Naked with a Canary

By Kate Gostick

After leaving university, I worked as an optician sometimes in Sheffield, but mainly in Rotherham. The Sheffield practice may have been in the wrong part of town, but when I worked in Rotherham, the whole town was in the wrong part of town!

Rotherham had the highest incidence of mental illness in Britain, and I tested the eyes of all the people who made that statistic a reality. They may have been totally crazy, but they were all so kind and funny, not an evil bone in their bodies. When it was cold or raining hard, all the drunks who sat drinking cider behind Tesco’s, many of whom were homeless, would book an eye test just to have half an hour in a warm place. Many were on income support, so they did not have to pay, making it was win-win for them. They were troubled souls, but harmless and sweet-hearted. One once asked me out on a date to Blackpool and offered to take me to the tower ballroom and dance with me all night. I politely declined, and so he swept me up in his arms and waltzed me around the room. Every day brought new surprises.

When an elderly lady came in for her eye test, in her hand was a bright red umbrella still wet from the constant rain that fell on the declining mining town. She was dressed smartly in a blue coat, buttoned up to her neck to keep out the biting Yorkshire winds, and a felt hat protected her neat grey hair from the weather. I asked her to take a seat in the big chair and leave all her things on the smaller chair whilst I just took some forms downstairs. As I opened the door, I expected to see her seated in the consulting chair, ready to start the examination, and she was indeed sitting in the correct chair. Folded neatly on the smaller chair in the corner was her coat and sitting on top of the umbrella and hat just as I expected. What I hadn’t expected was that under the coat, folded just as

neatly were all of her other clothes and that she would be waiting for her eye test with her wrinkly, naked bottom sitting squarely on my consulting chair. The only thing she was wearing was her gold wedding band sitting, a little loose, on the third finger of her left hand. I checked her pupil responses, did another couple of quick tests, and then informed her that she could now get dressed again and I would just step outside for a second. I hadn’t wanted to embarrass her, so I just let her think that her interpretation of “your things” being everything she had come in wearing was correct rather than me just meaning her hat, coat and umbrella.

This was by no means unusual and the things that ended up in that corner of the room, tucked away for safekeeping during the eye examination, never failed to amaze! Another lady in her early seventies came in for an eye test. By now, I had learnt to be a little more descriptive of what they should leave in the corner of the room. This particular lady was wearing the standard dreary coloured anorak sported by most Northern women who had spent a lifetime battered by wind and rain. In her hand was a zip-up rectangular shopping bag. It was a light turquoise colour and made of a thin waterproof material similar to that which a tent would be made of. I asked her to place her bag and coat in the corner and take a seat which she dutifully did. As the eye test progressed, I was distracted by what seemed like a tiny movement coming from the corner of my eye. It was almost like a flicker and not easy to see in the darkroom, and I wondered if I was starting with a migraine, even though this was something with which I was not normally afflicted. As I turned the lights on for the next part of the examination, I realised I had not been mistaken as I watched the shopping bag move around the floor. The movement coming from within the bag became more frantic, and I looked at the lady for an explanation. She realised I needed to be reassured, so she just smiled, her dentures dropping a little in her mouth as she did.

“Don’t worry, love. It’s only my canary.” She felt no other explanation was needed, and I could see no credible reason which would change my opinion of the situation, so we just continued with the eye test. For the following twenty minutes, each time the light went on, the bag moved, and as the light was extinguished, the bag remained still. As she left, she zipped up her anorak, picked up her bag and headed out of the door, totally unaware that to most sane people, taking your canary to an eye test was not seen as conventional. When she returned a few weeks later to pick up her glasses, she apologised for being late, despite her neither having nor needing an appointment for a collection, but she had had problems moving her fridge freezer away from the door. When asked if she was having her kitchen refurbished, thus requiring a temporary new home for the appliances, she looked puzzled as though asking, “why anyone would think such a thing?”

It was not only the patients found in a state of undress in my room. On one occasion, a button had come off the waistband on my skirt. I had a few minutes between patients, so I decided to use a sewing kit I kept in my drawer for such emergencies to fix it. I shut my door, took off my skirt and sat in stockings and suspenders on my consulting chair to attach the button. Just as I was wrapping the red cotton around the button and starting to tie it off so I could put my skirt back on, my door burst open and a young postman about twenty years old launched himself into my room. Most people would have realised that this was not a good time and maybe they should have at least knocked or probably just waited to be called in, but not this young man.

“Hi, I’m David. I have an eye test at 11 o’clock. Where should I sit?” It seemed pretty obvious to me that he should sit back in the waiting room and wait for my door to be opened and be invited in, but this seemed to be something that needed to be pointed out to David. I politely asked him to sit back in the waiting room, and I would call him in in a minute and out he went with a jovial “OK!” He did not seem in any way surprised to find a half-naked optician, and just like the lady with the canary or the one who had also inhabited my chair in a state of undressed, he seemed to have an uncanny ability to regard the bazaar as totally normal.

The snow there could also be brutal. Growing up on the western side of the Pennines, we were protected by the gulf stream, a warm wind that blew from the Caribbean, but on the eastern side, they only received winds from the Arctic and the North Sea. One night we had about a foot of snow which would be nothing to the New Englanders I was later to live amongst, but Yorkshire was not prepared for the snow, which may only come once every few years in this kind of quantity. Dominic had managed to make it home from work, but many others would be stuck on the main expressway out of Sheffield overnight and even into the next day. We had not been expecting quite this volume of snow, and everyone was stuck in their houses. The buses and trains were cancelled. The roads were devoid of cars, except those abandoned by drivers near enough to homes or hotels or those filled with sleeping passengers, unable to find an alternative. Nobody had taken the appointment book home, so nobody could ring the next day’s patients to cancel appointments, but this did not seem like a problem since nobody was leaving their homes. When we finally made it back to work, there was a message from an old man in his eighties who had an appointment. He was trying to find out where we were because he had walked the three miles from home to the centre of Rotherham, so as not to miss his appointment only to find everywhere shut and then walked three miles back home. He hadn’t thought to make this phone call before setting off like Scott of the Antarctic because he was a hardy retired miner and did not think for one minute that we would not be just as hardy. Rotherham people were hardened by years working in coal mines and steel mills, by the grey skies and cold winds, by the poverty and uncertainty of where the next meal would come from, but they had hearts of gold.