SUPERPOWER’

Jessica Fellowes.

…then the pandemic hit and lip-reading in a strange new world of face masks became near-impossible for bestselling novelist But, she reveals here, she’s risen to the challenge all her life

If I’m being truly honest, most of the time I fail to remember that there’s anything wrong with me. I expect you’re the same. Until you go to a party, you forget that you’re hopeless at small talk. Or you lie in bed late on Sunday mornings, blissfully unaware of your webbed feet, or the need to wear glasses. And who among us hasn’t been reminded with a jolt that we are 20 years older than we feel when we accidentally walk past a mirror?

I was born deaf, but it wasn’t diagnosed until I was two years old, when my parents were puzzled as to why their usually well-behaved child was occasionally very stubborn, not responding to calls in the park or standing very close to the television.

Every morning, in spite of the fact I am not 86 and won’t be for four decades yet, I wake up and reach for my hearing aids as my first and most instinctive action. I have worn them since I was two, when they were attached to long wires and a box that hung around my neck. When I go out, my checklist is: phone, bank card, spare batteries. The Duracell Bunny’s got nothing on me. My hearing aids do their job spectacularly well, especially since I started wearing the digital version 15 years ago. They are finely tuned to my own particular hearing deficiencies – raising the volume on the pitches I find hardest to hear (the lowest and highest ends of the scale) and cleverly lowering the volume on the background noise I don’t need to hear. Which means I can function pretty well as a human being.

So the truth is: I forgot I was deaf until the pandemic arrived and everyone started wearing face masks. My hearing aids might be good, but I still rely heavily on lip-reading – possibly more than I should. That’s how I’ve done it since I was young.

I learned to lip-read through sheer necessity, by gradually matching sounds with movements once I had the hearing aids. As I was only just then beginning to talk, my parents spent a year pronouncing every word very deliberately and slowly, so that I could hear all the elements of each syllable (deaf people often sound drunk when they talk because they miss out the

‘THE DAY I GOT MY NEW HEARING AIDS, THE WORLD CHANGED,’ SAYS JESSICA