Deaf Sentence by David Lodge

Author:David Lodge
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Aging, Fiction, Literary, Older deaf people, Psychological, Fiction - General, General, Marital conflict
ISBN: 9780143116059
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Published: 2009-09-29T07:00:00+00:00

7th December. I couldn’t get away from Christmas even at the lip-reading class. This afternoon Beth handed out questions on a piece of paper which we had to ask each other and answer without voice: Have you started your Christmas shopping? Do you get up early on Christmas morning? Do you visit family and friends at Christmas? What present would you like to receive this Christmas? Do you have a turkey for Christmas dinner? etc. Then she read without voice a magazine article about the biggest Christmas pudding in the world, and handed round pictures of this gross and repulsive object. In the tea break Marjorie reminded us that we should put our names down on a list if we wanted to join the Christmas lunch party at the end of term. She left the list on a table and I carefully avoided going anywhere near it.

Fortunately it wasn’t all Christmas. We had an exercise in small groups involving homophenes - the deafie’s equivalent to homophones, words which look alike on the lips but have a different meaning, like mark, park and bark, or white, right and quite, rewire and require. We had to make up sentences using one of these words and lip-speak them to the group. I made up a sentence using all the words in two sets, ‘Quite right, the white room requires rewiring,’ which of course nobody could lip-read, and there was much protesting laughter when they gave up and I said it with voice. I was justly punished for showing off in this fashion by the next exercise, a quiz, to be completed in pairs, called Animal Crackers, which was a list of words with letters missing which themselves spelled out the name of an animal. Thus the solution to Ball - - - ing was Ballbearing, Bl - - t - - was Blotter, and Pu- i - - was pumice. It reminded me of puzzles in the comics which I read as a very young child, but I found the exercise surprisingly difficult, while Gladys, the elderly lady I was paired with, was an absolute wizard at it, and guessed nearly all of them before I did. She told me she is eighty-six.

It is too early to tell how far these classes will improve my ability to use lip-reading in real conversations, and I doubt whether it could ever help me much in situations where there is a low level of redundancy and predictability in the flow of information. Nevertheless I find the class a soothing and refreshing interlude in the week, a welcome suspension of the troubled introspection for which retirement gives so much scope, and a distraction from the anxieties of my personal life at the moment. Above all, it is wonderfully relaxing to be in a social environment where you don’t have to feel in the least foolish or worried or apologetic about being deaf.

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