BLINDSIMMING LADY
BLINDFOLDING AS A CHILD
My obsession with blindfolding developed from those early days, despite no real further interest on Chris's part - at first. I grew to love blindfolding, something I kept very much to myself, of course. So I had, and still have, a secret love of blindfolding. I would have liked to be blindfolded by someone who shared, or at least understood, my fixation but there was nobody I could bring myself to confide in.
Except, as you might now be expecting to hear, my brother Chris
At the same time, I found myself equally interested in the idea of blindfolding others. I liked to see pictures of blindfolded people. Page 2065, Volume 5 of our 12 volume set of The Wonderland of Knowledge, childrens encyclopaedia, has a copy of George Watts famous painting of Pandora setting free the Spirit of Hope in which Pandora is blindfolded. I was fascinated by it and gazed at the illusration when no-one was around. We've now seen the original, of course, in the Tate Gallery, London.
Chris and I were at the age when Enid Blyton's books written for and about children of that particular age were widely read.
In one of the many series about adventurous children dealing with adult crooks, one of the children was kidnapped, the other four went to her rescue and were themselves taken hostage and all five were tied up, unable to escape.
There were nice clear whole-page illustrations of their adventures throughout the books and this story was no exception, having a drawing of all five children laying bound hand and foot on the floor of a barn. I wanted to improve on this and I carefully traced the drawing adding blindfolds to all five children. We can't find the original drawing nowadays or even remember the name of the book, but here is an illustration found by Chris on the web of the sort of drawing that was only too easy to amend to include a blindfold (or five!)
If anyone finds the original drawings of the five kidnapped children on the web, we would be most pleased to know!
