Book Bite - All Is Given: A Memoir in Songs

She’s a Brisbane-based songwriter and an awardwinning producer of radio documentaries, and in this memoir LINDA NEIL travels the world, playing music and meeting people along the way. In this extract she recalls as a teenager being given the seemingly tedious duty of reading books to a blind neighbour. But what happened next surprised both the reader and the listener.

I once read to a blind person. She lived down the road from us in Warren Street, St Lucia, during my last year at school. Her name was Mrs Featherington, although, in the teenage tradition of shortening everything, I referred to her as Feathers. Feathers was studying law at the University of Queensland and also learning singing from my mother.

One summer, during a particularly vocal discussion with my siblings around the dinner table, Mum suddenly leaned towards me and said: If you like the sound of your own voice so much, go down the road and read to Mrs Featherington.

I found out later that Mum had already volunteered me as one of Feathers’ small band of readers, who called at her house to read law books, legal briefs, university texts and the Bible.  

Oh God, I remember pleading. Don’t make me read the Bible! I’ll do anything, just not the Bible!

So I was put down on the list marked ‘miscellaneous’, which meant I was reading for entertainment and not educational or religious purposes.

My father suggested I choose reading material with some literary merit and handed me a book by Katherine Mansfield. Mum countered with the offer of a biography of Dame Nellie Melba (or was it Joan Sutherland?), which she assured me was a ‘jolly good read’. But I rejected any notion of highbrow pursuits during my holiday and chose instead a copy of Adolf Hitler: My part in his downfall by Spike Milligan.

I can’t say I looked forward to visiting Feathers in my allotted time. She’d always struck me as a crabby sort of woman. And even though Mum would ask me how I would be if I couldn’t see, when it was hard to get a civil word out of me even with all my faculties intact, I still thought it was a tiresome chore. So I rocked up to Feathers’ doorstep and entered her dark but tastefully furnished residence, with a lot of resentment and very little hope of having a good time.

Two pages into Milligan’s book, though, Feathers and I were in fits of giggles. By the fifth or sixth page, the giggles had turned into guffaws and snorts of laughter. This symphonic hilarity continued throughout Spike’s story. I can’t recall much about the content of the book now, or even the tone. What I do remember is that by the time I had finished reading the book, which coincided with the completion of my rostered duty as a volunteer, Feathers and I had bonded in a way no amount of talking one on one could have achieved. It was as if our shared laughter had bridged the chasm between our personalities. As if every time Feathers had stopped me mid-sentence and spluttered no, no, read that bit again because the sound of her giggles had drowned out the previous words, we had become members of some secret society of laughers.