Girl in the Dark

Imagine yourself forced to live in total darkness. Not the normal curtains-pulled sort of night-time darkness, but total, impenetrable blackness, so dark that you must feel your way around. That’s what happened to Anna Lindsey (a pseudonym) when she developed a severe sensitivity to all forms of light, natural and artificial. Exposure to light, however small or dim, caused excruciating pain, as if her skin were being burned by a blowtorch.

Girl in the Dark is her account of how life changed. It’s not a misery memoir. Although Lindsey admits she gets depressed – and has even, on occasions, thought of suicide – generally she remains upbeat, and her book is both uplifting and life affirming. She is no longer angry about her condition, and she has stopped seeking reasons or answers. She explains: “‘Why me?’ is the question of an idiot. The sensible person says simply, ‘Why not?’”

Girl In The Dark: Anna Lindsey's beautiful, moving
account of living with a severe sensitivity to light.

As her photosensitivity worsened, her world contracted to a single blacked-out room in the house of her boyfriend (now her husband). “It is extraordinarily difficult to black out a room,” she tells us.  

“First I line the curtains with blackout material, a heavy, plasticky fabric, strange flesh-like magnolia in colour, not actually black. But the light slips in easily, up and over the gap between the rail and the wall, and at the bottom through the loops made by the hanging folds. 

“So I add a blackout roller blind, inside the window alcove. But the light creeps in around the sides, and shimmies through the slit at the top. 

“So I tackle the panes themselves. I cut sheets of cooking foil, press them against the glass, tape them to the window frames. But the foil wrinkles and rips, refuses to lie flat. Gaps persist around the edges, pinpricks and tears across the middle.” 

Eventually, with curtains, blind, layer upon layer of foil and tape, and a rolled towel along the crack at the bottom of the door, she has blackness. But even that is not enough. To protect her skin from light rays that cannot be seen, but can still be felt, she must cover herself from head to toe in an assortment of garments, discovering through trial and error that some materials and styles are a more effective barrier than others. 

The room is small, but when she is first in the dark she often gets lost, for ‘the darkness can cause disorientation that is total, and terrifying’. She develops strategies to cope and listens to audio books and Radio 4 – plays, readings, debates, current affairs but, to start with at any rate, not music. At the beginning music ‘unhinges’ her, reminds her of what she has lost. 

And she plays word games in her mind, sometimes on her own, sometimes with visitors. Most tricky is the word grid, five squares by five, forming five letter words down and across - difficult enough when you have pen, paper and light, but well nigh impossible without them.

During the 10-year period covered by the book Lindsey has periods of remission when she is able to emerge from her room and venture to other heavily veiled parts of the house. In semi-darkness she cooks and reads, and is even able to creep outside in the dark. There are some memorable moments, like a night-time walk in the garden in the falling rain. She tells us:

“From the crown of my hat to the toes of my boots, an indescribable thrill runs through me. I stand poised at the edge of the lawn, and my starved senses open to this delicious, half-forgotten joy... 

I let myself be soaked. Like a young plant, I let myself be watered well in. It is as though I am being kissed by the world, welcomed back to life.” 

Roses at Montisfont. (Pic from National Trust website)

And on another occasion Mottisfont, a National Trust property near her home, arranges an extra-late midsummer opening so she and her husband can visit the walled rose garden. As they go through the door the smell ‘wallops’ them in the face. 

“It is as though we have passed from air to some new substance, formed of a thousand interlocking scents that twist languorously about each other, like invisible smoke.” 

It’s a magical interlude and as they leave she says: 

“…on the inside of my eyelids I carry with me the imprint of glorious flowers, and in my nostrils, the ghosts of their perfume.” 

It’s a shadowy sort of existence, and timings become all important during her good spells: her life is ruled by sunsets and sunrises. A photographic light meter helps track the amount of light she can tolerate. For example, f1 is almost dark; f4 is more or less when street lights come on; f8 is the sun just above horizon on a clear day. Light levels at noon are f200 plus, which she cannot cope with. She is, she says, ‘nibbling at the edges of the day’.  

Sadly, these periods of remission are all too brief, and she is always forced to retreat back to the sanctuary of her dark room. She looks back on them, grateful for the respite, but never lets herself hope for more, because she is unsure they will ever be repeated. 

Girl in the Dark is very moving, and very lyrical. Lindsey writes with great warmth and lucidity, and is able to consider her consider her situation and analyse her feelings in way which reveals more general truths about humanity. It made me laugh and cry - moments of high drama and intense sadness and despair are juxtaposed alongside interludes full of joy, and almost farcical episodes, for Lindsey retains her sense of humour, and is well aware how ludicrous her life can seem.  

Reading it took me on an emotional journey which left me exhausted, and I cannot begin to envisage what it must be like for Lindsey to live like this. Yet she seems to have achieved a degree of serenity, a feeling that what will be will be, and she is thankful for small pleasures in life. I was left with the feeling that we should all put a higher value on things we take for granted, like the feel of rain, the smell of a flower, the warmth of the sun – and having enough light to sit and read a book.

A Disappointing View of Childhood

Who remembers reading Ballet Shoes, White Boots, Curtain Up, The Painted Garden, The Circus is coming, and all those other wonderful Noel Streatfeild books? I still read them with as much enjoyment as I did when I was a child, but I’ve never got round to trying any of her adult fiction. So, when I saw A Vicarage Family (A Biography of Myself, it says on the front), I had to have it. This is a Fontana Lion published in 1984), so I imagine it’s aimed at children, and it’s written in the third person singular, which makes it read like a novel, especially as names have been changed. Noel Streatfeild herself becomes Victoria Strangeway, the middle sister of three girls, the plain one, the non-conformist rebel who is always in trouble.

The sisters, their brother Dick, and their cousin John (who spent much of his time living with them) seem to have had a very odd upbringing indeed. Their vicar father was very austere, unconcerned with home comforts or what he considered to be fripperies – I get the impression that more uncomfortable things were, the better he liked it. Perhaps he felt it proved how strong his faith was. He had a strong sense of duty and responsibility to his parishioners, and very strict standards, not just for himself, but for the children as well, and there were punishments for quite minor transgressions. In many ways his wife seems to have been as unworldly as he was, caring nothing for her appearance, or the importance of creating a beautiful home. A lot of the time she appears quite cold and hard-hearted, but has obviously been traumatised by the death of a child, at a point before this memoir starts. Despite all this the children are obviously loved, and they adore their parents, especially their father.

Religion obviously permeates every aspect of their lives. The only person I can think of whose childhood is in any way similar is Jeanette Winterson. Just as she produced craft work based on stories from the Bible, so Victoria/Noel, her sisters Isobel and Louise, brother Dick and cousin John, name their rocking Nebuchadnezzar!

Adherence to their father’s religious principles causes social problems and makes them feel people will laugh and ostracise them for being different. It’s impossible not to feel sympathy when they attend a children’s party during Lent, when they are only allowed to eat bread and butter. At the party they find the bread and butter is liberally sprinkled with hundreds and thousands; so, not wishing to appear rude, Vicky and her older sister Isobel eat it… lots of it! And their younger sister Louise succumbs to a sugar rose from the cake, then acts as if she’s committed a mortal sin, though I’m not sure if she really feels contrition, or is just play-acting, enjoying the drama, and looking for sympathy. Back home they confess to having broken their Lenten fast, and have to do penance by reading the first nine verses of Matthew IV, where the Devil tempts Jesus during his fast in the desert.

And their mismatched outworn, outgrown, clothes cause the girls just as much anguish. Isobel wears cast-offs from a cousin whose wealthy mother has exquisite taste – but what suits the cousin doesn’t necessarily suit Isobel. And the copies of her clothes, made up by a local dressmaker using cheap material, are a disaster. But neither the girl’s mother nor their father can see anything wrong with their clothes.

We follow the family through their move to Eastbourne, accompany them on holidays, trips to relatives, and school, and we get to meet their family, friends, servants, and the stalwart Miss Herbert, who is part governess, part nanny, part maid, part vicar’s secretary, and part home help.

Noel Streatfeild

Actually, I found this slightly disappointing. Like Christopher Milne’s The Enchanted Places, it offers glimpses into a bygone way of life (Streatfeild was born in 1895, and her memoir takes us up to the death of Cousin John in the early days of WW1). However, unlike Milne she doesn’t provide much insight into the way people felt and thought, and there are no reflections on life, the universe and everything, no sense of an older person coming to terms with their younger self. It’s a much more straight forward narrative, but what does come across – and what I found interesting - is the way Streatfeild’s drew on those childhood experiences for her writing. All those ‘underdog’ children, the plain, gawky girls, the outsiders, who lack feminine wiles, girlish charms and womanly accomplishments obviously have their origin in the young Noel’s childhood and the way she saw herself. They’re rags to riches stories, where a ‘Plain Jane’ child turns out to be the one with talent, or the one who finds true happiness, doing what they want to do.

It would have been nice to see some pictures of Streatfeild and her family, but as changes their names I suppose this was not possible, because it would have revealed their identities. Overall, I was disappointed with this book. I didn’t dislike it, but I felt something was lacking, and couldn’t put my finger on what that something was. I think it has to do with the fact that is not quite an autobiography, and not quite a novel: it falls somewhere between the two, and doesn’t quite come off.