My 1960’S Catwoman Specs By Cathy Bell
Around about the age of nine or ten I began to have problems with my eyes. As it turned out, I was long-sighted and it was this conjunctivitis ailment that caused my parents to take me to the doctor and discover that I needed to wear glasses - or specs.
It was a traumatic discovery for me for a couple of reasons. First of all none of the other family members needed specs; my mum, dad, sister and brother all had good eyesight. So what was wrong with me? I was the youngest so I should have had 20/20 vision through my hardly used eyeballs. It made me feel a bit freakish, strange, different, as if I were in the wrong family.
Even worse was the thought of what was going to happen at school. Only weeks before another girl had appeared in the class with new goggles and had been laughed and pointed at without mercy. I was not involved in the mockery but stood by thinking how awful she must have felt. This little girl was an unfortunate specimen of childhood with an extremely spotty face, which had been drawn further attention to by a pair of pink NHS glasses. The kids were as heartless and cruel as her parents who had put them on her in the first place. That’s what went through my mind when I heard the doctor say that I would need to go to hospital for an eye test and that I would probably need to wear glasses.
It was my dad who took me to both the doctor and the hospital. Although he did his best I really needed my mum but she was out working nights as a waitress. This was the early 1960’s and after the doctor's we went home and dad made dinner and switched the TV on for me to squint at. The hospital eye test came and went. I managed to convince mum and dad not to throw me to the kiddie mob by spending a bit of cash on some trendy eye furniture. Dad was a pushover because he felt guilty that he wasn’t mum when I needed mum. So I was taken to town and allowed to choose a pair of groovy Catwoman-style pointy frames in black. Quite sophisticated for a nine year old.
The other thing that was going on at school was the school choir competition. Our singing teacher had become an inspiration to us kids and had us singing our little hearts out. She was an animated woman on a mission. I had never seen anyone so passionate and was fascinated to watch her leap about with her arms waving wildly in the air. Lost in music and totally loopy, Fanny Froggat was determined to train her band of small warblers into a singing machine capable of winning the school choir competition.
It was the day of the competition. Everyone was on a high, we would win there was no doubt. Nerves had me running to the toilet every ten minutes. The bus was revving up to go and I had to go again. School toilets, concrete block, smell of carbolic soap, horrible - the memory is inexplicably vivid. In the rush I pulled my jacket so hard that my cool 1960’s glasses came flying straight out the pocket and down into the toilet pan. I froze momentarily from the head down; my mouth fell open and my head tilted forward to peer down the hole. Then I ran to catch the bus.
We didn’t win the competition and for a minute or two on the bus home there was a gloom hanging over us. That was until the school wit, a girl called Anne, piped up ‘that adjudicator wis rubbish - he couldnae even adjudicate’.
