it. Beth’s basic teaching method is to say something silently in lip-speech and if members of the class look puzzled, she writes the problematical words on the whiteboard. Then she repeats the statement with voice. Her own speech is extremely clear but with one or two slightly distorted vowel-sounds that one associates with the profoundly deaf. She told me in the tea break that she lost her hearing completely at the age of nine as the result of a virus infection. She also told me that thirty per cent of English is not lip-readable, a statistic which makes it all the more remarkable how well people like herself cope with their disability, but removed any illusions about lip-reading being a magic bullet for my condition.
It was not only the sense of being a new boy that reminded me of primary school. Beth evidently tries to make the class interesting by enhancing the participants’ general knowledge and testing their wits, as well as improving their lip-reading skills. So she tells us little stories or relates interesting facts about some subject, which she presumably finds in newspapers or magazines or encyclopaedias, alternating lip-speech with voiced speech, sentence by sentence, and then sets us related exercises in a quiz format, which we have to complete in pairs, lip-speaking to each other. This week she began with a brief history of the origin of Thanksgiving Day in America, which was celebrated last week. Her own lip-speaking, as one would expect, is relatively easy to read. She forms the words with lips, teeth and tongue carefully and deliberately, but not artificially, and if you don’t get the sentence the first time, you have a second or third chance, because she repeats it three times to different segments of the arc of students. I have to admit that I learned some things about the Mayflower pilgrims that I hadn’t known before, or had forgotten, for instance that there were only 102 of them, and that forty-six died in the first winter, which wasn’t entirely surprising since they landed on the north-east coast of America on December 26th, 1620. I just stopped myself from putting up my hand and asking why they hadn’t started their colony in the summer, reflecting that Beth might be irritated at having her demonstration of lip-speaking interrupted by an irrelevant question, or embarrassed by not knowing the answer. In the first year the local Indians helped the Pilgrims with growing crops and hunting and ninety-one of them attended the harvest feast of 1621, which was the origin of the modern Thanksgiving. I didn’t know, or I had forgotten, about the friendly Indians. Later Beth handed round a typewritten quiz about the Pilgrim Fathers, which we had to complete in pairs, collaborating in lip-speech with the person we were sitting next to. In which century was the firstThanksgiving Day? In which year did the Pilgrim Fathers go to America? Where did they sail from? What was the name of their ship? And so on. I was paired with a nice but rather timid middle-aged lady called Marjorie who was quite content to let me suggest all the answers and confined herself to nodding agreement and writing them down on the form. Still, she seemed to be able to read my lips. Then Beth went round the circle asking individuals to tell the group in lip-speech the answers they had come up with. Some are better at it than others. Some, perhaps out of shyness, barely move their lips at all. But there was no difficulty in lip-reading them since you could guess what they were going to say. The same was true of a game we played, a kind of simplified ‘Twenty Questions’. Each person was given a card with the name of something round on it, say, an orange, and a list of questions to ask other people about their round objects: Is it big? Is it small? Is it soft? Is it heavy? Can I touch it? Can I eat it? etc. I created some consternation by asking a question not on the list, Is it manufactured? There was much hilarity when the resulting puzzlement was cleared up. The atmosphere of the class is very good-humoured and supportive. There is a lot of laughter, of a totally innocent kind. At the beginning of another little talk Beth wrote on the board, ‘An Enormous P -’, and nobody sniggered or even smiled.The subject turned out to be a giant pumpkin which someone