B.Y THE SAME AUTHOR:
EMMA AND I
EMMA V.I.P.
by
SHEILA HOCKEN
LONDON
VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD
1980
Copyright @ Sheila Hocken 198o
ISBN 0 575 029I4 5
Published by arrangement with
Sphere Books Ltd.
WAVERLEY PAUNICH)AL LIBRAR
C,T 2,3.to.goj
-4w
Printed in Great Britain at
The Camelot Press Ltd, Southampton
This book is dedicated to my husband, Don,
without whose completefaith and encouragement
I would never have written a word
I
ILLUSTRATIONS
Following page 44
Sheila and Don (Syndication International)
Sheila and Emma (Eddie Barradine)
Sheila, Don, Emma, Betty Greene and Zelda (Harold
Greene)
Betty and Harold Greene (Roger M. Willgoose)
Sheila, Emma, Kerensa, Christmas 1977 (Sheffield
Newspapers Ltd)
Signing Sessions (Nottingharn Post, Millington & Chapman)
Following page 76
Ziniba
Ming (Sheila Hocken)
Holly (Oliver Hatch)
Sheila, Emma, Kerensa (Roger M. Willgoose)
Buttons (Roger M. Willgoose)
Bracken and Emma (Roger M. Willgoose)
Following page io8
Sheila, Emma, Kerensa, summer 1979 (Eddie Barradine)
Kerensa and Emma (Roger M. Willgoose)
Bracken, Buttons and Emma (Roger M. Willgoose)
Colonel and Mrs Clay with Emma's mother (rorkshire
Post)
Bracken with his dumb-bell (Roger M. Willgoose)
7
Following page I72
Kerensa and friends (Oliver Hatch)
Sheila and Kerensa out walking with the dogs
(Oliver Hatch)
Don, Kerensa, Sheila with Bracken, Buttons,
Emma (Roger M. Willgoose)
8
FOREWORD
M Y F I R S T B 0 0 K, Emma and I, told the story of how my life as
a blind person was utterly changed by the wisdom, cleverness,
and affection of my guide-dog Emma, so much so that we
became twin parts of one personality.
I was born in 1946 in Beeston, Nottingham. As a child, I
could see a little but not enough to recognize people as more
than vague images, or colours as blurred and muddy travesties
of what I later learnt they really were. Both my brother
Graham and I suffered from congenital cataracts which, in
turn, caused retina damage. This was inherited from my
father's side of the family. My mother had a different sort of
eye complaint, caused by German measles when she was a
child. All of us, therefore, were partially blind in varying
degrees, although my father still managed to earn a living for
us travelling round to markets selling drapery.
Eye surgery was not then as advanced as it is now, and
an operation on Graham resulted in the total loss of the sight
in one eye. I had also had an unsuccessful operation, but as a
result of Graham's experience my parents decided against
further attempts at surgery.
So when I started school, I could just see enough to be able
to learn to read-if I held a book right up to my face-but the
blackboard was a blur. In one respect con " cerning school,
nevertheless, I was very lucky. My mother insisted that I should
go to an ordinary school, and not a special one for the blind
and visually handicapped, where willy-nilly I would have been
taught braille despite my temporary ability to learn normal
print. Her view was that such special schools, however well
intentioned, kept blind children apart from the rest of the
world-the sighted community-whereas what they most
needed was to be integrated into it, and for this I have to thank
her.
9
I
During my school career my sight gradually grew worse and
by the time I was nineteen I was totally blind. I now had a job
as a switchboard operator; when I had left school I badly
wanted to work with animals (and despite not being able to
see properly had helped at a local kennels at weekends) but it
was somehow decreed that I should be a telephonist. So that
is what I became, feeling over the switchboard to make the
connections and taking notes on a braille machine. First I
worked for a big dress shop in Nottingham, which was not a
happy experience, and then, in a much more friendly atmosphere,
for a firm called Industrial Pumps.
It was at this time that my life was made utterly different by
the advent of Emma. I was, if the truth be known, ashamed of
being blind. I refused to carry a white stick and hated asking
for help. After all, I was a teenage girl, and I couldn't bear the
idea that people would stare at me and think. I was not like
them. Partly as a result of this attitude I got lost one evening on
the way home from work. I kept colliding with lamp-postsand
apologizing to them-and I couldn't find the bus stop,
or hear anything that resembled a bus. I was nearly three hours
late getting home, and it had been a frightening experience.
But my Home Teacher was there when I arrived (Home
Teachers visit the blind regularly to help and to supply aids
such as braille paper, braille clocks, egg-timers that ring and
so on) and after he had heard my story, he said: 'Why on earth
don't you have a guide-dog?'
They were the nine most important words of my life. The
result, eventually, was a spell at the Guide-Dog Training
Centre at Leamington Spa-and Emma, the chocolate-brown
Labrador who from the moment we met never wavered in her
understanding and affection for me, and who never left my
side. It was as if, suddenly, I had been supplied with an extra
limb and an extra brain. Emma from then on guided me to
work (and had her own ideas, often, about how she would get
me there and back), saved my life-literally-and was intuitive
to an unbelievable degree in realizing my needs, even to finding
me a telephone-box when I desperately needed one in an area
of Nottingham she had never been to before.
It was because of Emma that I finally found the courage to
I0
go and share a flat in Nottingham with a girl, Anita, who became
a marvellous friend. And at this time I met Don, who had
a chiropody practice, whom I eventually married. With his
love, care and attention added to that of Emma, I became
doubly fortunate.
We moved into a little prefab bungalow; I got a new job with
a big garage in the city, and I started going out with Emma and
giving lectures and talks on Guide-Dogs. I also started (despite
difficulties with sight invariably solved by Don) keeping, breeding,
and showing Siamese cats which became, and has re
mained,
a major interest.
Then came another event which transformed my life again.
Mr Shearing, the specialist whom my brother Graham recommended
me to go to, decided he would operate on me, although
he warned that he did not work miracles.
To me, however, he did work a miracle. He gave me sight
and, in September 1975, I saw the dazzling, unbelievable world
for the first time with all its beauty and in all its incredible
colour. For me, it was like being born again. I went liome witli
Don and Emma and began life anew.
SHEILA HOCKEN
I
Stapleford
April 198o
I
CHAPTER ONE
I LAY IN bed that night, unable to sleep, just thinking back
over an incredible day. At the age of twenty-nine it had been
my first day of life, real life that is: the day my husband Don
had brought me home to Nottingham from hospital. Only a
week before, and it now seemed a century ago, I had had the
operation which had given me sight. But almost as soon as I
had received that first unbelievable, incandescent shock of
being able to see, the bandages had been replaced over my
eyes. In the days that followed they were taken off again for
only a minute or two and put back, so all the world I had seen
was enclosed in the four walls of a hospital ward, and all I had
caught sight of were glimpses, breathtaking and brief as they
were, of the blues and greens of nurses' uniforms, and the
yellows and crimsons of bowls of flowers on locker tops.
But today, today had been like no other since the Creation,
too much, almost, for one human being. I lay there in bed and
all its images tumbled and whirled through my mind like a
laundromat machine gone mad: the sight of Don for the first
time in my life-for I was quite blind when he married meand
the sensation in less than a second of all my imaginings of
what he might be like being wiped away, and the reality
approaching me up the ward being more handsome than ever
I could have dreamt. The sight of my guide-dog Emma for the
first time, the affectionate creature who had steered me through
all sorts of difficulties, on whom I had relied and placed all my
trust-but so much more beautiful than seemed possible.
People had told me she was chocolate-coloured, and I had an
idea of her appearance through feeling her coat and velvety
cars, but no one had said she was a hundred different shades of
brown, with a white patch on her chest, or that she was so
bouncing with life and her eyes were so bright in the sunlight.
Then there had been that dazzling greenness that I could not
I3
make out until Don explained it to me. Grass! Something I had
only felt through the soles of my shoes, something I knew
existed, and that I dimly remembered from the days when, as a
child, I could see a little. But that remembered grass, blurred
and muddy green, now shone bright beyond belief, just as the
entire world had become a landscape suddenly cleaned like an
oil painting, and restored from beneath layers of thick, dead
varnish.
These were major revelations, but there had been minor
ones too: simply the delight of seeing water sparkle as it swirled
from a tap, simply the sight of streets, shops, houses, and scores
of people-something that when I was blind I somehow could
never imagine, the idea of so many different lives going on
around me but outside my own enclosed box of consciousness.
And there had been strange shocks, including the sight of myself
in a mirror. I felt as if I was looking at a stranger. I could
not believe it was me. There had been disappointments as
well, as when before teatime I had decided to be adventurous
and go for the first time to the shops without Emma guiding
me. I had taken her on a lead, and not on her usual guide-dog
harness. But, once outside the gate and walking along, I had
been terrified at the way lamp-posts and the trees and their
shadows slanting across the pavement all seemed to rush at me,
bearing down as if they were going to hit me. So I had shut my
eyes, reverted instantly to blind ways, and had been thankful yet
again for Emma who took over and even on a lead, guided me.
So the thoughts whirled round as I lay there. Beside me, Don
was already asleep. But not only did I find sleep impossible, I
did not want to drift off. It seemed such a waste of time spending
eight hours with my eyes shut. Even though I could not see
a thing in the dark, I just wanted to keep my eyes open. Somewhere
lurking was the faint ghost of the feeling I had when in
hospital they put the bandages back the first time, after I knew
that, miraculously, I could see: what, I had thought then, if
it's only a cruel joke and that's it? I knew it was irrational, but
I felt that if I kept my eyes open all night then no one could
take my sight away again.
Lying with my eyes open in the dark, I could not see anything.
Yet this was not like being blind. The darkness of night
is a different sort of darkness to blindness. People used to say,
'It. must be terrible to live in the dark.' But over all those years
goingd, blind, and finally unable to see at all, it was not like
living in the dark, because light and dark are opposites and if
you don't have one-that is, light-then you don't know what
darkness is. Only when you can see can you understand that
you were living in the dark in a different sense. So it was with
me lying there that first night at home, and I realized that
blindness is not a black dark like night. It is a sort of void darkness,
a non-colour darkness, an indescribable sort of limbo,
neither black nor grey, nor brown, nor any visual colour, and
lying awake and seeing nothing was exciting because this was
the black of true night that I had never known before.
But if that was a new sensation experienced in the night, also
through my mind went the countless new sensations of that day
apart from visual experience. It was as if all sorts of other things
had suddenly come alive as well as my sight-ambitions, hopes
for the future, and bodily things. I was aware of blood racing
round my veins, my heart beating, lots of other things I had
never thought existed before. I suppose it was because I felt
more alive than I had ever done before, and visual sensation
stimulates the rest of your body. As a blind person, things can
be very exciting and you enjoy life-but there is so much more
when you have a visual stimulant.
More materially, I thought, What about driving a car?
~Vouldn't that be great! Could I read? Apart from trying to
identify the word SALT on a box in the food cupboard, and the
names of cereals, I hadn't yet even looked at print. I had been
so excited with all the fabulous colours I had seen I had not
really stopped to tliink whether I could read or not, or how
much I had retained from my
early partially-sighted days at
school.
I heard Emma snoring and I looked over and knew that,
Linseen, there was the shape of a dark, curled-up ball of fur and
affection at the bottom of our bed. Then, suddenly, I had an
awful thought. What about Emma?
I sat up in bed. I was horrified.
'What about Emma?' I found myself shouting aloud.
Don grumbled a bit and turned over. 'I won't need her any
I5
more as a guide-dog. Will they take her away?' I started to
shake Don. 'Don, wake up, wake up-what about Emmai" I
said again.
'What's the matter with Emma?' he said sleepily. 'She's all
right, isn't she?'
I felt him moving his foot about to feel her at the end of the
bed.
'Yes, of course she's all right, but I don't need her any more
as a guide-dog.'
'Well, of course you don't. Isn't it marvellous?' He turned
over to go to sleep again.
'But they might take her away from me.'
At that, Don sat up.
'Who might?'
'The people at Guide-Dogs.'
'Oh never. They won't. Don't worry about it. Try and go to
sleep.'
'But they might.'
'She's nearly eleven,' said Don. 'Who'd want to have her at
that age? Nobody else could use her as a guide-dog.'
'Yes, I know,' I said. 'But they do have the right to take her
away from me if I don't need her any more.'
'Oh, they wouldn't. Believe me, petal, they won't take her
away from you. Don't be silly.'
I realized it was no good discussing it with Don. I lay back,
still with my eyes open, and the worry grew and, like a growing
storm cloud, blotted out the memory of the wonderful day. I
could not bear the thought of living without Emma. What
would I do? I know, I won't tell them, I thought. I won't tell
them at Guide-Dogs that I can see. But no, that would be silly,
they'd be bound to find out and then what? They surely
wouldn't, they couldn't. I wouldn't let them take her away,
they'd have to shoot me first. I put my hand down and stroked