Reg Cooper, 73 is registered blind and suffers from congenital cataracts a condition which has passed through several members of his family, including his daughter, Sheila Hocken. Both have some sight, but not much.
No-one in the Cooper household had much vision, but it wasn't until Sheila was 6 or 7 that she came home and asked "Why don't other kids walk into lamposts? To me, our family was normal - it was everyone else who was odd!"
For Reg, growing up in 1930s with a visual impairment wasn't easy. He'd attended the local school up to 6 years old, but they gave up on him when the teacher found he couldn't read the blackboard no matter how close he was to it. Reg was sent away to the Liverpool School for the Blind.
There was little knowledge of how to treat children with disabilities in the 30s. The education authorities were empowered to a remove a severely disabled child from his or her home and place them in an institution. Reg remembers, "You were absolutely locked in They had complete control of you night and day - they never took their eyes off you…" Reg laughs as he describes the brushmaking and woodworking classes.
Reg feels that the school didn't really affect his attitude to his lack ofsight. The 'inmates' hated it so much, that a lot of their time was spent in wanting to be free and at home - they only had 9 weeks a year where they were allowed home to see their families.
Neither of Sheila's parents had the experience of a home life as a child, so they fought hard to get their daughter accepted at a local school. The headmaster there had sight only in one eye, so he had sympathy for the family. "I was an odd fish in a bowlful these sighted kids - and they could catch balls - I never worked that out." There was some classroom teasing, when Sheila got so close to the blackboard that she got chalk on the end of her nose. The family dealt with teasing, or traumas, or other sight-related incidents, by laughing at them, "You begin to think," says Sheila, "'What do sighted people laugh about…they don't have all these traumas we have!' "
Sheila feels that being a child in a family that is visually impaired helped have a very positive attitude to her disability, "If I'd been a visually impaired child in a sighted family I would have been mollycoddled…" Reg has been a bit of an inspiration for his daughter, "What happens as a child is the ground for everything you do when you grow up - if my dad had had perfect vision, my life would have been completely different - it would have been horrible! I would have thought I was odd, wouldn't I! Whereas I got to quite an age before I realised that!"
