Locked in a world where talk ‘is just a low seaside roar’

Sound: Stories Of Hearing Lost And Found

Bella Bathurst Wellcome Collection and Profile €20.99 ★★★★★

It’s the stuff of nightmares. You’re sailing on dark, choppy waters and the engine fails. As your crewmates try to hoist the sail, you’re put in charge of steering, but all you can hear of the skipper’s instructions is ‘... ell …! …ll …! …t …ay!’ No matter how hard you listen, his words remain an unsolvable crossword puzzle. This was where writer Bella Bathurst found herself in 2004. By then, she’d been going deaf in both ears for seven years, and while she had reluctantly been fitted for hearing aids, she was still trying to conceal the lifechanging extent of her hearing loss from friends.

Social challenges – and they’re profound – are just one area of deafness

that Bathurst explores in her extraordinary journey. Splicing memoir with reportage, she investigates, among other things, hearing loss in the music world and the military, and the glorious versatility of sign language.

Hearing loss affects 250,000 adults here, and for Bathurst it started when she was just 27. By then, it wasn’t just missed punchlines. Talk in meetings had become ‘no more than a low seaside roar’. An audiologist in pink shoes and a ScoobyDoo tie confirms her growing deafness, most likely the result of a head injury.

Twelve years later, Bathurst has finally found happiness after routine tests revealed her to be among the tiny percentage whose condition was operable. Thanks to a pair of minuscule titanium implants shaped like question marks, she’s now regained more than 80% of her hearing.

The first live music she experiences without hearing aids is nothing short of revelatory. But she’s also newly aware of the selective ‘deafness’ that we ‘hearies’, as the deaf dub us, bring to the world around us. To truly listen is to care.

It’s observations like this, along with riveting scientific detail, that echo long after you’ve turned the final page.