CONTENTS

  1. Then and Now
  2. Craigton Hall
  3. Louise
  4. Danny
  5. Slow Courting
  6. Home Teaching
  7. Voyage of Discovery
  8. Jack Wilson
  9. The Blackford Hill
  10. The Potting Shed
  11. Revelations

1 THEN AND NOW

This is the story of Douglas and Louise. Of all the blind people I have known, they were the high flyers. Douglas became a barrister in a large criminal practice. Louise taught piano in a music academy, and performed in the concert hall. But I focus here on their teenage years, when they met and fell in love.

Life and love were very different in Scotland around the middle of the last century. For most people it was drab and narrow. John Knox was by no means dead. The contraceptive pill was still only a research project, and young love, as people said, had to be 'careful'.

The penalties for transgression could be severe, especially at Craigton Hall. It was a special school, built in the 19th century as an 'asylum', in which blind people could be instructed, housed and put to work.

Many years after the time of this story, those who campaigned for inclusive education decried it as a prison. The term is not wholly undeserved, for there was much about the regime at Craigton Hall that was bleak and negative. Yet there was also much that was bright, constructive, and not without lessons for today.

Craigton Hall helped to mould Douglas and Louise into the people they became. At the same time they had to mould themselves, even in the teeth of tyranny - for teenage love found no favour in the sight of John Knox's descendants. This is an intimate history of that resistance, told for the first time. It is part fiction, part fact - true without being truthful.

Am I serious? Well, yes, actually. Douglas and Louise were subjects in a field of power-knowledge, as Michel Foucault would say. They and their friends formed an underground resistance to a regime that was out of kilter with nature.

Douglas and Louise had no plan or theory to undermine Craigton Hall. The weapon they did have was 'culture' and, ironically, it was Craigton Hall that put it in their hands. No party or programme yet laid siege to the system of residential special schools. Inside, however, the language of 'liberty' was being redefined. People will always redefine it, whatever French philosophy says. The mole of revolution was running underground. My friends won their personal battle, but the system and the struggle continue.