Oh lovely Lady in Pink! There is very, very little chance of a disciplined
regimen in Morse's life.'
33
chapter seven Whoever could possibly confuse
'Traffic Lights' and
'Driving Licence'? You could! Just stand in front of your mirror tonight
and mouth those two phrases silently to yourself (Lynne Dubin, The
Limitations of Lip-reading) disabilities, like many sad concomitants of life,
are often cloaked in euphemism. Thus it is that the 'blind' and the
'impotent' and the 'deaf' are happily no longer amongst us. Instead, in
their respective clinics, we know our fellow out-patients as those affected
by impaired vision; as victims of chronic erectile dysfunction; as citizens
with a serious hearing-impediment. The individual members of such groups,
however, know perfectly well what their troubles are. And in the latter
category, they tend to prefer the monosyllabic 'deaf', although they realize
that there are varying degrees of deafness; realize that some are very deaf
indeed.
Like Simon Harrison.
He had been a six-year-old (it was 1978) attending a village school in
Gloucestershire when an inexplicably localized out- break of meningitis had
given cause for most serious concern in the immediate vicinity. And in
particular to two families there: to the Palmer family in High Street, whose
only daughter had tragically died; and to the Harrison family in Church Lane,
whose son had slowly recovered in hospital after three
weeks of intensive care, but with irreversible long-term deafness:
twenty-five per cent residual hearing in the left ear; and almost nothing in
the right.
Thereafter, for Simon, social and academic progress had been seriously
curtailed and compromised: like an athlete being dined for the hundred-me tres
sprint over sand-dunes wearing army boots; like a pupil, with thick wadges of
cotton- wool in each ear, seeking to follow instructions vouchsafed by a
tutor from behind a thickly panelled door.
Oh God! Being deaf was such a dispiriting business.
But Simon was a fighter, and he'd tried hard to make the best of things.
Tried so hard to master the skills of lip-reading; to learn the complementary
language of 'signing' with movements of fingers and hands; to present a
wholly bogus facial expression of comprehension in the company of others;
above all, to come to terms with the fact that silence, for those who are
deaf, is not merely an absence of noise, but is a wholly passive silence, in
which the potential vibrancy of active silence can never again be appreciated.
Deafness is not the brief pregnant silence on the radio when the listener
awaits the Greenwich time-signal; deafness is a radio-set that is defunct,
its batteries dead and non-renewable.
Few people in Simon's life had understood such things; and in his early
teens, when the audio graphical readings had begun to dip even more
alarmingly, fewer and fewer people had been overly sympathetic.
Except his mother, perhaps.
And the reason for such lack of interest in the boy had not been difficult to
fathom. He was an unattractive, skinny-limbed lad, with rather protuberant
ears, and a whiny, nasal manner of enunciating his words, as though his
disability were not so much one of hearing as one of speaking.
Yet it would be an exaggeration to portray the young Harrison as a hapless
adolescent, so often mishearing, so often misunderstood. His school fellows
were not a gang of 35
unmitigated bullies; nor were his teachers an
uncaring crew. No. It was just that no one seemed to like him much;
certainly no one seemed to love him.
Except his mother, perhaps.
But Simon did have some residual hearing, as we have seen; and the powerful
hearing-aids he wore were themselves far more valuable than any sympathy the
world could ever offer. And when, after many a struggle, he left school with
two A- level certificates (a C in English and a D in History) he very soon
