BLINDSIMMING LADY
BLINDFOLDING WHEN TEENAGERS
This is the only picture of me - Jane.
The others have all been contrived and added by my brother - Chris, who is responsible for the whole of this document
Many years later, in our later ‘teens, my brother, who was a keen cyclist was ‘volunteered’ by our mother to help at a local school for blind children by taking them for cycle rides on tandem bicycles, which the school had bought for that purpose. Rather reluctantly he agreed and was then told that first of all he should practice a little with a sighted person on the back wearing a blindfold. Equally important he should take a turn on the back, blindfolded, to appreciate the particular problems involved as a blind person on a cycle, perhaps even for the first time. I found myself volunteering to be the blindfolded passenger as well as the sighted guide to a blindfolded Chris. We had a few spills but got the hang of it reasonably quickly and in time my brother did a fair amount of their voluntary guidance work until there was a nasty accident, thankfully with some other volunteers and the scheme was hastily dropped and the tandems sold off.
The school for blind children is still there, but we have both moved some distance away now. Here, in the South-East, with modern traffic, one dare hardly cycle at all. The mind boggles as to what we could do quite happily those many years ago.
BLINDFOLDING AS YOUNG ADULTS
​A little later on, now fully qualified in his job, Chris took on a junior administration job in a big building re-development scheme in Brighton. He had an office to himself in the old building, which was Council owned, and did not have a great deal to do for the first few months. He also discovered that besides his official telephone line for use in connection with his work, there was another phone with a live connection in his otherwise unoccupied office, which apparently was unused and had no traceable owner. Probably the Brighton Council, he thought. He used it for phoning me and never received a billing. Wandering around the town, he saw a post-card announcement in a shop window notice board, from someone offering to take blind people for guided walks on the local Downs or cliffs. Chris thought he would be good at that with his experience in that field ( me!!) but had a better idea. He was a little afraid of getting involved with genuinely blind people. The card that he put in several shop windows in different areas of the town included the ‘un-owned’ office phone number to reply to at certain stated weekday times and said, after a few trial runs.
TRAINING EXPERIENCE – REQUIRED – VOLUNTEERS FOR
GUIDED BLINDFOLDED OUTINGS LOCALLY
– RING Etc. etc. (Or words to that effect.)
When I eventually agreed to ring him to try his idea out, he said that he had had several replies within the very first week. He really needed a chaperon (partner for him of opposite sex) to sound convincing and would I come down to Brighton over the week-end and help him out. At least two of the ‘applicants’ had been girls. Well, Brighton is a curious town, full of curious people and we eventually had a little group of people who seemed to like meeting up on the Downs and taking each other in turns blindfolded for longish walks on Sunday mornings, or Wednesday afternoons. Chris’s job eventually came to an end and we handed the group over to someone else and never heard anymore from any of them.