the way monkeys do, before taking a sudden grip and holding my wrist hard as if willing me to trust him.
It wasn’t Huey, I’m certain of that.
The same dream came again the next night, and the night after that, but always the scene with my mother intervened. The two fused. When I woke up the man was gone. What remained like a dull headache or a pebble in the shoe that won’t go away was the fleeting medicinal odour from my mother’s bedroom.
I don’t know what other blind people see when they dream. It is one of the questions that people ask me, people who are genuinely interested or know me well enough not to mind if I change the subject. “Do you dream in colour?” they say. Or, “When you dream, what do you see?” Or they might say, “When you eat, how do you know what’s on your plate?” (That’s easy. “How do I know what’s on myplate?” I say to them. “I can smell it.” But sometimes if I’m feeling mean I will say, “I don’t know what’s on my plate until I see it.” They don’t know what to make of that.) I don’t think my dreams are any different from anyone else’s, except the one about my mother which by an odd coincidence has to do with buried memory or, rather (I hate this) with repressed memory.
Childhood is less clear to me than to many people. My childhood ended at thirteen when I joined the Scouts. This was during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 when I was evacuated to the country. I can’t remember if my mother was ill then or not. My father was in the Home Guard. When the bombs began falling on London my brother Tom, who was five years older than me, joined the Air Force and was sent to Canada for training and I was evacuated to Devon. Everything seemed to happen at once, I was thirteen and still in short pants, and after that I turned my face away from home.
In Devon I was billetted with two other London boys, young tearaways like myself. We lived with an elderly widow who ran a boarding house in Torquay—lovely little lady but a strict and particular Baptist. She was highly evangelical, she knew the Devil in all his works, and that meant us . We ran wild on the clifftops over the Defence installations and refused to eat her suet pudding. But she was fully understanding of us, you might say, because that was the Devil at work. She had a young niece called Deirdre whom I later smuggled into mydigs at Plymouth when I was in the Navy.
I remember going to a Scout camp near Torquay and being put in charge of a borstal boy named Wanstead. He had pinched something. “Chesney, you’re in charge of Wanstead. He’s on probation,” the Scoutmaster said to me. I said to the Scoutmaster, “What’s probation?” Wanstead was younger than me but quick as temptation. He showed me how to eat snails. We cooked them in a billy. He taught me to play dice and two-up. He knew about the sex factor and told me how to negotiate a girl’s skirts without getting her in the family way. One night we crept into a defence camp—an engineers’ section was bivouacked nearby—and stole a bicycle and a gas mask. (We returned them the next night without being caught.) Wanstead had bottle. Wanstead was exciting. I suppose my interest in probation work and the psycho-pathology of candidates for disaster began then.
Apart from the hours I spent mucking about the docks after school and pinching rides on the barges—I can still smell the tar coming off the Thames and the aromatic tannins and flakes of resin crumbling from the planking on Blackwall Pier where the barges tied up—it wasn’t a particularly happy childhood. There was a lot of drudgery. There were no family holidays. My mother left school at ten, my father at eleven, my grandfather would sign his cross because as I say he couldn’t read or write. But that was good because I grew up talking and listening, and I kept my eyes open. I was told that at one time there were elevenof us living in the house, my parents, my brother
It wasn’t Huey, I’m certain of that.
The same dream came again the next night, and the night after that, but always the scene with my mother intervened. The two fused. When I woke up the man was gone. What remained like a dull headache or a pebble in the shoe that won’t go away was the fleeting medicinal odour from my mother’s bedroom.
I don’t know what other blind people see when they dream. It is one of the questions that people ask me, people who are genuinely interested or know me well enough not to mind if I change the subject. “Do you dream in colour?” they say. Or, “When you dream, what do you see?” Or they might say, “When you eat, how do you know what’s on your plate?” (That’s easy. “How do I know what’s on myplate?” I say to them. “I can smell it.” But sometimes if I’m feeling mean I will say, “I don’t know what’s on my plate until I see it.” They don’t know what to make of that.) I don’t think my dreams are any different from anyone else’s, except the one about my mother which by an odd coincidence has to do with buried memory or, rather (I hate this) with repressed memory.
Childhood is less clear to me than to many people. My childhood ended at thirteen when I joined the Scouts. This was during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 when I was evacuated to the country. I can’t remember if my mother was ill then or not. My father was in the Home Guard. When the bombs began falling on London my brother Tom, who was five years older than me, joined the Air Force and was sent to Canada for training and I was evacuated to Devon. Everything seemed to happen at once, I was thirteen and still in short pants, and after that I turned my face away from home.
In Devon I was billetted with two other London boys, young tearaways like myself. We lived with an elderly widow who ran a boarding house in Torquay—lovely little lady but a strict and particular Baptist. She was highly evangelical, she knew the Devil in all his works, and that meant us . We ran wild on the clifftops over the Defence installations and refused to eat her suet pudding. But she was fully understanding of us, you might say, because that was the Devil at work. She had a young niece called Deirdre whom I later smuggled into mydigs at Plymouth when I was in the Navy.
I remember going to a Scout camp near Torquay and being put in charge of a borstal boy named Wanstead. He had pinched something. “Chesney, you’re in charge of Wanstead. He’s on probation,” the Scoutmaster said to me. I said to the Scoutmaster, “What’s probation?” Wanstead was younger than me but quick as temptation. He showed me how to eat snails. We cooked them in a billy. He taught me to play dice and two-up. He knew about the sex factor and told me how to negotiate a girl’s skirts without getting her in the family way. One night we crept into a defence camp—an engineers’ section was bivouacked nearby—and stole a bicycle and a gas mask. (We returned them the next night without being caught.) Wanstead had bottle. Wanstead was exciting. I suppose my interest in probation work and the psycho-pathology of candidates for disaster began then.
Apart from the hours I spent mucking about the docks after school and pinching rides on the barges—I can still smell the tar coming off the Thames and the aromatic tannins and flakes of resin crumbling from the planking on Blackwall Pier where the barges tied up—it wasn’t a particularly happy childhood. There was a lot of drudgery. There were no family holidays. My mother left school at ten, my father at eleven, my grandfather would sign his cross because as I say he couldn’t read or write. But that was good because I grew up talking and listening, and I kept my eyes open. I was told that at one time there were elevenof us living in the house, my parents, my brother
Similar Books
