Heaven On Earth

Heaven on Earth

“0800 – CREDO – 1111. Believe in yourself: how can I help?”

Somehow he knew, unlike all the other telephone Helplines this was the voice of another warm, living person, not an impersonal, emotionless robot voice preparing to shunt him into a queue, listening to the first eight bars of Vivaldi’s “Winter” repeated ad infinitum or ad nauseam Even the silence itself felt somehow inclusive, shelter rather than shadow – perhaps brought about by the unmistakeable sincerity in the Voice which greeted him.

There was no irritating background musak to grate on his eardrum, nor any suggestion he was wasting precious time. The smooth, creamy contours of the brief ensuing silence lapped gently at his battered and fragile nerves, easing his pain.

“I don’t know if anyone can help me, really.”

Was it his over-sensitive imagination, or did he hear the faintest of creaks suggesting whoever he was talking to had eased back in his chair, ready and willing to lend a sympathetic ear for as long as it took? A faint spark of Hope trembled deep inside. He continued:

“Lately it seems every decision I make has ended in sorrow, failure or worse. Let’s say I’m driving to a meeting, at a junction I can turn left or right, it’s the same distance either way. I turn left – and someone sideswipes me, the car’s a writeoff.”

“I booked a holiday – first time I’ve been away for a couple of years. On the morning of my flight there’s an Air Traffic Control strike in France, I lose everything. Even travel insurance said their policies didn’t cover industrial action.”

“I decided to propose to my girlfriend. Then she rang, took me out to dinner, said she hoped we would always remain ‘friends’ – and introduced me to her intended Wife …”

“Recently I was offered a new job; closer to home, much better pay. I worked my notice, started the new job last week – today they went belly-up, so no job, no pay, not a penny redundancy, and I don’t qualify for Job Seekers Allowance either! I don’t know where to turn, it’s been like going through Hell on Earth …”

His voice broke. What could have been an eternal second of grief-laden tragic silence and dark despair loomed, then receded as the calm Voice of the operator caressed his ears, easing his fraught fears with simple, unfeigned sympathy and solace.

“You’ve certainly had a lot to deal with, and I won’t try to claim I “understand how you feel” because very few of us could make that claim. I believe, in order to feel another’s pain, you must walk in his shoes for a while.”

“Tom was born with greatly reduced hearing in one ear and none whatsoever in the other. Scans and X-rays showed that, although the ear was perfectly formed on the outside, the internal mechanics of an eardrum simply weren’t there.”

“Despite being denied the opportunity to hear true ‘stereo’ sound, Tom developed a love of music and was determined to make it his career. There was nothing wrong with his manual dexterity or his natural abilities, and by the time he left school there wasn’t an instrument he couldn’t play – all without anything more than a minimum of formal lessons.”

“But regular work was hard to come by, even for those without disability problems. Tom drifted from one music festival to the next, surviving on what casual work he was offered as a ‘session musician’. One summer he found himself at Christiania, a ‘semi-official’ autonomous ‘Hippie kommune’ just outside Copenhagen, in Denmark.”

“After playing a set, he could see the crowd responding enthusiastically, clapping and cheering. Frustrated he could only hear ‘faint praise’ as reward for his talent, he took out a penknife and publicly sliced off his useless left ear, tossing it in a bucket of ice on the stage.”

“Medics were there within seconds: Tom (and the bucket of ice) were rushed to the nearest hospital. Tom was fully conscious, and insisted he was in no pain, that the ear itself was merely ‘dead flesh’ without function, and that he did NOT wish to have it re-attached.”

“The blood which seeped out of the ear into the ice gelled into tiny veins which spread to resemble a network of delicate fibre-optic radio cables. Puzzled by this, hospital technicians continued to ‘top up’ with ice to protect the ear and the blood vessels.”

“When Tom convinced the doctors he was fit to be discharged, he discovered that for the first time in his life he could hear everything around him in full, glorious technicolour Stereo! His decision to remove the obstacle in his life had transformed his personal hell into a very real Heaven on Earth.”

“I cannot promise you the same Happy Ever After: but where there is Life there is Hope.”