MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THE other day I was invited to attend the reading competition which is held annually by the National Library for the Blind. The final adjudications and prize-giving took place, not at the headquarters of the Library at 35 Great Smith Street, but in the Hoare Memorial Hall in Church House across the way. It was this Hall which during the war was used by the House of Lords as their temporary debating-chamber ; it was strange to see it again with the Woolsack and the throne removed to another place and with the peers elsewhere. I have only once before visited Church House since the days when it served as the "annexe" to Parliament during the strained and intimidating months of 1941 and 1942. It will perhaps be forgotten by the historian that many of Mr. Churchill's most creative speeches were delivered, not in the glaucous light of the old House of Commons, not even beneath the faded gilding of the Upper Chamber, but in the bright, hygienic, episcopalian atmosphere of Church House. The clean and intricate corridors, the Anglican stone staircases, were congested in those days with legislators, lobby correspondents and distinguished visitors; the space behind the Speaker's chair was indeed a narrow narthex, in which the intimate confidences of Ministers were interrupted by the rising and falling of a brightly illuminated lift. Neither the smoking-room nor the bar at Church House was able to recapture even a pale reflection of the intimate conviviality of Westminster ; the dining-room downstairs was neater and whiter than the hot, heavy room to which we were accustomed, but its walls had never witnessed the awe of Mr. Gladstone's presence or caught the rustling whisper which greeted the entry of Parnell. There was a tea-and-toast feeling about Church House which sundered it from the traditions of the past and which snapped the continuity which Charles Barry's great building has maintained with the days of Pitt and Fox.
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It was not, however, the ascetic, aseptic frigidity of Church House which by itself rendered us so ill at ease within its precincts. We resented, as Mr. Churchill furiously resented, the fact that the Luft- waffe should have driven the Mother of Parliaments from her historic home. The destruction of the old Chamber came as a personal blow to all of us, and we regarded this clean, fresh upstart with becoming gratitude for its hospitality, but with the respectful distaste which one acquires and retains fez a hospital in which one has been isolated from the associations of accustomed life. Thus, whereas every stone and pillar of the old Palace of Westminster is dear to me, whereas I walk today upon its tessellated pavements with affectionate and regretful steps, I cannot enter Church House without feeling again that cold draught of animosity which used to assail me during the dark years when we were exiled amid its alien walls. Or was it perhaps that those years coincided with our period of loneliness and defeat, and that the repressed anxiety within us became identified with those clean walls in which for all those months we suffered repressed fear ? I dislike becoming the victim of unreasonable and instinctive hostilities ; we should be very grateful to Church House for welcoming us in our hours of misfortune ; we should, I suppose, experience emotions of pride and gratitude when visiting again those halls and corridors which witnessed the long effort by which our danger was averted and then turned to triumph. But I doubt whether even Mr. Churchill feels very warmly about Church House ; and I am quite sure that my own sentiments in regard to that respectable edifice are of ice.
I was glad, therefore, to witness a ceremony the other day, so moving in its purport, so comforting in its cheerful efficiency, as was the reading competition organised by the National Library for the Blind. My feeling for Church House will henceforward be less stark and chill. I had not realised until then the immense debt of gratitude which we should all feel towards that Parisian of genius, Louis Braille. I am aware that he was not the first to invent a system of tangible type for the use of the blind, but he was certainly the first to perfect a method of embossed lettering in which books
could be transcribed with comparative ease and through which blind people could have access to the whole world of literature. When Miss Arnold and Mrs. Dow founded the National Library for the Blind in 1882 they can scarcely have foreseen the immense develop- ment which would be given to their work in after-years. Today the library possesses some 200,000 books transcribed in Braille and the daily circulation of these books is in the region of 800. Miss Garvie, the Librarian, and her staff of trained and devoted assistants, are able to give personal guidance to those who throng to Great Smith Street ; publishers and authors are glad to surrender their copyrights for this splendid purpose ; and there are many unselfish workers who voluntarily give their time to the arduous and exacting task of transcribing books upon the wide, pitted sheets, so undecipher- able to the outsider, so intimately rewarding to the initiated blind. It is not only that these books provide occupation and pleasure to those who cannot see ; it is that they give them a world of their very own, the only world in which they are not dependent upon someone else.
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There have been occasions when I have watched blind people reading Braille, sitting in the sunshine outside some institute, or sitting quietly in a train. I have always been struck by the way their lips moved as their fingers travelled, by the little smile which from time to time would flit across their features, by their look of abstracted concentration such as a stenotypist assumes. Yet in my ignorance I had supposed that they were reading texts already known to them from constant perusal, and that the ease with which they absorbed what they were fingering arose from long familiarity with the words themselves. The competition at Church House cured me of this ignorant illusion. Six different categories of competitors were led to the platform and two sheets of Braille were put before them, one being a transcript of a prose passage and the other a short poem. The elder competitors, after touching the embossed dots gingerly to estimate the length of the lines, were able to read the passages just as quickly as I could read a clearly printed page, and moreover to give to what they were reading the exact variations of tone, emphasis and expression which the author intended. What was even more astonishing was the ease with which the junior corn= petitors (boys and girls of between 12 and or 9 and 12, and even1 children of under nine) rushed through their pieces at almost break- neck speed. They faced the audience without the slightest self- consciousness, their little fingers scurried along the dots without hesitation or trembling—it was only by the gyrations of their dangling feet that one noticed that they were conscious that they were being tested in front of many hundred staring eyes.
* * * In the premises of the National Library for the Blind in Great Smith Street the thousands of Braille volumes, looking like stout exercise books, are ranged in high steel shelves. Novels and books of travel, histories and biographies, plays and poems, text-books and works of philosophy—all are there. It is a rich and private world in which the blind can explore and wander unassisted. The cheer- ful zest with which they compete with one another, the warmth and friendliness of those who devote their lives to this great task, the utter absence of self-consciousness or of self-pity on the part of those so hardly handicapped—all these have warmed for me the cold premises of Church House ; have made me forget those months of apprehension, forget the black-out and the bombs. Yet I am left wondering whether blind people derive a conception of the pattern of words which is different from that acquired by those who read the printed page. Is the rhythm of prose or poetry, as trans- mined by their tactile sensibilities, more delicate than that conveyed by our visual approach ? Or do the eyes in our case, and the fingers in theirs, serve merely as channels of communication, and is it that the sense of style or rhythm is a purely auditive faculty, which operates equally whether the passages are absorbed by sight or by touch.
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