‘OK, then we will.’

And so it was that Darren Whiteside came, for a short while, into our lives.

It was Harry who taught me the rudiments of lip-reading, pushing me every day to improve, to be faster, to be more engaged. He knew that this was the time to do it, before I began to forget, began to expect less of the world. It is a strange sensation, to be newly deaf. For when you open your mouth to speak, nothing happens, there is no sound, and yet it seems there is, because the listeners nod and smile, shake their heads and reply. Simply because you do not hear sound does not mean there is no sound — an aural Schrödinger’s cat, which is all ears. Harry tried to explain this to me, more, I think, to show me that he understood me rather than the reverse.

John — think of jour bedroom at home. I expect it’s full of things. Books, clothes, pictures, he wrote.

‘Shells,’ I said. ‘Lots of shells and pebbles. And bits of boats.’

Right. Lots of things. You haven’t been in your room for a long long time.

I nodded hard, trying not to think of my bedroom in the tiny cottage in Noss Mayo, for if I thought of it it would become a part of this, a part of the bomb and its consequences. I wanted it to remain separate, unsullied.

You haven’t been in there, you haven’t seen it, or picked up the pebbles, or slept there for a long time. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It does. Just like your speech. Even though you can’t hear it, it still exists.

I nodded again, closing my eyes, trying to keep out the familiar pictures. My mother, sitting as ever by my bed, picked up my hand and held it.

So what we’re going to do, you and me and your mother, is make sure you can talk and that you can listen. But instead of hearing with your ears you’re going to hear with your eyes. And what did the doctor say about your eyes?

I smiled. ‘That I could see the needle in the haystack.’

Right.

So every day I shuffled out of my room, helped by my mother, and went up in the beige battered lift the five storeys to Harry’s room. It was tiny, filled with books and papers and ringed, tannin-stained china mugs balancing on piles of magazines. Harry would be sitting there, hands tucked under his pale double chin, smiling, a blackboard and chalk behind him. I was given passages to read aloud, I’d watch Harry speaking single words, then phrases and then sentences. I practised fricatives and aspirates, practised saying ‘church, ‘thing’, ‘thump’, ‘shirt’, ‘funny’, words that worked my lips.

Harry’s approach was, I now realise, holistic. Not only did I have to be able to use my eyes to hear, I had to be able to speak clearly, not be allowed to become lazy so my words slurred and jumbled. I had to learn to read people’s faces as well as their lips, be able to read their whole bodies. I had to be able to write clearly, know how things were spelled so I could crack the shell of their sound on my teeth. He taught me to modulate my voice, taught me not to shout (I had been yelling for months) but rather to pitch my voice like a ball at the right height for the listener to catch. He had to make sure that I was learning all these things equally so that I was armed as well as I was able. Harry was a gentle man, a gentle teacher. Like Hyacinth, he had learned to read my face and he knew when I was struggling, when I was bored, when I’d slipped away and was thinking of other things. But he was relentless: like the others he made me mind, so that I would ask people to repeat things, ask them to turn their faces to me, rather than mentally shrugging and turning away from conversation.