II 1939: How Daisy met Ralph
Going places can be a bit daunting. There’s a reason why some people always spend their summer holidays at the same family pension in Brighton, booking early to make sure they’ll have the very same rooms as they had the year before.
For the blind, of course, the unknown is even more daunting than for normal people. Each time they go to a new place, they enter a netherworld and have to navigate the mists of a new territory on trust alone. But at sixteen, going on seventeen, Daisy was only too eager to take on such challenges.
As she and her mother stood waiting at the front door of Bottomleigh House, the monumental portico with its classical columns filled the older woman with awe and foreboding. For the young girl, who was not even aware of the splendour of the place, it was the twinkle of the old-fashioned bell that made her heart leap with anticipation.
“I don’t understand why you can’t come with us to Brighton this year, as usual. What was Daddy thinking!”
“Maybe: that you two are going to have a wonderful time without me. I’m sure he was just thinking of having a second honeymoon!”
“Oh hush, Daisy… such rot! You don’t even know what you’re talking about!”
“Hush, Mummy, I’m a big girl now… I wouldn’t mind a little bit of romance of my own, provided I can find Mister Right.”
This was said very airily, but Daisy felt far less self-assured than she wanted her mother to believe. Boys were a great mystery to her, the object of much speculation, fantasising and soul-searching. At school she and the other blind girls discussed the topic endlessly, and the consensus was that one was better off without Boys. If only you could stay at school forever, spend your whole life living exclusively with other blind girls… But still.
Presently the door opened, and Daisy and her mother were ushered into the entrance hall by a footman of some sort. Daisy could hear their footfalls and the tapping of her cane echoing through what must have been a wide and high hall. Breathing in deeply, she could smell the musty odour of antiques typical of such a place. Then their hosts stepped forward and introduced themselves as “Mr and Mrs Prendergast”. This charmingly mild-mannered couple led their two guests to what they referred to as the “family living room” and immediately proceeded to “call the children.” Shortly a noisy gang of young people invaded the room. They were about Daisy’s age by the sound of it, and were first introduced collectively as “the gang”. Too many names and too many handshakes followed at too fast a clip: William, Cedric, Margaret, Joan. They were not siblings but more or less cousins. Daisy didn’t say a word, but felt to her great despair that she was blushing to the roots of her hair.
Then there was one Beatrice, who stepped forward and kissed her on the cheek, which pleased Daisy immensely. At her school she and her best friends were hugging all the time: you knew one another by touch, and particularly by smell. It’s like when you visit other people's homes: you’ll notice without even trying that each house has its own distinctive smell. Beatrice smelled very nice indeed. And then Ralph was called forward by his father, who introduced him especially as her host, as he was the eldest son of the house, “If you need anything, you must ask Ralph.”
“Welcome to the madhouse,” Ralph said pleasantly, shaking her hand.
Daisy didn’t reply, as she didn’t know what to say. She only smiled, unwittingly unleashing the full power of seduction of her pearly teeth and lovely dimples.
Tea was served, accompanied by lively conversation from all quarters; Daisy did not participate much, speaking only briefly when spoken to, just like her mother. The young people were talking without a pause, mainly among themselves, with a mixture of absurd humour and aggressive teasing that relied on a lot of innuendo to deliver its punches. It was going to take some doing to get this lively “gang” figured out, but Daisy, sitting silently in the middle of the hubbub, was already working on it.
After tea she was shown to her room, accompanied by her mother. Very thoughtfully her hostess had given her a room right at the top of the first flight of stairs, “I hope that will make it easier for you to find your way around the house.” Left alone with her mother, Daisy made a quick assessment of her room, touching everything, which still made her mother edgy, though by now she knew better than to remonstrate. She helped her daughter unpack her suitcase and put away her things. Then it was time to say goodbye, as she was to leave her on her own at Bottomleigh House. Mrs Hayes choked up and became a bit tearful. “Don’t worry, Mummy,” Daisy said. “I’ll be fine, these are nice people, I intend to have a good time.”
She had been invited by the Prendergast family to spend two weeks here at Bottomleigh House, and for her it was a first, a leap into an unknown world. Her own family were not gentry at all. Her father was a bank manager, who happened to have done a very good job at managing Mr Prendergast’s finances in difficult times. But as Daddy always said, “All it needs is to focus on the assets, only the assets.” Daisy had no idea what that meant, but anyway, this had led the master of Bottomleigh House to become aware of Daisy’s existence. He had been quite charmed when he had met her for the first time, and forthwith he had issued an invitation.
And now, as soon as she had finished waving goodbye to her mother at the front door and the taxi had disappeared at the end of the drive, Ralph appeared at her side and offered to show her around the house. “Oh yes,” Daisy said, “that would be very useful, thank you.” The other young people were no longer there. They were nowhere to be heard.
“I must say, Ralph, you’re being an impeccable host. But then of course those are your father’s orders…”
“Well, Daddy has the wisdom never to give me orders that I wouldn’t obey with great pleasure. That is, during the summer hols, at least.”
“Aha… So: now I must ask you to take my hand and hold me close to you, I’m afraid that’s the way it’s done with a blind person.”
“Very well,” Ralph replied, and they proceeded to explore the ground floor room by room, hand in hand. This of course was the part of the house where the guests were expected to move around freely; all the bedrooms upstairs Daisy didn’t need to know. In each new chamber, Daisy insisted on being led around the four walls, then wanted to go crisscross all over the place. While exploring like this she asked where the windows were and where the doors; what pieces of furniture were there. She mapped each new space in her mind, and its position with respect to the rest of the house. Ralph would have found this task excruciatingly tedious, if it had not been for the novelty of getting to know a blind girl, and a very pretty one at that. It took a couple of hours. From then on Daisy knew as well how Ralph smelled. Now she had been properly introduced to Beatrice and him. Four to go.
After that, dinner and the evening were pleasant and uneventful. At the dinner table the young people were on their best behaviour, and Daisy was introduced to half a dozen grownup guests; there were also younger children, who in this house were allowed to dine with the adults. Among the grownups was Ralph’s elder sister, Maud, and among the children his little sister, Margery.
The table conversations were dominated by the adults, but not entirely devoid of interest. Ralph’s parents were very political, Labourites of long standing; they invited people from all walks of life to the manor for summer parties where social utopias were dreamed up and discussed endlessly. When you heard such ideas debated for the very first time, as was the case for Daisy, it was actually rather thrilling.
The evening was spent mostly listening to a play on the wireless, a murder mystery, which Daisy found very agreeable as it allowed her to relax without having to make an effort at conversation. And that was precisely why her hostess, Mrs Prendergast, had chosen this form of entertainment on this occasion.
There had been one awkwardness, however, but Daisy was not aware of it. Her mother had prepared an evening dress for her and instructed her to wear it at dinner without fail. “Put this on as soon as you hear the gong…” But at Bottomleigh, one did not change for dinner, at least not in the summer, and Daisy’s attire had been a bit jarring. She was overdressed, but showing too much of her shoulders and bosom, which had attracted a great deal of attention, from male and female fellow-dinner-guests alike. No one had said a word about it, of course, and Daisy had remained blissfully unaware of her faux pas.
The next morning Daisy had no trouble finding her way to the breakfast room, with a little help from her cane. But when she entered the room, she found it very quiet and wondered if she had overslept, even though the alarm on her tactile travel clock had gone off at the appointed hour. Then her hostess cried, “Daisy! I was waiting for you. Good morning, dear. Did you sleep well? Come and sit by my side.”
“Am I late, Mrs Prendergast?”
“No, no, not at all, let me serve you something. What do you want?”
“Where is everybody? I mean, where are the others?”
“I’m afraid they’ve already left. They seem to have left very early today. You know: eager to go on the adventure of the day… I’m dreadfully sorry about their lack of consideration for you as a guest. I will certainly remonstrate with them…”
“Oh no, please, Mrs Prendergast, that would not be helpful at all. I’m sure we’ll get along just fine if we give it some time…”
“Well, that’s awfully gracious of you, my dear Daisy. In the meantime I’m sure we can find something interesting for you to do today. Do you ride horses? Or would you like to learn? We have excellent stables, we can find a suitably compliant mount for you, and surely riding is something a blind person can do with great pleasure…”
“Well thank you, Mrs Prendergast; it’s very kind of you to offer, but no. I’ve tried riding at school and I didn’t like it much, I’m afraid. I find horses, and even ponies, rather unwieldy and I don’t like the way they smell.”
“Well, in these parts that’s a most unusual point of view, I must say…”
Mrs Prendergast was a bit annoyed and wondering what else she could offer this rather peculiar girl, when her son appeared at the breakfast table. “Ralph!” she cried, “are you still there? Didn’t you leave with your gang this morning? What on earth is going on!”
Ralph kissed his mother and greeted Daisy with a big smile, which she of course could not see. “I gave them the slip this morning. Serves them right. Last night they kept banging on about the fact that they didn’t want Daisy to join us on our daily outing and that having her along would cramp our style and spoil all the fun. So they decided to go bicycling, because you can’t be expected to take a blind guest along on a bicycling trip. I hope you won’t take this too personally, Daisy…”
“Oh no, Ralph, I quite understand. I was just saying to your mother: we must give it some time.”
“Exactly! So I decided to give them the slip and spend my day with you. I must entertain our charming new guest!”
His mother remarked that Daisy and she were just discussing the subject of entertainment, but that poor Daisy didn’t care much for riding. “Well, Daisy,” said Ralph, “maybe you yourself have a better idea? What is it that you’d like to do today?”
The young girl cocked her head as if she were looking sideways at the boy who was taking a seat next to her at the table. But in fact she was directing her ear straight at him and trying to gauge his expression, his mood, by hearing. “What I really would like to do today is to learn to ride a bicycle.”
“You mean like riding along on a tandem?”
“Oh no, I don’t suppose you have one of those anyway. I mean a normal bicycle. Do you think you could teach me?”
The young man sitting next to her gasped, then reflected for a few seconds, and said slowly, “Well… yes, why not, I guess I could do that, but it might take a little longer than one day.”
“Then let’s do it!” the girl exclaimed. “Let’s start straight after breakfast!”
Ralph took Daisy to the metalled courtyard in front of the garages, retrieved a smallish women’s bike that had belonged to Maud when she was thirteen or fourteen years old, and some tools. He then proceeded to unscrew the pedals, and he bound the pedal crank to the frame of the bike with a piece of string. Next he lowered the saddle and secured it in such a position that the girl could easily stand on her feet while straddling the saddle. All the while Daisy crouched next to him and explored the bicycle with both hands, going over the tubes of the frame, feeling the tyres and poking at the spokes. In the end her fingertips were a bit greasy and Ralph offered a clean rag.
By then he had completed the adjustments. “Et voilà, a nice draisine for you, a dandy horse, so that you can learn to ride with both feet on the ground.”
“My dear Ralph, you’re a real genius at mechanics!” Daisy cried.
“So you know the difference between a draisine and a bicycle?”
“Of course! I may be blind, but I’m not retarded!”
Ralph thought, “Ooh, the girl can be prickly!”
“No, but seriously,” he persisted, “just out of curiosity. How do you happen to know such things?”
“Same as you, I guess. I read about it in the encyclopedia. We have a Braille encyclopedia at school and I read that from A to Z. And I have an excellent memory, so I know everything this particular encyclopedia has to tell about the world.”
“Well I must say, you seem to be something of a genius yourself!”
“No! That’s my point: apart from being blind, I’m just an ordinary person. I read books and magazines—in Braille—, I listen to the wireless, and I know what’s going on in the world because I’m interested in things. Just like you. Besides, have you ever seen a real dandy horse yourself?”
“As a matter of fact, I have. At the Science Museum!
“Oh! Right. Lucky you.”
“But I get your point, Daisy. I was just being a bit nosy, sorry.”
“Oh, but don’t apologize, please! Feel free to ask anything you want. Now what do we do with this dandy horse?”
Ralph thought it over for a second. “Actually, the first thing I want you to do is to take off your glasses and hand them over to me for safekeeping. I’m afraid you might fall and break them and cut yourself.”
Without a word, Daisy took off her glasses and revealed the empty buttonholes of her crippled eyes in their full horror. Ralph was taken aback and fascinated at the same time. He started counting to ten in his mind while still peering intently at the ghoulish slits. Even the eyelids were atrophied; there were no eyelashes. After counting to ten, Ralph told himself, “All right, I’m over it now.” Then he reflected that the sight of Daisy’s eyes was disturbing and thrilling at the same time. She looked so naked. It was almost as if she’d taken off her clothes for him. There was something uncannily intimate about this situation.
“Is everything all right?” Daisy asked.
“Yes, yes. I just had to swallow hard, that’s all.”
“Funny, I didn’t hear anything.”
“No, I meant: swallow hard mentally.”
“Oh! Good. So what do I do now?”
Ralph made Daisy sit on the saddle and put her hands on the handlebars, and then her fingers on the brake levers; then he explained how it all was supposed to work. “Now I just want you to step forwards and try to steer left and right and test those brakes. There’s enough room in this courtyard, and I’ll give a shout when you must come back.” And so the lessons began.
By the time they heard the gong and had to stop to go inside for lunch, Daisy was already able to coast nicely after giving a few swift kicks on the ground with her feet, then letting both legs dangle left and right. She was getting the hang of it and feeling quite exhilarated by the progress she had made. But to achieve this, she’d had to work relentlessly. She had kept at it for several hours now, and Ralph’s voice had become hoarse from guiding her movements. Standing in a central spot of the garage courtyard, he had kept shouting instructions, “A little to the left, you’re almost there. Brake! Brake! Turn around and come back to me…” It had required his utmost concentration and he felt exhausted. On the way to the kitchen entrance of the house, holding her hand and handing back her glasses, he told Daisy, “I’m amazed at how well you are doing. I expected you would have much more trouble with your sense of balance.”
“Oh no, there’s nothing wrong with my cochlea. People tend to overestimate the role their eyesight plays in keeping their balance. At school they told us that, in fact, the inner ear takes over completely, the moment normal people stop looking at their own feet!”
At the lunch table there was still no sign of the gang. Ralph’s father, having been told by his wife what was going on, appeared to be quite angry about it. “I wager that Cookie is the instigator of this caper, as usual! Ralph?”
“I am not at liberty to tell, Sir.”
“You don’t need to. I know enough! The presence of that girl spells trouble each and every time…”
“Well, I beg you not to be too harsh on Cookie this time, father. The truth of the matter is that we had a lover’s tiff, Cookie and I, if lover is the correct word in this case. Yesterday we had a falling out that led us to end our relationship, if a relationship is really what we had… Anyway, this morning Cookie was in a murderous mood so I gladly let her go with the whole gang. I gave them my blessing.”
“So you are responsible, then. Bad show of hospitality towards our charming new guest!”
“Oh, but I have been making amends to Daisy… I have been teaching her to ride a bicycle!”
“I beg your pardon? My poor Daisy, what has this young blackguard been subjecting you to? Are you certain you can do this? It seems a bit dangerous for a blind person, if I may say so.”
“Well, don’t blame Ralph, Sir. It was entirely my idea. I see it as an interesting challenge. I would like to go bicycling in the countryside with the others, just tagging along on the open road, navigating by the sounds the others make. It should be feasible…”
“You make it sound quite easy, but have you ever done this kind of thing before?”
“Bicycling, no. But navigating by sound, that we blind people do all the time. The thing is, when we go tap-tapping with our white cane, we’re not only probing our way, but also listening to the reflections of the sound we produce… It’s called ‘echolocation’. That’s why I believe that bicycling should be quite feasible for me.”
“Very well. But be careful you two, I beg of you.”
When they went back to the courtyard in front of the garages after lunch, hand in hand, Daisy asked Ralph, “Who is Cookie? Do I know her?”
“Yes, that’s what we always call Margaret. I have no idea why we call her that…”
“I hope your falling out had nothing to do with me…”
“Oh no! Don’t worry, it had been brewing for a long time. You just happened to arrive at a very bad moment, that’s all. But I’m sure everything is going to be all right and that we’re all going to be good friends in the end.”
Now Ralph untied the crank and fastened the pedals back on his sister’s bicycle. The saddle was repositioned just a little bit higher, and Daisy was to pedal in earnest for the first time. With Ralph holding the saddle and running next to her, she managed a wobbly start. Then Ralph let go of the saddle for a very short while, and then a little longer, and suddenly Daisy was off. It was exactly how little Margery had done it only a few years before. Then Daisy almost crashed into a garage door and Ralph was shouting “Brake! Brake! Feet on the ground!” Daisy stopped just in time, then toppled over with her machine, but she didn’t hurt herself.
By the end of the afternoon, after she had again kept at it relentlessly, Daisy could ride a bicycle. As she was rather tall, Ralph had soon decided to abandon Maud’s old machine and had fetched a full-size model that was kept at the disposal of grownup female guests. His pupil fitted the bill exactly. Then, as soon as she had become used to that one, he brought out his own bike, went to the house to get a deck of playing cards, fixed a card to his frame in such a way that it flapped against the spokes of his rear wheel, and tested that it made a good sound.
Daisy said, “Another stroke of genius! You’re a real boffin.”
“It’s funny that you should say that. Normally William is our great boffin, but in his absence I suppose I’ll have to play the understudy.”
And now that everything was ready, Ralph said to Daisy, “Follow me, keep right behind me, we’re going for a proper ride.”
The card produced an astonishingly loud rattling noise and Ralph started riding down the driveway that led from the front of Bottomleigh House to the main road, all the while casting glances behind him to make sure that Daisy kept up with him. It went astonishingly well and they picked up some speed. Suddenly Daisy started to shout with girlish excitement, “Ralph! Ralph! I’m actually riding a bicycle! I’m free! I’m flying! Yahoo!”
Relentlessly they spent the next hour riding up and down the driveway, a distance of about five hundred yards. Then, at a given moment, the gang turned up at the main gate, finally back from their day-long trip in the countryside. They were quite astounded at the sight of the blind girl chasing after Ralph at breakneck speed on her bicycle, shouting “Tally-ho!” at the top of her lungs, and they felt at once that it was they, not them, who had missed all the fun that day.
Before they finally went back into the house to prepare for dinner, after the gong had sounded, Ralph took Daisy aside and told her, “Today there’s no need to change, Daisy, just keep to the kind of thing you’re wearing now, we’re having an informal evening.”
“Oh dear, did I make a fool of myself last night?”
“No! No. On the contrary, you looked very fetching, you made a great impression.”
“You’re astoundingly bad at lying, Ralph. I like that about you.”
That night, as Daisy was preparing to go to bed, there was a knock at her door. She just had time to put her dark glasses back on before the door opened and a girl’s voice inquired, “Can we come in? Are you decent and all that?”
“Yes, yes, do come in,” she replied. Then she heard the rustle of several people pouring into her room.
“It’s dark in here!” one of the boys said. “Were you already asleep?”
“No, but I’m blind, remember? I don’t need any light.”
The switch by the door produced its characteristic click.
“We would like to ask you something.” the first girl’s voice said.
“Who is this, by the way?”
“It’s me, Cookie, well, Margaret, and the rest of the gang.”
“Ah yes, Cookie! I was wondering: why does everyone call you that?”
“Well, you see, my mother’s an American. And when I was a little girl, wherever we went visiti