deep, deep snow. At Jyväskylä, sounds are crucial, for the school uses them to teach the children who have been born blind or with low vision how to see the world through what they can hear.
From the moment the children arrive at the school, which is in the midst of the Finnish countryside, halfway between Helsinki and Lapland, surrounded by lakes and forests and blanketed in snow for much of the year, they are introduced to another way of being. A constant beeping sound greets them, guiding them to the front door, so that they can walk towards it unaided and with confidence, knowing that they can find their way in without needing someone to guide them. Echo-boards, placed strategically at frequent intervals along the corridors, on the walls outside in the quadrangle, wherever they might walk, are used to teach the pupils how to hear the slight modulations created by any kind of surface alteration. The clipping sound of their footsteps and of their canes swishing across the floor changes when met by a door, a window, even a painting or noticeboard. Such changes can be used as ear-posts, telling those prepared to hear where they are. Some visitors to the school are surprised by all the wall decorations. ‘Why bother when the kids can’t see them?’ they ask. It takes a leap of understanding.
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.
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