So the address that Martin McCullough had dictated was on Uxbridge Road. Daisy had to take the Tube to Shepherd’s Bush Market Station, and in the middle of the Saturday crowd that streamed out on their way to the market grounds, she started asking around for directions to the address that she had written down in Braille. There were always some good souls to be found everywhere, who would manage to tear themselves away from their own pursuits long enough to help a blind lady, even at the exit of a bustling Tube station.
In fact, Daisy asked to be directed a few doors further down the road from where she needed to be, because she wanted to size up the place beforehand. After thanking the last person who had guided her, she turned back and ambled along the busy pavement, crowded with summertime strollers, and she listened intently. She recognized the hippie commune at once. There were kids hanging around left and right of the front door. The door itself was propped open, you could hear youthful voices coming from inside. After a first walk-by, Daisy came back, veered sideways right in front of the open door and walked in. After a few steps into a corridor she could hear that there was another open door on her left, the voices still coming from within, so she veered again.
Tap-tapping spectacularly with her white cane, her face and dark glasses held high, Daisy walked straight into the front parlour of the house and stopped smack in the middle of it. Everyone in the large room fell silent at once. Only the sitar music kept on playing in the background, probably Ravi Shankar on the turntable. The place reeked of pot, patchouli oil and joss sticks; unwashed youthful bodies.
“Excuse me,” Daisy called out, “is this a Lions’ tea shop?”
A few of the youngsters sniggered, then one of them, a boy, said, “No, Granny, this is definitely not a Lions’ tea shop.”
“What is this place called, then?”
Silence. Daisy just stood there, apparently undisturbed. At length another male voice said, “As a matter of fact, if you really want to know, we call this place The Island. It’s a hippie commune…”
“Really? Interesting! Would that be as in Island, the last novel published by Aldous Huxley?”
“Yeah! Yeah! You know about Huxley, then?”
“Of course! I’ve been a great fan of Huxley since I was sixteen…”
Another silence, filled with awe, this time. The same—rather posh—male voice said, “That must have been a long time ago?”
“Oh yes! But you know, Aldous Huxley goes back a long time too. He published his first novel in 1921, just before I was even born!”
“Wow! So how old is he now?”
“Well, I don’t know: he’s dead! He passed away a couple of years ago…”
“Wow!”
The young man softly took Daisy’s arm, led her to the side of the room, by the open windows, and invited her to sit down. “If you don’t mind sitting on a mattress on the floor?”
“Oh no, that’s all right. Just like at a picnic!”
The noises from the street were coming in through the windows, there was traffic and there were throngs of chatty pedestrians. Ravi Shankar was still twanging in the background. The nice young man was very anxious to hear the blind lady out about Huxley. Daisy was amused by the trouble he was taking to hide his polished accent.
“So how old would Huxley have been when he died?”
“I don’t know exactly… but wait, I seem to remember he was almost seventy. Yes, he died in sixty-three…”
“Jesus! That’s old!”
“Yes, but he was something of a hippie all his life. He must have been around sixty when he published The Doors of Perception…”
“Yeah! The Doors of Perception! You know, we’re completely into that. Accessing the deepest levels of awareness of the brain with psychedelic drugs. Turn on, tune in, drop out…”
“And how about Island?”
“Well, I haven’t actually read the book, you know, but with the little group who started this commune a year ago, we were completely into the Huxley novel because of the free love and the Tantric sex practices, apparently.”
“And what does ‘Tantric sex’ involve, if I may ask?”
“Well, erm… it’s like… if they hold back, delay orgasm a bit, a couple can enjoy themselves much longer. Things like that. Tiger and Piglet are very good at those techniques and they teach us…”
“Sounds like fun! But I find it hard to imagine someone like Huxley writing about such things… The man was old enough to be my father!”
“Wow! Then how old are you, anyway?”
“I’m forty-four, going on forty-five, hardly old enough to be your Gran, by the way, but I could definitely be your mother. And I wouldn’t mind a nice boy like you as a son…”
A couple of the other kids were hovering nearby and listening in: they sniggered at Daisy’s last remark. “You can’t see it, Babushka,” a girl said, “but Dragon is blushing to the roots of his hair!”
“Dragon? What a strange name! My name is Daisy, by the way. And you would be?”
“Roxanne… May I ask you something?”
“Ask away, Roxanne!”
“Are you blind since birth? If you don’t mind my asking?”
Another well-bred kid, who forgot for one moment that she was no longer square, straight, and that she was supposed to be rude at all times.
“Yes, blind since birth, and no, I don’t mind. I even appreciate your interest.”
“So how can you picture colours in your head?”
“I can’t. For me colours are just words… The sky is blue, the village green is green, and the green smells of grass!”
Daisy explained more or less what she always told people: how she only knew the world from sounds and smells; from her sense of touch; how important miniatures and models were to her, because she could apprehend them with her fingers to get an idea of the larger objects they represented. She explained the importance of language for the blind, and of the innate sense of orientation we all have.
“When I was at school—a special school for the blind—, they taught us the techniques of mapping knowledge in our minds. It’s like putting different ideas and objects in different rooms of a mental house so that you always know where to find them. Most people have no idea of these techniques, but normal people could benefit from them as well…”
“Why do you refer to us as ‘normal people’? Doesn’t that imply that you are abnormal, somehow? And you were just telling us that you don’t see yourself as inferior?”
“Valid point, Roxanne! But to tell you the truth, when I refer to ‘normal people’, I’m implying that we blind people are superior to you normal people in some ways…”
“Oh really?”
“Yes, and I’d like to give you a little demonstration of my powers… Who wants to play a special kind of blind man’s buff? I need twelve volunteers!”
All the youngsters in the room stirred; just like little children they seemed to be strangely roused by the prospect of playing a game with the blind old lady. Daisy instructed them to sit in a circle around her; then when discussions arose, she insisted that yes, they had to be twelve. A couple of volunteers were sent outside to commandeer a few of the kids hanging around by the front door. In the meantime Daisy had taken place in the middle of the room on a meditation cushion provided by Roxanne, who was very excited by the prospect of this unknown game.
“Now,” Daisy finally instructed, “I want all twelve players to sit around me at an equal distance from one another. The person sitting right across from me goes first. You say: ‘the person sitting to the left of me is…’ and you give me the name of that person. Then that person repeats the phrase and gives the next name. Get it? Never give your own name, only your neighbour’s… Now let’s go!”
And they did what Daisy asked, the names went round the circle with lots of giggling: Dawn, Julian, Felicity, Piglet, Roxanne, Dragon…
“All right,” Daisy said as soon as the circle had been completed, “now we start playing a kind of blind man’s buff… Anyone in the circle can ask me ‘who is sitting two positions to my right?’ or ‘three positions to my left?’ and I have to answer. Who wants to start?”
“I do!” Roxanne immediately cried, sitting somewhat behind Daisy. “Who is sitting four positions to my right?”
“Dawn… and you are Roxanne.”
“That’s right!”
Then a boy sitting exactly on the left asked, “Who is sitting three positions to my left?”
“Dawn again, of course… and you are Bruce.”
“Yeah! Groovy.”
And so it went on for a while, faster and faster. Someone even asked the name of who was sitting eight positions to her left, and after a short hesitation Daisy answered correctly. Then two kids tried to stealthily trade places, but Daisy heard them shuffling and took note. When the others excitedly started asking trick questions, Daisy could still serenely identify the two, especially as it were a boy and a girl who had swapped positions. She turned out to be unbeatable.
Of course, when they had satisfied themselves that Daisy knew them all by name, they wanted to know how she did it. “Well, it’s a simple example of mental mapping… I memorised twelve voices and twelve names, and I pinned them to the twelve hours of the clock-face around me: Amber at twelve o’clock, Dawn at one o’clock, Julian at two, Felicity exactly at my right hand side, at three, and so on and so forth. With that information firmly mapped in my head, it is easy enough to answer all your queries… It looks as if none of you has given me their own name, but that’s irrelevant, because I pinned the voice and the name of each person to one same clock position…”
The hippies were much impressed and immediately started discussing Daisy’s little demonstration. And now that she knew most of them by name, Daisy had no difficulties following what was going on, even though the conversation was rather incoherent. The young people tended to speak in short exclamations: Groovy! Far out! Trippy!
One girl, Morag, said, “I had no idea that being blind is so cool!”
“Yeah! I always pitied the blind, but, you know, maybe they can see more than us?”
“Yeah, yeah, right!”
“Being blind is totally trippy!”
Daisy sat on her cushion in the middle of the room, smiling like a benevolent Buddha, and enjoyed herself immensely. When a few kids asked her to take off her dark glasses, she obliged them without hesitation. Their reactions to her atrophied eyes were frank and brutal, as was always the case with children. At some stage the boy named Dragon, who hadn’t said much, moved closer to her and muttered, “Wait a minute, wait a minute… Daisy, is it okay with you that we talk about you like this? I mean, we’re not hurting your feelings or anything?”
“No, no, not at all, darling. As I already said: I don’t miss what I never had, and I don’t feel diminished in any way.”
At length Daisy decided that it was time to take her leave, as the conversations around her had petered out and she didn’t want to overstay her welcome. She made a point of telling the whole company that she had enjoyed their hospitality very much, and that maybe she would pay them another visit, sometime soon.
Daisy then hinted that she needed help to get to the Tube station, even though she knew her way by now, and that it was only five hundred yards down the street. Dragon immediately volunteered. While they walked hand in hand, Daisy asked, “Dragon is not your real name, I suppose?”
“No. The others call me that, but I see myself more as ‘Dragon-Slayer’… You know when you take an acid trip? Sometimes you can have a bad trip? Well, I’m the one who helps those on a bad trip to stay cool. I help them slay their dragons, see?”
“Does that mean that you’re not high on acid at that moment?”
“Yeah. I always hold back a little… you know?”
“Well, that’s very nice of you, Dragon. I myself am a physiotherapist. I slay the dragons of pain!”
“Cool!”
As they took leave of one another in front of the Tube station, the boy spontaneously folded Daisy in his arms and cuddled her. She responded with a very strong bear hug of her own, almost lifting the slightly built boy from the ground. “At my old school for the blind, we used to call this the ‘heart-throb hug’, because if you do it properly you can feel the other person’s heartbeat throbbing against your own chest.”
When Daisy got home on that Saturday afternoon, her neighbour, Mrs Maurois, came out on the landing and said, “I’ve been waiting for you, dear, there is something in the paper I must absolutely read to you: an article about your exhibition!”
“Oh! great, Mrs Em! Please come in, let’s have it! But first I must put on the kettle, I’m dying for a cup of tea. I have just spent an exhausting couple of hours at a hippie commune in Shepherd’s Bush!”
“Good Lord! What on earth were you doing there, my dear?”
“What indeed? It was very interesting, though…”
“My dear Daisy, as always you never cease to astonish one!”
As soon as they were settled in Daisy’s sitting room with a cup of tea at hand, Mrs Maurois rustled the newspaper. “This is the last edition of the Islington Gazette. I don’t have a subscription myself, but Mrs Bonner from the grocery shop always gives it to me when she’s done with it. And here we have a nice feature about you, our great artist, with a whole page of pictures of your works. It’s called Blind Artist’s Vision.”
“Very catchy title! And the by-line?”
“Erm… Ah, yes: Nick Aaron.”
“That is indeed the man who interviewed me at the opening… Please proceed.”
The old lady read out the story with great relish, as it was very positive and clearly meant to be rather flattering for the artist. But Daisy frowned severely, and when her friend had finished reading, she grumbled, “Once again, the press has published a deplorable piece of prose, Mrs Em…”
“Really? Why on earth should you say that?”
“Well, when we talked at the exhibition this Aaron chap was putting very intelligent questions to me and seemed genuinely interested in my work, so I had high hopes for a competent piece of reporting. But instead, he has produced some tired bromides about the brave blind lady who creates beautiful art against all odds. He has written exactly what the public wants to read and what the Islington Gazette are willing to print. The ‘difficulties’ I’m supposed to have ‘overcome’ exist only in the man’s imagination!”
“Oh Daisy! Sometimes you are too hard on yourself and on others…”
Daisy thanked her neighbour for reading the newspaper piece to her, and then invited her to stay on and watch a rerun of The Avengers on ITV. Mrs Maurois and Daisy were both great fans of John Steed and Emma Peel, and the older lady was a great admirer of Daisy’s expensive television set. Of course, when her blind neighbour had acquired this marvel, she had been baffled. Daisy had explained, “Remember when people used to sit by the wireless in the evenings and listened to blood curdling radio plays? Well, for me an episode of The Avengers is just like that.”
“But you can’t even see what they look like. Steed has a bowler hat that he can use as a throwing weapon, and he has an umbrella with a hidden sword inside, and pretty Emma is always wearing outlandish outfits…”
“I know, I can’t see all that, but I get the idea all the same. And I just adore the witty dialogue, the crazy plots… And later in the evening, I find that the Newsroom broadcasts are often more interesting than the news bulletins on the radio!”
“Well, by that time I’m already in bed and snoring, thank you very much.”
“But that’s the thing Mrs Em, when I want to turn in early, or when I have to go out and I don’t want to miss The Avengers, I can always record it on my tape deck!”
“Good Lord! You mean you can watch it from a tape?”
“No! Of course not! But I can listen to it! No, fancy watching motion pictures from a magnetic tape!”
Daisy didn’t even mention the complicated timer she had to set for the appointed hour, which switched on the tape deck and the TV simultaneously, so that the former could record the latter. All this high-end audio equipment had been acquired and installed only recently: radio tuner, HiFi stereo amplifier and loudspeakers, ditto turntable. Mrs Maurois had compared this new-fangled “audio wall” to the Mission Control room of the American space program in Houston.
“You’re absolutely right, Mrs Em,” Daisy had replied, “this is the nerve centre from where I monitor the modern world. We live in the age of the mass media, and I like to keep abreast of things…”
After the rerun of The Avengers, Daisy was left alone and decided to do some ironing while listening to her brand new Beatles LP: Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band! Mrs Maurois could have stayed, but listening to the Beatles was just one bridge too far for her. “I’m not going to waste my precious time with those long-haired monkeys!”
“But they’re wonderful, Mrs Em! Their lyrics are hilarious!”
“No, thank you all the same!”
So she had fled. Daisy put side two on the turntable and listened to the first song, “Within You Without You”, the one with the sitar music. She unfolded her ironing board and collected her freshly laundered white overcoats from work. She set to do her chore and listened.
Daisy had liked the Beatles as soon as she had become aware of them a couple of years before. That had been at the beginning of the Beatlemania, of course. The Fab Four had taken the land—and the commercial radio stations—by storm: John-Paul-Georges-and-Ringo were suddenly everywhere. And they were fun, you had to admit it, and their hit singles were damn good. Then you had a lot of other so-called Rock bands as well, and even folk singers like Bob Dylan and Donovan, all of them damn good; all pretty exciting in Daisy’s humble opinion.
And so Daisy had embraced the “swinging sixties”, which was highly unusual for someone of her generation, but that was perhaps because she could not see what was going on, she could only hear it on her top notch audio wall, especially on the FM stations on the radio. What you could see was rather off-putting to most people her age: the long hair, short skirts, scruffy looks and so on.
Also, Daisy had just found out that she had come full circle with her sunglasses. In the thirties and forties it had been normal to wear round glasses—Huxley, who was almost blind at the time, had done the same—, but in the fifties it had become out of date. Everybody was wearing butterfly glasses, and Daisy at the time had been hopelessly out of fashion because she kept to her old-style specs when she went out. But now she was fashionable again: even John Lennon, apparently, wore round glasses nowadays.
Then recently the hippies had made their appearance on the scene. Some of them came over from the States, lured by the reputation of “Swinging London”, but most of them were simply local kids who morphed into San Francisco-style hippies, inspired by the “Summer of Love” that was all over the news.
During her lunch breaks in Hyde Park, Daisy witnessed the “sit-ins” of the hippies on Speakers’ Corner to “legalize pot”. She got to know the pungent smell of marijuana and unkempt bodies. The sound of Indian music and of the wooden clogs the girls were wearing. In places like Notting Hill, Petticoat Lane, Piccadilly Circus, the hippies had suddenly taken over the streets. It felt as if there had been an invasion of a benevolent alien race from outer space who had conquered the world and imposed a new order through silly idealistic slogans: “Peace and love”; “Make love, not war.”
Daisy didn’t mind, she thought it was rather fun, even though she didn’t take their ideas too seriously. Her younger colleagues from the group practice where she worked, on the other hand, felt too close for comfort to this younger generation that seemed to dismiss them out of hand.
But even the new ideas coming out of the so-called “youth culture” were not completely alien to Daisy, as she had always kept in touch with the works of Aldous Huxley. Brave New World, which she’d actually read, or rather, that Beatrice had read out to her, had already prepared her for a world where sex and drugs had a free reign. And that was a book from the thirties, that Beatrice and she had read in the late forties! Then there had been The Doors of Perception and Island, the former in the fifties and the latter at the beginning of the sixties. Daisy hadn’t read these, but had heard about them on the radio. Long before the first hippies had appeared on the scene, Huxley’s outlandish ideas were being discussed in dead earnest on the most highbrow literary magazines on the BBC. Listening to these, it had struck Daisy that most of Huxley’s admirers were older than herself, and some of them much younger. But the intellectuals of her own generation, those who had done the actual fighting against Hitler—or had been engaged or married to them—, those did not seem to care much for Huxley’s ideas. She herself being something of an exception…
Daisy was listening to side one of Sgt Pepper for the second time, and she was almost done with ironing her overcoats. She always felt some satisfaction at the crisp and professional feel of her work uniforms. And that was when the telephone started ringing. Before she could pick it up she had to deposit the hot iron in its metal cradle—as a blind person you couldn’t be too careful—and step over to the stereo to turn the volume down. But the phone kept on ringing relentlessly. When Daisy finally picked it up, a male voice exclaimed, “Ah, there you are, Daisy Hayes, you took your time!”
“Well, McCullough, a blind girl has to grope her way to the bloody phone, you know!”
“Oh! keep t