It is now, early June of 1983, so it's more than two and a half years since I lost sight and in that time, my dreams have...
Now, we'll just see what we'll have.
Hello, this is the tape of Imogen's tape, produced in the 1980s in 17 Alton Road.
Hello.
It's seven o'clock and time for Radio H, and here's your host, Ibi Hal.
The whole question of what you can remember as a child is an interesting one, isn't it?
So much has been written about my father. It's hard to unpick what's remembered and what isn't.
When I was six, my mum remarried and we moved down to Dorset.
I used to come back up to Birmingham every fortnight for the weekend.
Dad would come all the way down to Pool, which was four or five hours on the train, pick me up from school,
and then we'd travel all the way back that same day. Special times together.
I think that transition from him leading me to me leading him must have been quite a slow one.
I remember saying to him around that time, can you see me now at all?
I remember him turning and spending a while looking at me, and then saying,
Are you wearing a red dress?
I think that must have been the last time that he saw me.
Radio H!
And now we're going to have a little look at some of the programmes on this morning.
In a few minutes there's some jokes and fun and songs.
There's an only child up until seven, eight and onwards.
Hello, and here's a brief summary of the news.
Margaret Satcher banned national health classes today,
giving extra points to a rich and characterless art to be a student.
This is actually cream with chicken soup.
And now here's your ingredients that you've collected.
I wonder at some level whether I was mirroring the fact that Dad was doing a lot of recording.
That sound of the tape clicking off and clicking on and rewinding.
That was the sound that you knew Dad was awake.
I might see a light on, I suppose.
I don't remember him discussing that with me.
I can imagine that he would have recorded that diary at work
or in his office late at night.
All his mischief and his humour.
Those huge amounts of time that he spent with us.
He was in many ways a very private man.
I guess hearing the tapes now has been very painful for a lot of reasons.
Because he kept such a lot from us, I think.
It's only really now that I realise what an enormous upheaval his sight loss was for him.
I remember the sound of that cane clicking up and down in the corridors of the university where he used to work.
Walking up and down there with him and him showing me how he was using that cane.
Training me how best to support him.
And I think he must have placed quite a lot of trust in me.
And that must have been part of a huge process of letting go of vast amounts of control.
I certainly learnt how to get around in the world.
Maybe it has given me a certain amount of confidence that things will be alright.
It's only so lost you can get.
Is it the right way up?
Yeah.
Right, stick it through.
You know, you'd come in with a song or a poem that you'd written and Dad would say,
well just a minute, we'll just put the tape recorder on.
I guess for him it was kind of like sticking photos in a photo album.
The photos have gone down.
I am speaking in Melbourne, Australia with my mother.
Yes.
Now let's see mother.
I guess for him it converted it into something which he could relive.
Then at 11 o'clock there'll be some more frightening stories in a visit to Daddy's House of Horror.
The stories were legend.
Are you sitting comfortably?
This five-legged beast of Borneo.
Go alone to Daddy's House of Horror.
Scared the living daylights out of everybody.
Ah, Mr Bartender, I'll have a bottle of whiskey.
Certainly.
There you are.
Don't bother about the cup, I'll just drink it out of the bottle.
Isn't it really good on sound effects?
Would you like another one, mate?
What, another one?
You must be crazy.
You know, for a man of such stature quite a childish sense of humour, really.
Give him the camera.
His education of us was totally about trying to get us to see the world through different eyes.
I remember being taken to the Jewish temple, to the Hindu temple.
All kinds of very different experiences.
As quite a young child, really.
You know, he was always very keen for us to see difference
and to have different perspectives on the world.
I mean, you only need to sort of walk through crowds
to see how people respond when you're walking with someone with sight loss.
Can you talk and help me with?
No, thanks, we're fine.
Thanks for asking.
It's the sort of fear that people have around a lot of disability, isn't it?
There's that sort of sense that there's this kind of aura around someone.
I guess those experiences, the discrimination and the patronising
gave him huge insight into people who are marginalised.
How can blind and sighted people truly understand each other?
Can we have insight into other people?
This is the great question upon which the unity of our humanity hangs.
Without that personal direct experience of humility,
I think he would have been a very different man.
Don't forget to tune in again next week, boys and girls,
when we'll be bringing you more music and songs.
See you soon.
That's like an older...
We'd sit and drink whiskey together in his study,
which had this corrugated roof that maximised the sound of falling rain.
You know, we'd listen to comedy and music,
we'd read poetry together and talk about philosophical concepts,
political ideas.
He really found this whole kind of second wind of active protest in his later years.
I remember one winter he went all the way up to Scotland
to campaign at this space where they were building a nuclear submarine.
He must have been in his 70s and he got himself arrested.
They obviously didn't know what to do with him.
He started asking them if he could have a Bible.
And then when they brought the Bible in, he said,
well, that's no use to me, I need a Braille Bible.
And I think at that point they just thought,
God, what are we going to do with this guy?
He was in a pretty bad way.
He'd been out most of the night in the cold.
Had to stop at practically every service station on the way back
just for him to kind of get himself back to strength.
But he also was just so invigorated by that whole new side of things.
Hello, Imogen, how are you?
Oh, good, you're good.
I sometimes worry that in that last decade together,
when Dad was, I suppose, getting more tired really
and just withdrawing more into his world of thought.
And I was busy, I had young kids, I was working hard
and building up my career.
I look back and I think maybe I should have made more time
to sit in the rain with him and listen to poetry and drink whiskey.
But I guess we always feel like that about people that we've lost.
Listening to the tapes now
and hearing him go through that process
of acceptance around his sight loss, I guess,
just felt like the process that I've been through around my grief, I suppose.
Going through that stage of feeling that this can't be happening to you
and shouldn't be happening to you.
To move through that, to then feel, well, actually,
there is meaning in here and there is hope in here
and what do I do with that next?
And I went to go and see him a couple of days afterwards in the mortuary,
which I was really glad I did.
And put my hands on his head and, you know, I just kind of...
I suppose the thing I said to him was, you know,
we'll carry all this on, you know.
The fight for social justice
and trying to make a difference in the things that you believed in.
Um, it's in safe hands.
It's in safe hands.
It's in safe hands.
Thank you very much for listening in. The end.
