FROM THE ARCHIVES:Eileen O'Brien's "A Social Sort of Column" described the situations of marginalised people without comment – such as the story of 38-year-old Margaret Dowling. - JOE JOYCE
WHEN BOYS of little chivalry throw bangers and dirty papers into Miss Margaret Dowling’s letter-box or break her window panes, there is not much she can do about it because she is virtually blind, very deaf and without power in her left leg and arm.
She lives with her brother, who is stone deaf, in a flat – which she keeps like a doll’s house – near Westland Row Church.
“I am quite happy except for the loneliness,” she says. “I think I would die if I was put into a home.”
Miss Dowling was born 38 years ago in a tenement a few yards away, and her parents moved into the flat when she was six weeks old. “So my heart is in this place. But all the old neighbours are gone, and the girls I grew up with have married and moved out to other districts. I scarcely know anyone around here now and I have no visitors.”
She could not walk until she was three. Then her mother offered her a biscuit and discovered that the little girl could not see it: she was going blind.
She went to school, but the teachers found that she could not learn anything in class. Because the other children would knock her down if she went into the yard, she joined the teachers at their lunch and one of them, Miss Dempsey, spent her lunch-hour trying to teach her.
Miss Dowling said that she did not learn much, but all the teachers gave her biscuits. She has hopes now of getting a steel support for her leg and going out to learn braille.
Her mother insisted on keeping her at home and refused to send her to the blind school at Merrion.
When she was about 13, she heard one day “a noise like two crashed planes” and found herself going deaf. There followed years of hospitals, including many years in a sanitorium [sic] and two operations to her eyes.
“I had to wait on the eye bank,” she said. “I have parts of dead people’s eyes in my eyes. It was a success. After the operations I became able to see shadows. I had to wait a year on the eye bank, and I know a man who was three years waiting. If only more people would leave their eyes to the eye bank . . .”
She showed me proudly how she could recognise, by looking at them closely, that pictures on the evening paper were of girls, and demonstrated how well she could read short words in the headlines.
Her greatest success was with “E.S.B.”, and she wondered why this should be.
She lives on a blind pension, plus a tuberculosis allowance, amounting to £5 15s. a week. She pays £1 rent: she gets free electricity and turf, but pays a man 2s. 6d. to bring her the turf. Her brother, she said, had T.B. meningitis and after that went stone deaf. He gets £4 12s. T.B. allowance; she looks after the money.
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