This essay first appeared in the Writers Without Margins Journal, Vol 7, March 2022. Writers Without Margins is a non-profit helping writers in non-traditional spaces learn through expressive writing.

"You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read," suggests Charlie Tremendous Jones.

I would add, “and the places you go.”

As a teen in England, I had the gift of them all, in meeting and reading to Sidney Hawes.

Reading to Sidney

Sidney was an elderly man in my school's neighborhood who had recently lost his sight. He put in a request to my high school for students to come and read aloud to him weekly, and when the announcement was made at Assembly one morning, I leapt at the chance.

I had recently had my own bout with potential blindness and come through with my sight intact, so my heart went out to Mr. Hawes. Also, more selfishly, the offer of a legitimate reason to escape the confines of school was astonishing.

Several of us students went, one at a time. So, where I left off in a Freya Stark account of camels in the Arabian Desert, I did not pick up later because another student had read in the meantime. However, my curiosity was piqued and I often sought out the book to learn what I had missed.

Thanks to Sidney, I gained not only read-aloud skills, but a love of learning beyond the prescribed path. Wandering beyond the prescribed has been my home ground ever since.

Transported

Sidney Hawes loved travel writing. In the pages of his aging hardcovers, we were both transported beyond ourselves and the gloom of recession-filled '80s Britain, to the heyday of travel before passports and the romance of the Middle East.

I read to him for two years, in the hour before lunch once or twice a week.

And oh, the glorious freedom of leaving the hubbub of flowing corridors, two thousand students changing class simultaneously, and the criminality of roaming the halls between time.

I walked honestly out through those gates, onto Hall Road in my home city of Norwich, and took a left. I only had to pass a few driveways, turn in at the little brick house, and raise the knocker to enter a world of quietness, of his wife's shuffling slippers as she answered the door, and the ticking clock.

Mr. Hawes sat ready in his overstuffed chair, crowded in with walls of books, always somewhat grumpy but quietly appreciative.

Gifts

He gave me a small gift each Christmas, usually a box of After Eight mints, carefully wrapped and modestly ribboned. And when I mentioned it was about to be my sixteenth birthday, he gave me a different sort of gift—that of perspective.

I'm surprised now that I read to him that week because it was slap in the middle of O-level exams—nine subjects examined over two weeks, the cumulative work of two school years—but at that point he was a fixture, and I would not have dreamed of disappointing him.

In our moment of catching up before opening to the page, I mentioned my milestone.

Sidney was silent, then said, "So, you're going to be sixteen."

His grey eyes teared up with a great swell of longing and regret, and he uttered, "The world is your oyster."

I think he was in his ninth decade.

During World War II, Sidney’s young daughter was evacuated to Canada. After the war, she did not want to return but stayed on with her new Canadian family. His granddaughter was then living illegally south of the border, in the Big Apple.

He proudly showed me an article of hers published in The New York Times, and this I also read aloud to him.

I held the newsprint reverently, imagining a life in the States and how one went about getting there, legal or not.

Mushroom Soup

One day I learned from his wife at the end of an hour's reading that it was Mr. Hawes' birthday, and would I like to join them for lunch?

So, I sat down in the narrow space that was the dining room and pulled in my chair and the first course was soup—Cream of Mushroom soup from a can.

There was nothing I disliked more.

The pungent aroma of the mushrooms enrobed in milky sauce and salt rose up from each bowl and filled the room. But I took one sip after another, seated next to Sidney's wife, with her tight grey curls bobbing to the level of her soup spoon, and opposite Sidney, who could not see my struggle.

We talked little and the clock ticked on, and I thought of the painful story of vet James Herriot in All Creatures Great and Small struggling to eat the fatty pork from a grateful farmer.

I gained the bottom of the bowl. Books were a solace all around, it seemed.

Solace

Sidney was bitter about losing his sight; bitter about his daughter not returning. A short man, round in his sleeveless knitted pullover and button-down shirt. Round, very thick glasses captured what light was left to him.

He seldom smiled, let alone laughed—but listening to books was a solace to Sidney. They took him winging away from that tiny sitting room, the suddenly narrowed space of no reading. He hung on my every word and together we travelled far, both in need of the romance of story.

I do not remember our parting or know what happened to him later, but I vividly recall the still air of the sitting room, the ticking clock, Freya Stark striding valiantly out across 1930s Arabia, and Mr. Sidney Hawes breathing quietly as he leaned forward and listened.

To this day, in my life in the States, my head turns at the sight of a volume he would have loved.