Walking Through the Hearing World: My Story

By Emerald Fitzgerald

The Journal of my life, looking through a glass, as a profoundly deaf lady aged now at Sixty seven years of age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Mar 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9781669890652

Book preview

The Beginning

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How do I begin this story? Who am I writing this for and why? Why do I need to tell my story at all? Could it perhaps be in the search for love? I wasn’t aware of it consciously, but I had been looking for an answer for most of my life—that is, until I met a wise and intelligent man who was himself deaf, and he was interested in asking about me.

Kevin and I met briefly at a deaf friend’s funeral in 2018. He had a flurry of white hair, and his shoulders were slightly slumped. I sensed he was somewhat lonely or in a sort of despair but bearing up bravely. Our eyes met, and I became flustered and scurried off to find a seat with a full plate of buffet food for myself and a friend of mine. After a few moments, his kind and interested face sought me out and began signing to me; he asked me whether I was deaf and where I was from. I introduced myself and told him I lived in a rural village and that I had lived there for four years and that I had a few deaf friends in the area. He told me about his wife, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s, and pointed to a photo of her in her youth, which was on the wall in the church hall. She was beautiful, and I could see him feeling sorrowful at how she had changed so much.

We found a common interest—we both taught British Sign Language and later both became BSL examiners. As I didn’t know many people at the wake, I was relieved that I could talk to him and share my experiences, but it was the book that he told me he had written, Deafness of the Mind, that really took my interest. I was immediately keen to have a copy, and Kevin happened to have one in the boot of his car. I thanked him and insisted on paying for it; I couldn’t wait to read it in bed that night.

I was instantly gripped reading about his life as a deaf man. He became deaf in childhood after contracting meningitis. His experiences at boarding school in 1944 were truly shocking and quite an eye-opener. I wanted to ask my deaf brother, who went to the same school, if he had any of those experiences, but I think it would have been very different for him, as he went many years later. I only have a few deaf friends who went to that Catholic school, and I assume it would have been quite a different experience from the residential school for the deaf that I went to.

I admired his character and stories. He seemed such a rogue with his daring ways, strong, sad, and funny at times. As I read the book, tears of laughter rolled down my cheeks. I felt him talking to me in those pages. I read night after night, totally absorbed, and felt compelled to email him to tell him how much I enjoyed his book and how I could relate to many of the points within it. I felt like it was a new beginning for me, accepting my deafness as the most natural thing in the world, sharing experiences, and enriching life. I was tired of being lonely within my deafness, body, and mind. This was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and suddenly I wasn’t so lonely anymore.

The Young Me

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My earliest memory of being deaf was when I was around four years old. I was playing outside the family home. I had laid down a wooden rocking horse on the path in front of our front garden gate, and I remember putting my ear against the horse and hammering its face with a hammer. I was fascinated that I could hear a sound and feel the vibrations. I noticed I had made many dents on the horse’s face too! It had not dawned on me that I was profoundly deaf until that experience. My family were totally unaware of my deafness, and the family doctor pooh-poohed my mum, who thought that my lack of ability to speak signalled something wrong.

My brother, a year older than I, was hearing, and he went everywhere with me. He would always speak up for me to family and friends. I remember the Christmas before starting school, my parents had bought me a blue and white tricycle with a small white metal basket at the front between the handlebars. It was a cold Christmas Day, and my brother couldn’t wait to try it out. He rode it to the bottom of the cul-de-sac where we lived. When he returned, my mum was furious because he had dented the lovely white basket. He must have hit the fence at the bottom very hard! I thought, Oh, crikey! But it didn’t stop me trying it myself. It was great fun riding down the street with the cold air hitting my face. ‘Whee! Whoo! Whoo!’

In later years I would think of those special times. There’s something magical about a family’s Christmas, especially when you are home from boarding school.

Around this time, I was sent to the audiology department in the county hospital for a hearing test. I was in a small room. There were no windows, and I remember large black pieces of equipment standing on a worktop. I was wearing headphones. I remember they tried making sounds with toys and other noises behind me, but because I was a curious girl and I wanted to know what they were doing, I would turn around every time. (It was not a reliable way of testing me or the intelligence of deaf children really. Rather, it was an outdated system, and it’s far better now that there are modern audiology systems, which are all on the computer and not left to human guesswork.)

Subsequently, I was fitted with a body-worn hearing aid, and it was there I met a young audiologist in white overalls. She became my trusted friend for many years to come. How I missed her when she finally retired. She was like a member of the family and had looked after my hearing needs and those of my younger sister and youngest brother. So I invited her to my sixtieth birthday party, and we were so thrilled to see her there with her husband too.

In nursery school, we had to sit by the speech tutor to learn the sounds of the alphabet. I remember practising ‘P’ with a piece of paper in front of my lips. We had to watch a piece of paper move backwards and forwards and watch the lip pattern at the same time.

Practicing ‘B’ was similar but not as strong. I found practicing ‘S’ was impossible as you need to feel the breath on the back of your hand with your teeth showing like a silly grin. This was impossible for a profoundly deaf child; however, it could be done if a child had some useful hearing and used hearing aids. My hearing level was never in that range. I know I will never hear the high pitch of birds singing.

‘M’ was done with a blown-up balloon against your cheek; therefore, you could feel the vibration from the balloon.

Saying ‘N’ was done with two fingers on the nose—the forefinger and the middle fingers against the sides of your nose. You could feel the vibration there.

‘K’ was felt with the back of your hand under your chin, like saying ‘kick’ as those hands/feelings were easier to identify.

Practising ‘T’ was not as easy, but I found saying ‘tick’ could be felt with the back of the hand under the chin. All this was boring to any child with profound deafness. With the use of my hearing aids and headphones, working on a one-to-one basis with a hearing speech teacher, and many lessons, I was able to achieve speech with words, and I practised with hearing people, my teachers, and family.

When I finally went home for the first time in weeks, I was able to tell my mum what my brother had said and done. The looks of astonishment on my mum’s and brother’s faces were priceless. I can’t remember what I said, but it was profound. There’s a picture of me when I was around five years old with my grandma holding my hand and looking down at me. I was saying something whilst she held on to my younger sister as a baby. I’d love to know what I said because the look on my grandma’s face said it all.

Once I was in the kitchen, and Mum gave me a stick of rhubarb. I wanted brown sugar to dip it in, and I kept asking for it and pointing to the kitchen cupboard, but Mum didn’t understand. I was exasperated and frustrated from not being understood. Communication at home often broke down, as my parents were advised not to learn sign language. The frustration of lack of communication and not being understood within my family remained throughout all my years at school. We even had to use speech with my deaf sister and deaf brother so our hearing brother and sister and our parents would understand us. How absurd that this visual language wasn’t encouraged. Hearing people in those days thought it would hide the ‘disability’ if we had speech.

Little did they understand that it’s far easier for hearing people to learn sign language than a deaf person to venture to speak in a silent world. We understand that speech and language are powerful tools for communication in the hearing world, where people are able to express themselves and share feelings with other hearing human beings. However it is much easier for a deaf person to communicate in sign language, to fully express and demonstrate their true feelings, to ‘open up’ and share a visual language. It is an important factor to survive. Yet, hearing people continue to underestimate this.

Back then hearing people didn’t know any difference. They never thought about deaf people and the difficulties they faced with speech or considered that they could communicate with sign language. In those days it was seen as ‘disability’ within the hearing world. Are hearing people still being that ignorant? Do they try to understand the importance of a visual language and how vital it is to replace these lost sounds?

Some years later, when I was around ten or eleven, when I was developing breasts, I persuaded mum to buy me a bra. Wearing a bra meant I could clip my awful bulky aids underneath my dress to try to hide them. I remember my first bra; it was white with pink and red rosebuds on the cups; I remember proudly showing a friend that I was ‘growing up’, and it felt wonderful. I can remember Mum and Grandma being given a letter when they came to school on prize day. It was to tell them that I had started my period (at age eleven). I’ll never forget the look my grandma gave Mum in the corridor on that prize day. I was truly growing up to be a young woman.

I can remember the great excitement when I was given my first ever ‘behind the ear’ hearing aid. How grown-up that felt; no bulk bulge from my bra. When I was around twelve, I was given two ‘behind the ear’ hearing aids, one for each ear. I remember the strange sounds and learning how to adjust to them. I had speech lessons, which I practiced frequently. Hearing aids make it possible to hear sounds and speech, but it can never feel the same as for a hearing person. Aids can’t replace lost or missing frequencies but simply amplify the ones we have.

In 2014 I was given my first digital hearing aids by a young audiologist, and I thank her every day for my ‘hearing’ life. These hearing aids were amazing; they picked up more sounds than I had ever known before. It took time for my brain to adjust, and for a while I would have to ask what I was hearing when I was in various places. In the end it took me at least five years to appreciate the sounds, including music and hearing my own voice as well as other people. It has been immensely valuable; it has uplifted my silent world.

A funny story. Before I went back to school, once Grandma went to pick some flowers for me to take along, I’ll never forget the embarrassed look on her face as she bent over to cut some Sweet Williams and then quite quickly stood up to apologise, and I thought, why? I didn’t understand. I found out she had let off some wind, but I hadn’t heard it at all. Now I have digital hearing aids. I realise how loud everything is, and I can understand her embarrassment. I often wonder if I had missed out on all these sounds. But no, of course not, but it’s the innocent looks on deaf people’s faces when embarrassing things happen that make hearing people smile, isn’t it? It’s true that sight, smell, taste, and touch are sharpened in a deaf person’s world due to their lack of hearing.

Eventually the hospital recommended I attend a boarding school for the deaf, where all children and teachers communicated using sign language. I left school with four CSEs. Between 1954 and 1970 the deaf school didn’t offer the same opportunities as the hearing schools, so I never got to take any GCSEs.

Nursery School

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My earliest memory of being sent to school was one of bewilderment. I remember it was September 1958, and I was four years old. I had my clothes stripped off me and put into a pillowcase, which was then put on top of a high shelf along with many other rows of pillowcases. It smelt like a laundry room in there, and I was put into a stiff school uniform instead. Suddenly, my mum started to walk away from the nursery I was in. I screamed and screamed in terror, thinking of all the comforts and familiar things I’d known being taken away from me. That memory haunts me to this day. Total bewilderment, emotional devastation, nobody had explained anything to me—no child should ever go through that, let alone a profoundly deaf child.

I didn’t see my mum for three weeks after she walked away on that first day. After three weeks we were allowed to go home for Friday and Saturday nights and return Sunday. Trains became a very important part of my life because my parents didn’t own a car. Riding trains home and back to school remained a constant through all my school years, from the age of four to sixteen. I remember school and Mum allowing me at the age of eleven to travel on the bus and train by myself, to travel home, and to return to school alone. In the beginning, I vaguely remember Mum taking me to the station to meet another pupil and her mother, who was to chaperone me on my journey, but later, when I travelled on my own, my heart would pound as I wondered whether I’d got on the right bus and train to get back to school; communication with the outside world wasn’t easy at that time. Going home was easier, as I had some school friends to travel with, so I didn’t feel entirely on my own. I remember back then, the steam trains with their billowing smoke and strange fuel smell. The film The Railway Children will always remind me of that time.

The smell in the dining room made me feel sick and I remember being made to eat warmed sardines on toast for tea. I didn’t want to eat it, so the staff pushed my face into it, and the smell of it still revolts me today. That traumatic experience of not being able to hear or understand what was happening was truly heart-wrenching.

The bedtimes were the worst. The dormitory had five little beds in it. The beds had starched sheets, and it felt utterly loveless without my family. It was an incredibly lonely existence, not knowing anyone. When we had to take off our dressing gowns and slippers, we had to roll up the slippers in the dressing gown and put them into a tiny wooden cupboard with a hollowed-out heart-shaped hole (we put our fingers through this to open the door), which was next to our beds. We had to do this whenever we got up or went to bed; it was instilled in us. Discipline was a big part of boarding school routines, and where we might have got away with things at home, that wasn’t the case there. We learnt very quickly to fold up our clothes when we were undressed.

In the very early days of nursery school, I remember the blackboard, which was wall to wall. Windows were on two sides of the room. I could see a play area outside with sandpits, climbing frame, and railings and could see people walking to and from the nursery. I remember sitting on the floor, watching how our names were spelt, but my mind was constantly wandering to the cake tin, which was on a high shelf in a cupboard next to the blackboard. Mum had baked a rich fruit cake for my birthday. It was coated in white royal icing, with silver balls for decoration and was kept in that cupboard. On my birthday the cake was brought down, and candles were placed all around the edges and lit. I loved the candles and the smell when they were blown out. I’ll remember those days for as long as I live and how they reminded me of home.

Birthday cakes are always a special feature of a family gathering, especially for me. I once read an article in The People’s Friend magazine about ‘candles for Kinderfest’, how the baking of cakes and candles for birthdays started in the Middle Ages. Folklore held that on a child’s birthday, evil spirits would try to steal their soul, so burning candles would keep them from harm. After dinner the candles would be blown out, and the smoke would take the children’s wishes to heaven. An interesting concept.

To this day, I still like to bake cakes for my children, grandchildren, and friends. There’s something memorable and nostalgic about every celebration. Memories and family gatherings are important to me, especially now as we are all living our own lives.

Being separated from your parents brings emotional heartache, especially a child’s pain growing up at a boarding school. I have no doubt of the effect it must have had on every child.