EYE TESTS

There is a sequel to the previous story.

I have always had poor eyesight, it’s due to an astigmatism, which means that the shape of the front of my eyes is wrong and no matter how hard I try I cannot focus my eyes on anything. If you think about the rough and ready vision test that is part of the driving test where you have to read a car number plate at 20 metres, I couldn’t see what was on a number plate if it was touching my nose, but luckily for me (and the other car drivers I share the road with) I wear glasses.

When I was about five or six years old my teachers were baffled by the fact that I had come to school at the age of four and I could already read and write, but I seemed to be taking little or no interest in the lessons. One day the nit-nurse and the optician came to the school and they discovered that I had no head lice and virtually no sight. Within weeks I was given a pair of Granny glasses and I could see again, but just as a precaution it was decided that I should see a consultant at the eye hospital.

Dad got a day off work and we went off to the eye hospital. I was logged in on arrival and given a big folder of case notes which of course dad tried to read. We sat on a bench with all the other out-patients and as each one went in to be examined we shuffled up along the bench until it was my turn to be seen. After I was examined by someone in the whitest white coat I had ever seen I was told to sit on another bench so that I could be examined in cubical two. This continued from one cubicle to another each with its white coated inhabitant who shone lights in my eyes, made me wear funny glasses that gradually came into focus, and then sent me on my way to sit on another bench and shuffle along to be seen again and again until I was eventually examined by the consultant who squirted burning drops in my eyes, blinded me with a bright light and told me to sit on the bench outside until I felt well enough to go home.

I felt well enough to go home without sitting on another bench, I couldn’t see where I was going, but I was ready to go home.

This happened every year for ten years, then one day the appointment letter came and it was addressed to me instead of my dad. I phoned the eye hospital and said that I wasn’t going to come, this year or any other year. I was put through to the consultant who wanted to know why I was reluctant to have my eyes tested. I told him in very blunt terms that I’d had ten years of wasting my time so that his students could practice their infernal art on me and he should consider it very good value, I bid him good day and put down the ‘phone.

That’s not the end of the story.

I was getting on for seventeen; on the Friday that I should have gone to the eye hospital dad woke me early in the morning with a cheery salutation telling me he was ready to take me to the eye hospital. He wasn’t happy when I told him that I had cancelled that and all subsequent appointments. He told me that he had managed to get the day off work to take me to Manchester. I told him that I wasn’t going and if he wanted a day out in Manchester he could go on his own.

The thing was that dad liked hospitals, I never understood it, but all his life he loved to go to hospital. For him the interminable queuing up and mindless shuffling about on wooden benches with the paint worn through by countless rear ends was some kind of earthly paradise.

Dad had a day off and went to Manchester, probably wandering around looking for elusive bargains and I had that Friday off school and presented my hospital appointment card as proof when I went back on Tuesday morning, I would have gone in on Monday, but I was still suffering from the effects of the eye drops you know.