On cold, clear, still bright winter mornings, you’d hear it. A little like the sound of the jet engines of planes taking off from Birmingham (then Elmdon) Airport, only it was everywhere. A hushed roar, there to greet me as I woke up on those schooldays, back in the sixties. ‘The Brum roar’, the Evening Mail called it: a unique sound caused by untold thousands of cars and factories mingling in the still air conditions above the city, if the air was right.
Which was over 60 years ago. And with that, great change. Not least in me. My hearing lately has shown its age. To the point of needing my first hearing aid a few years ago. They helped but I wouldn’t describe them as restoring youth. With hindsight (and doesn’t that get easier with age?) it would have paid me to get to know an audiologist. I didn’t. Those aids lasted 5 years, and now I’ve needed new ones.
I’d grown to trust Steven quite by chance by then – he took my wax out. Something I found I’d needed to give the hearing aids any possibility of doing their job. And that was the most important lesson in getting new aids: trusting to someone. Unlike new glasses, for which you can more or less wander down the High Street or through Google, hearing aids are – well, complex. They can now do so much. Given all that tech, pricing can be confusing and what matters most isn’t so much choosing the aid as how you are treated in the months and years that follow. You need that ongoing relationship if you are going to get your money’s worth. So I went with his recommendation.
The next few days were nothing less than astonishing. My clothes crinkled again. My slippers made their sound on the hall floor again. I could hear my wife drying her hair in the morning. Which in itself may not sound astonishing, but for the fact that I could hear her from the kitchen – she was in the back bedroom. Half a house and several doors away.
But then there was something else. Something bigger. Wider. Out there. A gentle rumbling. Couldn’t place it. It was everywhere. Yet nowhere. Wasn’t the wind – but it seemed to change with it. Were my new aids playing up? Was the tech getting the better of me? Was I getting Radio 2 on a bad day with these things? Then it struck me. We live less than a half-mile from the M6. What I was hearing, for the first time, was the sound of the motorway in the distance. Thousands of tyres on tarmac and engines at speed. Not unpleasant, at this distance. Just not heard, up to now. The sound of the city, again, in my sixties. If the wind is right.
It’s said nearly all of us will lose some of our hearing, eventually. We lose the chance to hear those sounds of youth, the chorus of life. We lose the roar. Hearing aids are not – yet – a guarantee to still all the quiet. But mine let me hear the city roaring again. And no one can take that back.
Alan Taman
