REMARKABLE STORY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 April 1938, Page 5

REMARKABLE STORY

OF WOMAN’S COURAGE. BLIND, DEAF AND DUMB. What would you do if you were blind, deaf and dumb? Would life mean nothing to you? Would you drag out a miserable, bitter existence alone? Then read the life of Helen Keller —perhaps the most remarkable story of courage that has ever been told. “Helen Keller’s Journal,” a moving record, has been published by Michael Joseph. Miss Keller, now 56, has been blind and deaf since infancy. She has never known the sound of human speech. .Yet Helen Keller graduated with honours at Harvard University. She has learned Greek, Latin, French and German. She has translated “The Odes of Horace” from Latin into English.

She is,a student of history, philosophy, economies and literature. She can “listen” to music, feeling the vibrations of sound.

1 Helen Keller swims, rides and is fond of air travel. She goes to the pictures and to theatres with a compansion, who taps on to her hand the story of the film or play.

That is the secret of how Helen Keller was taught. Her teacher was Anne Sullivan, who had been blind herself as a girl but had recovered her sight. She began to teach Helen Keller when Helen was seven.

With miraculous patience the teacher began her task of telling Helen the names of the objects around her by tapping out letters on to the child’s hand.

She taught her that those words represented sounds, sounds that Helen Keller had never heard. And she then taught her to reproduce those sounds herself, although Helen could not hear her own words Anne Sullivan wrought those miracles. Fourteen years after she had begun her teaching, her pupil, Helen Keller, graduated at Harvard. Anne Sullivan accompanied her to lectures, always tapping the words of the speaker on to Helen’s hand. And then in 1936 Anne Sullivan died.

Helen Keller’s courage was supreme. With her secretary, Miss Polly Thomson, who taps out words for her as Anne Sullivan did, Helen Keller made a journey to Great Britain. She kept a journal into which she poured her grief, her most intimate thoughts. She typed it herself every day.

It is a record of courage, a story of achievement, and a message of hope.