The language of friendship

When Bruce Brehaut was diagnosed as profoundly deaf, it might have been seen as a disaster. But his 'disability' was to shape a very special life, as Yvonne Ozanne explains BRUCE arrived in September 1946. A fortune teller in India had told my father that his next child would be a boy and that he would be special. Indeed, he was.

A blond and bonny baby, all was well until the time he suffered meningitis at 18 months old. Tests soon proved to my anguished and anxious parents that Bruce had been left profoundly deaf. They took him to Harley Street specialists in London but at that time there was no further treatment available and no operation would help. Hearing aids could not assist him and so Bruce faced life without one of the crucial senses we all take for granted.

Before long the problem of schooling arose. He was doted on by my great-aunt Elise, who had no children of her own. She was very much against his going away to England, but that was the only option open then for Bruce and the family.

Today, deaf and hard-of-hearing children will be able to attend the new school in the Forest for those with special needs.

I wonder how different life would have been if Bruce could have stayed in Guernsey.

However, there were two other boys attending The Royal School for the Deaf in Margate, Kent, and it was decided that that was where Bruce would be sent.

The wrench for us all, three times a year for three terms for the next 10 years, was heartbreaking. Aged only six, my brother was in effect attending a boarding school and it was initially very difficult to explain to him why he had to leave us, his four sisters, mother and father. It was very hard on everyone.

When he was around eight years old, Bruce asked me what hearing was like. And why was he the only one in the family who couldn't hear? I tried to explain sounds. For a time he was very angry and felt isolated.

Gradually, though, he accepted his life and made the best of it. The school gave him a wonderful education and great confidence. The boys and girls were encouraged to lip-read and join in the hearing world rather than use only sign language. This stood Bruce in good stead and we always spoke to him normally, using our voices but adding lots of animated descriptions with our hands.

However, Bruce and his deaf friends had a rapid sign language of their own, some of it coded and a kind of shorthand. You had to be very quick to keep up with him in full flow and a room with him and his school friends would be the noisiest imaginable. Dumb didn't come into it.

He had a wonderful sense of humour and mischief, sometimes using his deafness to tease someone. There was a man he didn't care for who always made huge signs and spoke silently in exaggerated and slow fashion.

Bruce detested being spoken to as if he was an idiot. So one day, in a workshop where the radio played loudly all day - but Bruce knew when it was switched off because he had a phenomenally aware sense of vibration - he waited for silence. Then he clapped loudly and shouted the man's name, causing him to drop his dish of paint, which crashed to the floor, spilling all the liquid.

When the man angrily rounded on Bruce, he put on an innocent look and said: 'But I didn't know the noise had stopped, I am deaf!'

All his sisters played different parts in looking out for Bruce. When we were little, I used to go to the cinema with him. He loved a good cowboy film, Laurel and Hardy and the Marx brothers, all very animated films.

In the dark of the cinema, Bruce would prod my ribs with his elbow wanting to know what was going on. I had to follow the plot and tell Bruce the story simultaneously. This has left me with a lifelong ability to analyse and communicate at the same time and possibly also accounts for my nosiness and good memory.

Bruce left school at 16 and worked at Tektronix for a while and made good friends. People were very kind and he had an engaging manner and was very handsome. But soon he began to long for the open air and to work out of doors, so he joined R. G. Falla and worked on the new harbour and the Princess Elizabeth Hospital. He became very skilled and was proud of his contribution to Guernsey's architecture.

Many of his workmates learned some of the sign language for the deaf and Bruce made deep friendships. He liked his pint and on one occasion, while at the Royal Channel Islands Yacht Club, Oliver Reed walked in and challenged the men to an arm wrestling match. He was not a small man - in fact he was something of a gentle giant. Soon Bruce joined in the fun and offered 'the best of three' matches with Reed. Bruce won!

From then on, whenever he wanted to, he proudly produced a signed note from Reed saying 'This b****** is stronger than me!' Both larger than life, they ended the evening the best of friends.

Because of his heightened sense of vibration, Bruce had a rare gift - much as the deaf classical musician Evelyn Glennie has - of being able to feel rhythm. Once, at a dance, he conducted the live band because he could feel the music through the wooden floorboards.

He always knew when there was something wrong with his car and where it was: he could feel the abnormality through the steering wheel.

He would go to a garage and astonish the mechanics by

lifting the bonnet and pointing to the exact problem.

And when we were young we would lie in the grass and he'd tell me a plane was coming. I looked up to a vacant blue sky. 'No,' I would reply, puzzled. But, sure enough, slowly and just a speck at first, a plane would fly over. How did he know? 'I felt it through the ground,' he told me.

Because the fluid normally present in the canals of the ears had effectively been burnt out by meningitis, Bruce was never seasick. Once, on a ferry to France, the sea was so rough that even the crew was sick. Bruce helped himself at the bar, smiled at everyone and, when the boat docked, disembarked fresh as a daisy to enjoy his stay in France. He could also endure great heights without fear. He used this capacity to earn extra 'danger money' and loved the view of the island from the highest crane on the White Rock.

Bruce had no social barriers. He would walk up to quarrelling people and tell them to make up. Once, sitting in a parked car and squabbling, a couple told me that Bruce had banged on their window and asked them to stop being unhappy and made a smiley face at them. They were so taken aback they had to laugh and Bruce laughed with them.

His laughter and sense of fun were wonderfully infectious. In a room full of people, Bruce would use his eyes and tell me which person he thought was obnoxious, who was flirting, who he thought was ugly and who he fancied. It was very difficult to keep a straight face when he was around and absolutely impossible to ignore him.

The only thing that exasperated him was people treating him as deaf and dumb. He would get furious with that person.

'I can understand you but you can't understand me although you can hear! Who's dumb?' he quite rightly said. And it is a shame that the high technology we have now - emails, telephone texting, the Internet, sophisticated cameras etc - weren't around when he was growing up and had become an adult. These things are all so helpful to the deaf when it comes to communicating.

There is an operation available now which was being done in America when Bruce was in his 30s which helps his specific condition. But he refused it. He was worried as to how he might react to sound after all those years. He had adapted to his world and the deaf society in Guernsey and decided to stay as he was.

On the occasions when I didn't understand him, he was disappointed and impatient with me. He would take out a pen and paper and write what he wanted to say, giving me a withering look as if to say, 'You are stupid!'.

Sometimes he would write the words slowly and carefully, letting me know that that was how he felt - being told something in slow motion as though his very good brain wasn't somehow working.

He had a huge interest in general knowledge, people and ideas.

We could literally talk for hours and would paint and draw endlessly. When we were very young we would take turns to make up a story - usually something thrilling along the lines of King Solomon's Mines and adventure stories that ended with cliff-hangers for the next day.

When I heard that Bruce had had an accident at the Princess Elizabeth Hospital new building, I wasn't too worried.

He hadn't heard the warning beep as an excavator backed towards him and was trapped by the leg. It had been unpleasant and a shock, but we didn't expect his recovery to take too long.

So a few months later when Bruce began to lose weight and was obviously not well, we began to worry. The leg wouldn't mend. There was some circulatory trouble - Bruce, very unusually, lacked energy.

Just before Christmas 1990 he saw his doctor, who thought that he was over a 'flu bout and able to go to Margate for a reunion with his friends from The Royal School for the Deaf.

In the meantime our grandmother, aged 100, died and Bruce attended her funeral, as we all did. He didn't seem at all well and told us that he had pains in his back. But he still wanted to go to the reunion.

On 4 January 1991 my parents took Bruce to the airport and he waved, telling them not to worry. He would be back soon. He attended the reunion and in fact had a very good party, glad to see all his old school friends.

The next morning Bruce had breakfast but wanted a walk, telling his friend's wife he wouldn't be long. But soon he needed help. He went into a garage and asked the petrol assistant if he could phone for a doctor. The assistant offered him a chair but when he returned, Bruce had died. He was 44.

At his funeral at the Vale Church, the late Rev. Peter Simpson shed tears as he spoke 'and in heaven the deaf shall hear'. Hundreds of people in the congregation wept with him. Then he told us of Bruce's strong character, saying that we were the ones with a problem: he could, after all, understand us.

So there was laughter and that was Bruce: tears and laughter in equal measure.

And a life lived with great courage, warmth and humour. He was very special and can never be replaced.