If you had to choose, would you keep your hearing or your sight? In answering this perennial question, most people choose sight, says Bella Bathurst in this fascinating book, which documents her own voyage into deafness. But “if sight gives you the world, hearing gives you other people”, and other people are as essential to our existence as air or light. To lose your hearing is to lose the social connections that make you who you are. It is to always miss the punchline; to feel forever a beat behind; to lose confidence, and identity, as well as pleasures that suddenly seem fundamental, such as music and birdsong. Dealing with these losses involves remaking yourself in profound and surprising ways.
Until she was 27, Bathurst writes, “I accepted the ordinary miracle of my senses, and I expected them to get on with the job”. But then she found herself pushing up the volume on the TV, asking people to repeat things, missing the phone. Her boyfriend complained that she laughed at his jokes three minutes after he had told them. When she listened back to her interviews (Bathurst is a journalist, and has written books on subjects including lighthouses, bicycles and shipwrecks), she noticed that “all the grace of a conversation had gone, and now there were only a series of jolting observations”. Doctors told her that the hearing loss was likely to be a result of two past head injuries, that it was not treatable and that it was likely to get worse. She was given a bulky pair of hearing aids “the colour of a hernia gusset” and told to wear them every day. She spent the next 12 years adjusting to this new reality.
At first, the task threatened to overwhelm her. “Stupid and old” were the two words Bathurst associated with being deaf; she gave herself little sympathy, and others followed her lead. When she told people what was happening to her, they would often make stupid jokes (“Pardon?”). She would accidentally blank people, walk off in the middle of conversations, and then feel crippling embarrassment when she realised what she had done. Any social interaction became fraught with risk. She split up with her boyfriend and, as friends settled down and had children, Bathurst longed to do the same. But she was too angry, too sad and disoriented to form a healthy relationship.
She interviews a psychologist about why there is such a strong association between hearing loss and poor mental health (the incidence of depression is four times higher among those with hearing loss than the population as a whole). There is a distinction to be made between the 60,000 deaf people in Britain (those who have been born deaf, use sign language and have a distinct culture and community), and the 11 million deafened (those who have lost their hearing later in life, who largely do not sign). The psychologist points out that when somebody has a spinal injury they stay in hospital for a long time with people who have had the same experience. But people who go deaf get a diagnosis, and then try to hide. “And the deafer they get, the more they hide.” There is no community for them; after all, what would be the point in meeting for a drink with other people who can’t make conversation?
Bathurst is a restless, curious writer, and she interweaves the story of her own experiences with imaginative research around hearing and sound. She interviews people who were born deaf and those who have lost their hearing, from army veterans to musicians to welders. She visits an ear-splitting shipbuilders’ yard, and sits in an anechoic chamber; she interviews a professor of acoustics and an ear surgeon. In every chapter she comes up with gems of information. Did you know that 60% of those inducted into the rock’n’roll hall of fame have suffered some kind of hearing loss? Or that a significant number of those treated for loss of hearing are only pretending to be deaf (according to one doctor she talks to, it’s surprisingly common)? Or that, thanks to the prevalence of headphones and amplified music, there is currently an epidemic of hearing loss?
As she describes the physical process of hearing, it really does seem like a miracle: the tiny bones that channel sound waves into the inner ear; the hair cells that transform those waves into electrical signals and create a sensory experience. After reading this book, I found myself listening in a richer and more interested way.
Bathurst’s story provides a satisfying narrative arc. After 12 years of her hearing gradually deteriorating, she was diagnosed with a disorder called otosclerosis, which can be cured by means of a delicate operation to the inner ear. Results are variable but in Bathurst’s case the operation was a success, and her hearing was almost completely recovered. She vividly describes the bliss of hearing again after all that time, but even more heartening, in a way, is the fact that she had found happiness even while she was still deaf. The change came when she discovered photography, and immersed herself in the visual world. “Sight gives you the world, and hearing gives you other people. Take away hearing and what have you got? You’ve got the world.”
• Sound: Stories of Hearing Lost and Found is published by Wellcome Collection and Profile Books. To order a copy for £11.24 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
