black -out
The girl who lives in a permanent
Imagine sitting in a room in total darkness. How would you pass the time? What thoughts and feelings might come up? If you had to endure weeks and months of this, how would you know that you were still you? Most importantly, how could you describe the experience without being boring?
It is the sort of challenge a creative-writing teacher might set a class, but for Anna Lyndsay this was not some fanciful exercise designed to improve her prose style. Suffering from a very rare and extreme form of sensitivity to light, her only options were to live in constant agony or retire to a blacked-out room.
Light exposure didn’t make Lyndsay just a bit itchy, a tad scratchy: her entire body burned, as if her skin were being sliced by a giant cheese-grater.
The miracle is not that she has written about the experience, although that would be remarkable enough: computer screens cause such pain that she has to use a pencil, no easy feat in a murky room.
What is so surprising is that this is a tremendous book, beautifully written and full of hard-won hope and unexpected humour. It isn’t a misery memoir, nor a self-help guide. It’s a little masterpiece.
Lyndsay had a job in the civil service, a first-floor flat in an unposh part of Wimbledon and a newish boyfriend, Pete. Then, in 2005, her nice, happy life began to unravel. It started with a burning sensation in her face. People kept mentioning stress, but she began to realise that exposure to screens and fluorescent office lighting was setting off her symptoms.
On a holiday in Northumberland – hardly the sunshine capital of Europe – she became horribly unwell. Gradually it became apparent that all light, natural daylight included, was the cause of her troubles. Getting a diagnosis took some time, but eventually the doctors agreed she was suffering from a condition called photosensitive seborrhoeic dermatitis. What they didn’t know was how to cure her. So she blacked out a bedroom in her boyfriend’s house and shut herself in. Anyone normal would have gone mad, but as luck would have it Anna is abnormally cheerful, curious, inventive, funny and brave.
She passed time by listening to talking books. Because her local library had lots of spoken word tapes of soldier stories, she became an unlikely expert on SAS survival techniques. She made up word games. She enrolled on a course and tutored herself to become a piano teacher.
In a wry passage called Health
And Safety, she tells how she and her boyfriend risked serious injury attempting to make love in the pitch dark. ‘Pete has ground his elbow into my eye; on another occasion I punched him on the jaw and his head hit the wall behind the bed... the trick, we have discovered, is to make sure the other person always knows where your head is.’
Mercifully, there are periods of remission, during which Lyndsay is able to venture out before dawn and after dusk – the vampire parallels are not lost on her – and even to go on holiday in a caravan. Here, her descriptive powers come to the full, in accounts of the smell of a rose garden, of the sight of misty grassland before dawn, of walking through beech woods.
While she is a bit better, in the gloaming of a December afternoon, she and Pete get married. It is a lovely occasion but one marked by anxiety. The new bride can’t help but wonder, will he be able to stand a future with a partner whose life is so drastically restricted?
By the close of the book, you feel as if you’ve made a wonderful new friend. Anna Lyndsay is one of those special people of whom it could be said that she’d rather light a candle than curse the darkness; except, of course, she can’t do that.
Instead, she’s written a luminous account that celebrates everything that is best about being human. This book is that candle.