What follows is an utterly tasteless story that I have told here once before back in 2014.  I love it. I love how ten-year-olds and eleven-year-olds love it and especially because they often have to think hard about it before they really get it.  Besides, when I told it to storyteller and musician, Kate Portal, who has never let her blindness stop her from doing things, she enjoyed it too. But then, she was always straightforward about her lack of sight and she made a point of collecting eye stories. I’m not sure why I’ve remembered it now. Perhaps because of some work that’s coming up that’s made me start thinking of stories I might tell to get my 10/11 year old audience going. But more likely it’s because of one of the comments that came in on last week’s blog. Anyway, here’s the story. Remember it? 

An Eye For An Eye

There was once a man who had one glass eye. When this man heard about a surgeon in Harley Street who was brilliant at eye-transplants, he was very excited. So he made an appointment.

At the appointment, the man was told, ‘Yes, I can fix eyes. But you’ll have to provide the new eye yourself.’ Also the man was advised to be careful: it would be better if he could find a new eye that matched his own existing eye in colour.’

What was the man to do? He went on holiday to think about it and where he went was on a walking holiday in the hills in Scotland. One day, he was going along beside a little river and coming to a small stone bridge, when he heard the sound of a car going on the hill the other side of the river. It sounded like it was out of control. Then he saw it rolled down the hill and – Smash – into the bridge.

The man ran to the car. Only one person was inside it: the driver. And when he managed to open  the door on the driver’s side, he could see at once that the driver was dead. After his immediate shock, he was just about to go away to report the accident or get help when he stopped and looked again. The driver’s eyes were open and – my goodness – they were the same colour as his own. Slowly the man put his hand in his pocket, got out the spoon he was keeping there for the purpose and scooped out the dead man’s eye nearest to him. He felt very lucky, so much so that just as he was going away, an idea occurred to him. He’d leave something in return. So he took out his one glass eye and popped it into the eye-space he’d left.

You can guess what happened next. As quick as he could, this man travelled back to London, went to Harley Street and got himself fixed up. And lo and behold, the new eye worked! It was amazing! So a year later, the man decided he should make an anniversary celebration. He should go off walking in the same place as last year.

So there he was, on the same road as before, and there he saw the same little bridge. After surveying the scene for a while, he walked on and very soon came to a pub. When he went in to have a celebratory drink, he quickly got talking with the landlord. ‘Yes,’ said the landlord as landlords do, ‘this is a peaceful part of the world, nothing much happens round here. Except,’ he said, interrupting himself, ‘there was one thing that did happen about this time last year. A terrible accident it was. A driver went out of control on the hill and smashed into the bridge at the bottom.  Stone cold dead he was when we found him.  The odd thing was that when the police examined the driver, they were never able to work out how he’d been managing to drive that car with two glass eyes.’

Get it?

And why did I remember that story this week? Well, two comments on last week’s blog said how seeing shapes in the clouds in the sky had been part of their childhood. Swati’s comment also said that seeing shapes in the clouds had led on to her seeing patterns and shapes elsewhere, for instance in moss on walls. What she said resounded with me. I’ve forever noticing natural phenomena such as trees or rocks that seem to me to have eyes or faces or actually look like whole creatures. My photos this week are ones I’ve taken where I’ve seen such things. I wonder if you’ll see them too. 

So the process goes on. After looking back through my photo archive, I’ve started thinking about how we animate our landscapes not only with our eyes but in language too. The eye of the storm. The mouth of the river. The teeth of the wind. Bring these phrases together and you too may find some powerful images stirring into life in your mind.

PS: The lugubrious face is a tree, I can’t recall where. The great rock creature drinking from the sea is at Barafundle Bay in Pembrokeshire.

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