Deafening

June M. Blurton is a retired speech/language pathologist.

Grania loses her hearing when she has scarlet fever as a four-year-old.
Her mother never accepts her deafness as irrevocable and prays daily
that Grania’s hearing will return. It is her grandmother, Mamo, and
her sister, Tress, who begin to teach Grania to communicate using
speech, hand movements, and lip-reading. But even with their help she
cannot cope in a regular classroom, and eventually she is sent away to
the Ontario School for the Deaf in Belleville. For a year at a time,
Grania does not see her family or the hotel her father owns on the
shores of Lake Ontario. Even after she graduates she stays on and works
at the school, where she meets and marries Jim. At the time of the
marriage, however, the Great War is well under way. Jim soon leaves for
the battlefields of France as a stretcher-bearer, and they do not see
each other again for four years.

The story plays on the contrast between deafness and the cacophony of
war. Depictions of life at the School for the Deaf and the war in France
have been meticulously researched and are described in detail. But even
more, Itani gives us a compelling account of what it was like 90 years
ago to live in a small Ontario town.