Bespectacled
By STRIX ON the first lap of our lives we are put through a succession of hoops with loving and atten- tive care. We are taught to eat, walk, speak, dress,. blow our noses, clean our teeth, count, read, write, do up our shoe-laces and shake hands with visitors. As each obstacle presents itself we are led up to it like a young horse, and after one or two refusals we clear it. The end-product of all this schooling in the art of growing up is a man (or, of course, a woman). Either, regarded purely as a human animal, is thereafter theoretically capable of looking after himself or herself. The basic training is over. If we sink, it is not because we have not been taught to swim.
But a good many laps later it dawns upon us that throughout this intensive instruction in how to grow up they told us nothing about how to grow old. As the fifth decade-post flashes Past we are suddenly, reluctantly, aware that there are more of these tiresome obstacles ahead, that we are going to have to learn new tricks and techniques just as we once learnt to blow our nose, and that this time there is no one to teach us. On the threshold of youth there were too many rules, too many exhortations ind admoni- tions, too many helping hands, too many good reasons why it was essential to finish up our spinach, wash behind the ears, or grip the pony with our knees. The threshold of age is by con- trast silent and deserted, like a railway station at which, in the ,middle of the night, the traveller unexpectedly finds that he must change trains.
It is now several years since a map of Salis- bury Plain brought home to me the fact that I was on this threshold. In the quality. of War. Department maps, with which I was then inter- mittently preoccupied, I had discerned a falling- off. The names of small villages were often so badly printed as to be illegible in a poor light, and the numerals embodied in the contour-lines whose height they showed were even worse. Superfluous though it may be, fresh evidence of the utter incompetence of the General Staff is always welcome to Territorials. I drew my adjutint's attention to this lapse from the high standards of the past.
He was a nice man. It was only the look in his eye and the tone of his voice as he went through the motions of agreeing with me that told me what I needed to know : that the maps were as good as ever, but my eyesight was not.
By this discovery I was jarred. It had simply never entered my head that I might one day have to use spectacles. It was preposterous, unthink- able:- the sort of thing, like being arrested for bigamy or becoming a Buchmanite, that only ' happened to other people. For some time I refused to entertain the idea. At last, fed up with squinnying at the telephone directory and then dialling double five,instead of double eight, 1 slunk into an oculist's as if it had been an opium den.
All new equipment takes a bit of getting used to. It was some time before one's first spoon became a weapon of relative precision and the pudding finished up in one's mouth instead of in one's right ear or on the wall behind one. Gloves, hairbrushes, lavatories—pretty well all the accessories of everyday life were unmanageable to begin with; but in that distant era one received patient and elaborate coaching in their use.
Middle age has no mentors; nobody says, 'No, not like that, dear. Like this.' I defy anyone who puts on a pair Of spectacles for the first time not to feel that he has done it in a slightly ridiculous way. And so, in all probability, he has, as, grasp- ing the fragile contraption in both hands, he fastens it uncertainly on his face like a man putting on a false beard at some ghastly rout. Not since—in something of the same Surrepti- tious, apprehensive manner—he smoked his first cigarette has he been so unexpectedly reminded that there is a right way and a wrong way of doing things.
Once having lodged upon his nose what he used scornfully to call giglamps, he makes a long, searching scrutiny of his reflection in the mirror. There can be no doubt that he looks extremely odd. Lifd has played a practical joke on him, but it is, an obscure rather than an unkind practici joke. Although he still regards spectacles as pert' faintly ridiculous (why else .do we say besPet tacled—cf. begrimed,. bedizened and besotted' and not betrousered or even bebearded?) he Pe' suades himself that he looks no sillier than II° looked before. Rather, indeed, the reverse. A certain gravitas has been added. He fings himself for the first time wondering whether he might not have had a considerable future as a dentist' or in the Treasury.
But he has still to present this new persona t the world, and face the world's reactions. Wai back, when similar ordeals were undergone, 0, pains were spared to allay his misgivings en° boost his morale. 'But, darling, you look so nice in it! Doesn't he, Nanny? It's awfully becoming. All the other little boys at the party will he, wearing—well, the ,same sort of thing only I expect not so nice. I promise you they will.' NO* of this nonsense now.
He knows what he will get from his children. , The spectacles confer, in his a patriarchial air; they delicately underline the eventual fleet! for petits soins; he can almost feel the rug roan his knees, smell the aroma of the cocoa simmer' ing on the hob. (The blacksmith should be able to knock up a hob.) But he knows what he will get from his children, and he gets it.
'Daddy!' they scream, convulsed with laughter' 'What are you up to? Why are you wearing spectacles? You do look funny!' A rat caught in a gin-trap by one leg will often gnaw the leg off. To disembarrass Your face of ,spectacles involves .A simpler, far 105 drastic process; but if you have never done it before it is difficult to do it as though to the manner born. You cannot lay your ears bacl.:; you do not show the whites of your obsolescent eyes. But your face, emerging from between the shafts, inevitably reflects the part-rebellious, part' apprehensive, part-apologetic expression of tin old saddle=horse which has not. ciriviously Worn harness. Once you have expunged from their minds, the idea that you are dressing up in order to amuse them, your new gimmick can be plained to your children; but' it cannot be air° explained, any more than it can to your over' facetious or over-solicitous contemporaries.
I had hardly obtained a pair of spectacles whet' I ceased to need them, my eyes suddenly getting a sort of second wind. This reprieve (which Or all I know is of common occurrence) began so°' after one of my aunts recommended yeast to nie as a cure for failing memory. My memorY is appalling. I shovelled down the unexpired portinri of my aunt's yeast-ration—this was at the break fast-table—and continued for a time to eat the, stuff. Post, I suspect, rather than propter hoe I threw away my reading-glasses; my memory eon' tinued to deteriorate.
Two or three years later a minor military OW' paign in Arabia strengthened the delusion that for me spectacles were a thing of the past. S° refulgent was the sun, and so few the place-na0le5 on our unreliable maps, that I snapped my fingers at Salisbury Plain and the deep misgivings aroused upon it. But now—grateful for a reprieve, none the worse for a dummy run—I am once more, wh°P I read, bespectacled.
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