The Writer With The Wandering Eye

from Jacqueline

I went along to the ophthalmologist yesterday for my annual “comprehensive check up.”  This is an annual appointment I dread as much as the boob-crushing mammogram.  Sorry about that visual, but it’s the truth – about the mammogram, I mean.

You see, I had eye problems as a kid – lazy eyes.  Not just one, but both, with the right eye being rather more “off” than the left.  For the first five years of my life, I thought everyone saw two of everything, and when I think back, it’s a wonder I was reading so well by the time I started school at age five.  But of course, that’s when the reading gets bumped up a bit, and I discovered that I could see the words a lot better if my right eye were not involved in the effort.  In fact, my right eye didn’t really want to be involved anyway, because it began to wander as soon as it was required to work!

I was sitting at the kitchen table one day, when my mother asked me why I was reading with my head partially turned from the book. I explained that it was easier to read.  The next thing I knew she was giving me an eye test, holding my head in her hands and pointing my face directly at various things and asking me what I could see.  On the shelf over the stove?  Two pepper pots, two clocks, two vases …  hey, we had two of everything!  The next day I was taken to see the local optician who (even though he was a bit of a money-grabber) referred me to the hospital ophthalmology department. The hospital was some twenty miles away, and we didn’t have a car.  The journey by bus involved one or two changes, and to cap it all, I suffered from motion sickness.  Yep, even on the two-mile ride to school in the morning, I was queasy.  So, this journey became a really big part of my young life, especially as it was decided that I would have surgery when I turned six, and in the interim I would have to go to the hospital twice a month to see the orthoptist (they don’t have them any more  - it’s a defunct optical therapy).  The orthoptist was a woman named Miss Trew, which, when you think of it, is an interesting name for a person who worked with kids suffering from wandering eyes. 

Miss Trew would put my eyes through their paces. I had to follow her fingertip with my eyes as she held it up and moved it from left to right.  Then I had to follow the moving pencil light as she directed it back and forth to my nose.  But the most important part of the day was her machine.  I had to set my chin on a little ledge in front of the viewer, and she would put slides in either side.  With two handles, I then had to maneuver the rabbit into the hutch, the chicken into the cage, the dog into the kennel, or the circle into the bigger circle.  And all the time she was changing the coordinates, and making notes.  According to my current ophthalmologist, they did the exercises because at that age the brain is making sure the eye muscles are responding to instructions – so by giving more instructions it stimulates that part of the brain, and is also good prep for surgery.  For me it was all just a big pain – the hours in the bus, feeling sick to my stomach (especially from taking Kwells travel sickness pills) the exhaustion of putting rabbits in hutches and the migraine that began to set in the moment that light was shone in my eyes.  But it led to me holding a dream to be a writer.

I think I’ve told this story before, but it was on one of those early journeys that I saw the writer’s room.  I always traveled on the top deck of the bus, probably because looking down at the world was a big thing, and it took my mind off my stomach.  Our first stop was in a place called Pembury, and as the bus idled while people stepped aboard, I was able to see over the hedge and right into the window of a double-fronted Edwardian villa.  In the left bay window was a desk with a typewriter set upon it.  A sheaf of papers sat alongside the typewriter, and one sheet had been rolled under the platen (there’s a word you don’t hear any more).  A pile of books was to one side, with the top book open.  The room was book-lined – shelves and shelves of books, which even at five was my idea of heaven.  On the far side a fire burned in the grate. A cardigan had been left on the back of the chair, and there was a cup and saucer on the desk, suggesting that someone had just left the room. 

           
I began to look forward to the hospital visits, because I knew I would see that room again – in fact, I was always so tired, and with a thumping migraine, that I slept for most of the journey – but I would not let myself fall asleep until after the first stop alongside the house in Pembury.  One day I asked my mum who she thought lived in that house, and she looked down into the room and replied, “Oh, I think it must be a writer.”  My poor wandering eyes focused on the black typewriter, the pile of books, the sheaf of papers, the fire in the grate and the shelves and shelves of books and I replied, “Well, I want to be a writer when I grow up.”

I thought of that again yesterday, when the ophthalmologist suggested doing some exercises to strengthen the right eye muscles again – it’s been checking out for a while now, and my left eye is doing all the work. He said that he might suggest surgery on the muscle again in the future, and of course those eyes of mine almost popped out at that point.  I shook my head.  No – I had three surgeries between the ages of 6 and 17 (admittedly one was to remove the dissolving suture that did not dissolve and became embedded in my eye), and I’m not up for any more. 

            
I became a writer when I was five and started to make the bedroom I shared with my baby brother resemble the writer’s room.  I gratefully accepted an old desk offered by the shopkeeper at the end of the road, and Mrs. Croft who lived four doors along gave me a very old desk lamp with a shell-shaped shade – darn thing shorted and threw me against the wall when I plugged it into the socket.  I began to write at my desk each day, often placing my cardigan on the back of the chair, and I imagined myself seated in the bay window of the Edwardian villa in Pembury.   It took me another thirty-odd years to get anything published and another twelve to see my first novel in print.  But when I look around now at my MacBook Pro (with retina display) on my desk, and my laser printer, and then at my book-lined room, I think of something I once read and have quoted many a time: 

If you can see a thing, you can make it so.

And maybe seeing double helps ….

Have a lovely weekend – and look after your eyes!!!