emma vip Sheila Hocken Read online

  B.Y THE SAME AUTHOR:

  EMMA AND I

  EMMA V.I.P.

  by

  SHEILA HOCKEN

  LONDON

  VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD

  1980

  Copyright @ Sheila Hocken 198o

  ISBN 0 575 029I4 5

  Published by arrangement with

  Sphere Books Ltd.

  WAVERLEY PAUNICH)AL LIBRAR

  C,T 2,3.to.goj

  -4w

  Printed in Great Britain at

  The Camelot Press Ltd, Southampton

  This book is dedicated to my husband, Don,

  without whose completefaith and encouragement

  I would never have written a word

  I

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Following page 44

  Sheila and Don (Syndication International)

  Sheila and Emma (Eddie Barradine)

  Sheila, Don, Emma, Betty Greene and Zelda (Harold

  Greene)

  Betty and Harold Greene (Roger M. Willgoose)

  Sheila, Emma, Kerensa, Christmas 1977 (Sheffield

  Newspapers Ltd)

  Signing Sessions (Nottingharn Post, Millington & Chapman)

  Following page 76

  Ziniba

  Ming (Sheila Hocken)

  Holly (Oliver Hatch)

  Sheila, Emma, Kerensa (Roger M. Willgoose)

  Buttons (Roger M. Willgoose)

  Bracken and Emma (Roger M. Willgoose)

  Following page io8

  Sheila, Emma, Kerensa, summer 1979 (Eddie Barradine)

  Kerensa and Emma (Roger M. Willgoose)

  Bracken, Buttons and Emma (Roger M. Willgoose)

  Colonel and Mrs Clay with Emma's mother (rorkshire

  Post)

  Bracken with his dumb-bell (Roger M. Willgoose)

  7

  Following page I72

  Kerensa and friends (Oliver Hatch)

  Sheila and Kerensa out walking with the dogs

  (Oliver Hatch)

  Don, Kerensa, Sheila with Bracken, Buttons,

  Emma (Roger M. Willgoose)

  8

  FOREWORD

  M Y F I R S T B 0 0 K, Emma and I, told the story of how my life as

  a blind person was utterly changed by the wisdom, cleverness,

  and affection of my guide-dog Emma, so much so that we

  became twin parts of one personality.

  I was born in 1946 in Beeston, Nottingham. As a child, I

  could see a little but not enough to recognize people as more

  than vague images, or colours as blurred and muddy travesties

  of what I later learnt they really were. Both my brother

  Graham and I suffered from congenital cataracts which, in

  turn, caused retina damage. This was inherited from my

  father's side of the family. My mother had a different sort of

  eye complaint, caused by German measles when she was a

  child. All of us, therefore, were partially blind in varying

  degrees, although my father still managed to earn a living for

  us travelling round to markets selling drapery.

  Eye surgery was not then as advanced as it is now, and

  an operation on Graham resulted in the total loss of the sight

  in one eye. I had also had an unsuccessful operation, but as a

  result of Graham's experience my parents decided against

  further attempts at surgery.

  So when I started school, I could just see enough to be able

  to learn to read-if I held a book right up to my face-but the

  blackboard was a blur. In one respect con " cerning school,

  nevertheless, I was very lucky. My mother insisted that I should

  go to an ordinary school, and not a special one for the blind

  and visually handicapped, where willy-nilly I would have been

  taught braille despite my temporary ability to learn normal

  print. Her view was that such special schools, however well

  intentioned, kept blind children apart from the rest of the

  world-the sighted community-whereas what they most

  needed was to be integrated into it, and for this I have to thank

  her.

  9

  I

  During my school career my sight gradually grew worse and

  by the time I was nineteen I was totally blind. I now had a job

  as a switchboard operator; when I had left school I badly

  wanted to work with animals (and despite not being able to

  see properly had helped at a local kennels at weekends) but it

  was somehow decreed that I should be a telephonist. So that

  is what I became, feeling over the switchboard to make the

  connections and taking notes on a braille machine. First I

  worked for a big dress shop in Nottingham, which was not a

  happy experience, and then, in a much more friendly atmosphere,

  for a firm called Industrial Pumps.

  It was at this time that my life was made utterly different by

  the advent of Emma. I was, if the truth be known, ashamed of

  being blind. I refused to carry a white stick and hated asking

  for help. After all, I was a teenage girl, and I couldn't bear the

  idea that people would stare at me and think. I was not like

  them. Partly as a result of this attitude I got lost one evening on

  the way home from work. I kept colliding with lamp-postsand

  apologizing to them-and I couldn't find the bus stop,

  or hear anything that resembled a bus. I was nearly three hours

  late getting home, and it had been a frightening experience.

  But my Home Teacher was there when I arrived (Home

  Teachers visit the blind regularly to help and to supply aids

  such as braille paper, braille clocks, egg-timers that ring and

  so on) and after he had heard my story, he said: 'Why on earth

  don't you have a guide-dog?'

  They were the nine most important words of my life. The

  result, eventually, was a spell at the Guide-Dog Training

  Centre at Leamington Spa-and Emma, the chocolate-brown

  Labrador who from the moment we met never wavered in her

  understanding and affection for me, and who never left my

  side. It was as if, suddenly, I had been supplied with an extra

  limb and an extra brain. Emma from then on guided me to

  work (and had her own ideas, often, about how she would get

  me there and back), saved my life-literally-and was intuitive

  to an unbelievable degree in realizing my needs, even to finding

  me a telephone-box when I desperately needed one in an area

  of Nottingham she had never been to before.

  It was because of Emma that I finally found the courage to

  I0

  go and share a flat in Nottingham with a girl, Anita, who became

  a marvellous friend. And at this time I met Don, who had

  a chiropody practice, whom I eventually married. With his

  love, care and attention added to that of Emma, I became

  doubly fortunate.

  We moved into a little prefab bungalow; I got a new job with

  a big garage in the city, and I started going out with Emma and

  giving lectures and talks on Guide-Dogs. I also started (despite

  difficulties with sight invariably solved by Don) keeping, breeding,

  and showing Siamese cats which became, and has re

  mained,
a major interest.

  Then came another event which transformed my life again.

  Mr Shearing, the specialist whom my brother Graham recommended

  me to go to, decided he would operate on me, although

  he warned that he did not work miracles.

  To me, however, he did work a miracle. He gave me sight

  and, in September 1975, I saw the dazzling, unbelievable world

  for the first time with all its beauty and in all its incredible

  colour. For me, it was like being born again. I went liome witli

  Don and Emma and began life anew.

  SHEILA HOCKEN

  I

  Stapleford

  Nottinghamshire

  April 198o

  I

  CHAPTER ONE

  I LAY IN bed that night, unable to sleep, just thinking back

  over an incredible day. At the age of twenty-nine it had been

  my first day of life, real life that is: the day my husband Don

  had brought me home to Nottingham from hospital. Only a

  week before, and it now seemed a century ago, I had had the

  operation which had given me sight. But almost as soon as I

  had received that first unbelievable, incandescent shock of

  being able to see, the bandages had been replaced over my

  eyes. In the days that followed they were taken off again for

  only a minute or two and put back, so all the world I had seen

  was enclosed in the four walls of a hospital ward, and all I had

  caught sight of were glimpses, breathtaking and brief as they

  were, of the blues and greens of nurses' uniforms, and the

  yellows and crimsons of bowls of flowers on locker tops.

  But today, today had been like no other since the Creation,

  too much, almost, for one human being. I lay there in bed and

  all its images tumbled and whirled through my mind like a

  laundromat machine gone mad: the sight of Don for the first

  time in my life-for I was quite blind when he married meand

  the sensation in less than a second of all my imaginings of

  what he might be like being wiped away, and the reality

  approaching me up the ward being more handsome than ever

  I could have dreamt. The sight of my guide-dog Emma for the

  first time, the affectionate creature who had steered me through

  all sorts of difficulties, on whom I had relied and placed all my

  trust-but so much more beautiful than seemed possible.

  People had told me she was chocolate-coloured, and I had an

  idea of her appearance through feeling her coat and velvety

  cars, but no one had said she was a hundred different shades of

  brown, with a white patch on her chest, or that she was so

  bouncing with life and her eyes were so bright in the sunlight.

  Then there had been that dazzling greenness that I could not

  I3

  make out until Don explained it to me. Grass! Something I had

  only felt through the soles of my shoes, something I knew

  existed, and that I dimly remembered from the days when, as a

  child, I could see a little. But that remembered grass, blurred

  and muddy green, now shone bright beyond belief, just as the

  entire world had become a landscape suddenly cleaned like an

  oil painting, and restored from beneath layers of thick, dead

  varnish.

  These were major revelations, but there had been minor

  ones too: simply the delight of seeing water sparkle as it swirled

  from a tap, simply the sight of streets, shops, houses, and scores

  of people-something that when I was blind I somehow could

  never imagine, the idea of so many different lives going on

  around me but outside my own enclosed box of consciousness.

  And there had been strange shocks, including the sight of myself

  in a mirror. I felt as if I was looking at a stranger. I could

  not believe it was me. There had been disappointments as

  well, as when before teatime I had decided to be adventurous

  and go for the first time to the shops without Emma guiding

  me. I had taken her on a lead, and not on her usual guide-dog

  harness. But, once outside the gate and walking along, I had

  been terrified at the way lamp-posts and the trees and their

  shadows slanting across the pavement all seemed to rush at me,

  bearing down as if they were going to hit me. So I had shut my

  eyes, reverted instantly to blind ways, and had been thankful yet

  again for Emma who took over and even on a lead, guided me.

  So the thoughts whirled round as I lay there. Beside me, Don

  was already asleep. But not only did I find sleep impossible, I

  did not want to drift off. It seemed such a waste of time spending

  eight hours with my eyes shut. Even though I could not see

  a thing in the dark, I just wanted to keep my eyes open. Somewhere

  lurking was the faint ghost of the feeling I had when in

  hospital they put the bandages back the first time, after I knew

  that, miraculously, I could see: what, I had thought then, if

  it's only a cruel joke and that's it? I knew it was irrational, but

  I felt that if I kept my eyes open all night then no one could

  take my sight away again.

  Lying with my eyes open in the dark, I could not see anything.

  Yet this was not like being blind. The darkness of night

  I4

  is a different sort of darkness to blindness. People used to say,

  'It. must be terrible to live in the dark.' But over all those years

  goingd, blind, and finally unable to see at all, it was not like

  living in the dark, because light and dark are opposites and if

  you don't have one-that is, light-then you don't know what

  darkness is. Only when you can see can you understand that

  you were living in the dark in a different sense. So it was with

  me lying there that first night at home, and I realized that

  blindness is not a black dark like night. It is a sort of void darkness,

  a non-colour darkness, an indescribable sort of limbo,

  neither black nor grey, nor brown, nor any visual colour, and

  lying awake and seeing nothing was exciting because this was

  the black of true night that I had never known before.

  But if that was a new sensation experienced in the night, also

  through my mind went the countless new sensations of that day

  apart from visual experience. It was as if all sorts of other things

  had suddenly come alive as well as my sight-ambitions, hopes

  for the future, and bodily things. I was aware of blood racing

  round my veins, my heart beating, lots of other things I had

  never thought existed before. I suppose it was because I felt

  more alive than I had ever done before, and visual sensation

  stimulates the rest of your body. As a blind person, things can

  be very exciting and you enjoy life-but there is so much more

  when you have a visual stimulant.

  More materially, I thought, What about driving a car?

  ~Vouldn't that be great! Could I read? Apart from trying to

  identify the word SALT on a box in the food cupboard, and the

  names of cereals, I hadn't yet even looked at print. I had been

  so excited with all the fabulous colours I had seen I had not

  really stopped to tliink whether I could read or not, or how

  much I had retained from my
early partially-sighted days at

  school.

  I heard Emma snoring and I looked over and knew that,

  Linseen, there was the shape of a dark, curled-up ball of fur and

  affection at the bottom of our bed. Then, suddenly, I had an

  awful thought. What about Emma?

  I sat up in bed. I was horrified.

  'What about Emma?' I found myself shouting aloud.

  Don grumbled a bit and turned over. 'I won't need her any

  I5

  more as a guide-dog. Will they take her away?' I started to

  shake Don. 'Don, wake up, wake up-what about Emmai" I

  said again.

  'What's the matter with Emma?' he said sleepily. 'She's all

  right, isn't she?'

  I felt him moving his foot about to feel her at the end of the

  bed.

  'Yes, of course she's all right, but I don't need her any more

  as a guide-dog.'

  'Well, of course you don't. Isn't it marvellous?' He turned

  over to go to sleep again.

  'But they might take her away from me.'

  At that, Don sat up.

  'Who might?'

  'The people at Guide-Dogs.'

  'Oh never. They won't. Don't worry about it. Try and go to

  sleep.'

  'But they might.'

  'She's nearly eleven,' said Don. 'Who'd want to have her at

  that age? Nobody else could use her as a guide-dog.'

  'Yes, I know,' I said. 'But they do have the right to take her

  away from me if I don't need her any more.'

  'Oh, they wouldn't. Believe me, petal, they won't take her

  away from you. Don't be silly.'

  I realized it was no good discussing it with Don. I lay back,

  still with my eyes open, and the worry grew and, like a growing

  storm cloud, blotted out the memory of the wonderful day. I

  could not bear the thought of living without Emma. What

  would I do? I know, I won't tell them, I thought. I won't tell

  them at Guide-Dogs that I can see. But no, that would be silly,

  they'd be bound to find out and then what? They surely

  wouldn't, they couldn't. I wouldn't let them take her away,

  they'd have to shoot me first. I put my hand down and stroked