‘Some cunt from Preston,’ was the explanation.
Now, deaf as I am, I find this funny, whereas ‘“I see,” said the blind man, who couldn’t see at all’, while true enough, is sad. I knew an admirable British jazz pianist who
was blind and was led about by a devoted dog called Max. Max led him on to the stage and he sat beneath the piano until he’d finished. Max also looked after him when he was drunk, a fairly frequent occurrence. ‘What,’ I used to ask myself, ‘do blind-from-birth drunks experience?’
Dogs are not only necessary but wonderfully sympathetic companions to their blind owners. I was once asked to present one to its new charge in a distant South London publichouse. Another blind man there, sitting by his Labrador, told me of an additional advantage. ‘People,’ he said, ‘will come up and pat it and say “What a lovely animal”, but they never approach you to compliment you on your white stick!’
I only heard one, for me, acceptable ‘blind’ joke – hopelessly non-PC but at any rate funny. It was part of the material of the great Morecambe and Wise.
WISE: What would you do if you found a man in bed with your wife?
MORECAMBE: I’d kick his dog and break his white stick!
But deafness? I’ve been deaf now for many years, although initially only slightly and probably the result of singing in front of quite loud jazz bands. My wife noticed it first as I was increasingly complaining that everybody had taken to mumbling. In the end she insisted I have my ears tested at a surgery famous for its specialization in this area. Emerging from the nearby tube station I discovered on the pavement a series of green-painted footsteps leading to the clinic. This reminded me of the white pebbles dropped by the Babes in the Wood to guide them home if they were
lost in the forest. I didn’t need them then, nor indeed even now, but I found them both touching and funny.
The doctor tested my hearing, an earplug in alternate ears, a muff in the other, starting with quite loud and deep sounds, but ascending in both tests from a bass note up to a high level, not quite as high as a dog whistle but just as inaudible to me. Afterwards he said, ‘Yes. You have what we call ski-slope hearing.’ He let me see the chart he’d been marking which showed a fairly steep slope on the graph paper. ‘It’ll probably get worse,’ he said unhelpfully, and indeed it has.
You may wonder, and many have asked, how I can continue to sing. The answer is that most bands these days have monitors, loudspeakers in front of them, so that they can hear what the rest of the band is doing. They are not only adjustable but separate from the house system. However, even without a monitor I can manage. This is because I can hear myself, know my own material, and can take in a considerable part of the musicians’ contribution anyway.
A number of other jazzmen have become either somewhat deaf or deafer over the years, but rock-singers, who mostly prefer enormously loud, diaphragm-vibrating amplification, suffer from the effect much earlier. Pete Townshend is a case in point. Jazzbos are lucky in comparison.
So I went a few days later to a private hearing-aid specialist, a very encouraging and jovial man in Harley Street. He too tested me on the ‘raise your hand when you can still hear the ascending notes’ and then fitted me with a comparatively primitive device with a nozzle which was activated by switching on an adjustable plasticbattery on the end of a tube that snaked over the ear.
‘Now you’ll be able to hear the birds,’ he promised and
was proved right, as I walked along Regent’s Park looking for a taxi. (Up until then I might have concluded the only birds left were crows and ducks.) On the downside I could also hear trafficbut for a bit my wife and friends were equally pleased at the improvement, not only for me but for them too.
That must have been at least fifteen years ago. And indeed it soon got worse. The Harley Street man closed his clinic some time later (a great relief to my budget) and I went ‘public’. I saw a doctor at St Mary’s, Paddington, who sent me down to the technicians’ department, ‘audiology’ it’s called, in the basement of another building in that enormous warren I now know so well.
In the interim the devices had improved. They took a cast of both ears and, instead of the teat of yore, produced two snug moulds. Once again the silent hedgerows renewed their song, but finally my hearing began to fade again.
Well, not in all circumstances. In a room with just one or two people, it’s not too bad. On the other hand, in a car or taxi in movement, it’s pretty hopeless, except at trafficlights (something it often takes some time to convince most cabbies of, who continue to tell, and worse, ask me things while in motion; and despite, usually in the case of older men, being somewhat deaf themselves). But the worst is in situations where there is a loud volume of noise. Pubs, especially with techno and particularly when full of football fans half-pissed because their team has won or lost or, worse still, is winning or losing live on a huge TV, are a disaster. But unless somebody recognizes me and comes up to remind me insistently (and I’ve usually forgotten) that we met forty years ago, or to ask whether I am still working, or to say they haven’t seen me on the box recently (the only
real
proof
for many that one exists), I’m in the clear. If not, many refuse to take in that I’m deaf and some take offence, believing I’m faking it (true, I’m afraid, in some cases). Evelyn Waugh, I read somewhere, rejecting hearing aids which, like Picasso and jazz, struck him as ‘too modern’, relied on an ear-trumpet, but would discard it if bored. Turning off is one of the few bonuses available, but I’d sooner hear properly, of course.
Parties, book launches and gallery openings are impossible, although I still go to some of them for friendly or professional reasons. When approached, my subterfuge is to nod and smile, which usually works, but is a disaster if my interrogator tells me of a crisis in their own lives. Their much-loved mother, they might tell me, has just died, or their husband has an incurable disease. A smile then, still less a remark such as ‘You must be pleased’, is not what’s needed and, if their hurt or angry reaction proves I’ve put my ear in it, I confess to my deafness, make them repeat what they said until I’ve understood and apologize profusely. In general, though, I find it better to confess to my disability before they address me, and point at my now two appliances to convince them. Incidentally, few hearing people notice these unless they are whistling, but we, who wear them, take them in instantly.
Another side effect is to mis-hear something and misinterpret what was said. If I realize that I have misunderstood, I say, ‘Surely you didn’t tell me’ – and then repeat what is clearly absurd. This frequently gets a laugh as I intend. Mostly I get the vowels right, the consonants wrong.
But if what’s been said sounds more or less rational, my reaction appears simply dotty. In the early days of John Chilton’s Feetwarmers, they kept a small red notebook called
‘George’s deafies’ and when a fair number had accumulated would read them out to me. One example:
THE MANAGER OF THE ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL: Mr Melly, is your suite comfortable?
ME: What’s he want?
MANAGER(
perplexed
): What does who want?
ME: The Chief Constable.
Sometimes these mis-hearings remind me of one of the many games played seriously by the surrealists and guaranteed to produce often apt, yet absurd, results of a certain poetic resonance. An anthology of these seductive distractions is to be found in
Surrealist Games
, a small boxed book published by the invaluable Redstone Press.
Here, with their instructions, are two variants:
One: ‘Questions and Answers’.
For two or more players
.
A question is written down, the paper folded to conceal it from the next player, who writes an answer. The paper is unfolded to reveal the result. Remarkable facts result. Here are a couple of startling examples:
Q: What is reason?
A: A cloud eaten by the moon.
Q: Why go on living?
A: Because at prison gates only the keys sing.
The second game, ‘The Exquisite Corpse’, is, I believe, the progenitor of all the rest. Here are the editor’s somewhat longer instructions:
For a minimum of three players
.
The players sit around a table and each writes a definite or indefinite article and an adjective, making sure their neighbours can’t see them. The sheets are folded so as to conceal the words and passed round to the next player. Each player then writes a noun and conceals it, and the process is repeated with a verb, another definite or indefinite article and adjective, and finally another noun. The paper is unfolded and then read out…
It is in effect a variant of the childhood game of consequences. A few examples. The first, by no means the most surprising, but which nevertheless gave the game its name, is
The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.
And a sample of others:
The wounded women disturb the guillotine with blond hair
.
The avenged topaz shall devour with kisses the paralytic of Rome
.
My wife Diana is not only decidedly not a surrealist, but equally is irritated by my ‘deafies’, although occasionally she is tricked into a frosty smile. I suspect her reason, probably accurate, is that she imagines I exploit them to amuse others, whereas she has been exposed to them for many years. To live with someone deaf is, I realize, a constant strain. We meet largely at suppertime or when we go out together for some joint reason. Insofar as I know, she is never disloyal about me to others except perhaps (pure speculation) her intimate circle of mostly women friends, nor I to her with the same proviso. None the less, my deafness and its concomitant
misunderstanding of essential instructions are enough to try her patience. This is how she puts it: ‘I have to shout, and it makes me sound bad-tempered and then I
become
bad-tempered!’
This, I can confirm, is true enough.
The malicious fairies of the mind are more insidious than the coarse goblins of the lower intestines and bladder. With great effort they may be kept at bay, but never defeated. Their earliest tactic is the sudden obliteration of names and, less often, of words. There is no time limit here – sometimes I find myself incapable of remembering the name of someone from the distant past, but later, usually in the small hours, it comes to me from the increasingly disorganized filing system of the mind. My favourite comedian of all time, Max Miller – a name, by the way, which has never eluded me – corroborates this. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he’d confide to the audience, ‘I’m going to sing a song I’ve written. Mind you, it’s not finished. I’ve got the beginning and I’ve got the end (long pause); it’s the middle bit I’m after. It’ll come to me in the night (another pause)… the middle bit.’
Of course the audience, seduced by the wicked twinkle in his eye and knowing that his meaning was open to sexual interpretation, would begin to laugh. ‘No,’ he’d repeat, ‘in the night, the middle bit…,’
And then, as was his wont, he’d turn on them for misinterpreting him. ‘Go on,’ he’d protest in mock indignation. ‘Go on, make something of that… you filthy lot, you’re the sort that get me into trouble…’
Oh Maxie! My ‘middle bits’ are less, far less open to misinterpretation, but none the less irritating.
At parties, however small or large, I often forget the names of two people I know well who are waiting to be introduced to each other. ‘You know each other?’ I ask them desperately. ‘No,’ they tell me.
Wally Fawkes, our best classic jazz clarinettist, cartoonist and caricaturist, has a typically throwing solution. He boldly asks them their names, and sometimes, usually with irritation, they tell him. His reaction is extreme congratulatory enthusiasm. ‘You’re right!’ he cries, like a schoolmaster exhilarated by a correct answer from an otherwise dim pupil. ‘You’re right!’ I’ve tried this gambit but am greeted merely with puzzled irritation. Only Wally can pull it off!
It’s not only people who escape through the mesh of my mental net; plays, films, books, much-admired artists, famous jazz musicians may all swim through the wide unravelled holes, even when I knew the exact answer a moment before.
The most worrying manifestation, however, is when the failing mind, like a kind of windscreen-wiper, sweeps across leaving the glass entirely clean to reveal nothing more than a straight road ahead with identical semi-detached houses on either side.
Not long ago I read a newly published novel which, according to Diana, I thoroughly enjoyed. Later, when the
Sunday Telegraph
asked me to name my ‘book of the year’, I picked it up as though I’d never read it before – I’d seen it all right because my wife had brought it back from the book launch when I was out of London – so I read it, with mounting admiration and enthusiasm, and told Diana it was certainly, despite several other contestants, my choice. Diana said I hadn’t reacted quite so positively when I’d first read
it. But I had absolutely no recollection of having done so at all – none!
This happens quite often, if not so dramatically. Some of it – ‘You never told me that!’ ‘Yes, I did’ – may be due to being increasingly Mutt and Jeff (cockney rhyming slang), but not, as in this case, a whole book!
I used to call it ‘the gaslight syndrome’.
Gaslight
was a play, and later on two films, which I remember clearly, about a seemingly lovable but in fact evil (late-Victorian) husband who wants for his own nefarious reasons to drive his wife mad. When he turns up the gaslights in the sealed attic, while his wife is alone, those downstairs are mysteriously dimmed. Happily, insofar as I recall, a friendly detective believes her and unmasks her ingenious tormentor.
In consequence, when confronted by Diana in the past I would suggest that, not only was she lying, but she had adopted the methods of the double-faced spouse.