Best behaviour in the ranks

Sound artist, Amie Slavin, is developing a major installation for the Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds. She’s collecting sounds and voices, focusing on the lives of British soldiers. Following a visit to Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, she shares musings on political correctness

If it was strange for me and my intrepid sound engineer, turning up in the different world which is the British Army, on its own turf, then it must have been pretty perplexing for the superlatively practical, dyed-in-the-wool soldiers who happened upon us, wandering around loaded with our own arsenal of mikes, cables, headphones and shiny kit-carrying boxes.

Also, of course, there’s an inevitable double-take for anyone engaged in Army business, when faced with not only an artist (“a what?”), but a blind one at that. Gays? No worries. Women? Hmmm; not sure but working on it. Amputees? Where possible, yes. Hearing loss? If you’ve been under fire then you probably have a bit... But a blind person? I am a Health and Safety jobsworth’s wet dream. Yet... and yet, no one has turned a hair, so far.

There was a recent conversation in which a soldier told me about a trans-gender guy, mid-gender realignment surgery, who has been moved in with the unit’s girls. The girls are, unsurprisingly, pretty unhappy about this, but nobody dares to comment for fear of being branded intolerant.

Whatever the motivation, the results are impressive.

I am fit and healthy, other than being blind, but still, part of doing what I do is accepting the reality that a significant proportion of the people I meet will, frankly, have a problem with my disability and therefore with me.

I am practised in remaining cheerfully relaxed while being interrogated, usually after the manner of someone interviewing a prospective housekeeper: “Can you cook, clean, shop, care for children etc?”

In the work context, I am often ignored, making it necessary for me to be more pushy than my natural inclination.  

I embarked on this project with, to be honest, an expectation that it would hold much discomfort for me, personally. I was expecting some good, old fashioned bigotry, in dealings with such an intensely physical and tough organisation as the Army. If anyone can understandably have a dread of physical imperfection then it surely must be Tommy Atkins.

When people talk to me on tape and engage with a project like this, they share a little of themselves, and this earns them my respect and admiration. I do my best to facilitate a safe emotional space for them and that means keeping my own feelings out of the way.

So far, however, working on my sound sculpture Other Ranks, I have only encountered one person who has failed to hide their unease with me and that was someone not currently serving.

This cheerful acceptance, combined with plain good manners is, in my view, far more positively telling on the quality of our fighting men than any amount of sleek presentation.

The nearest I’ve come, so far, to eliciting a non-pc response from anyone at Sandhurst was when, while descending the stairs of the Officers’ Mess during the evening, with my white cane, I realised there were a couple of guys climbing towards me. My stick meant that I couldn’t blend into the scenery, as I can if accompanied. Nothing for it but to brazen it out and be philosophical about any raucous exclamations on my existence. I was, as I have now done many times, underestimating the central friendliness and good nature of the British Army. As they drew level with me and noticed my presence, they made not a murmur on the subject of finding a visually impaired civilian on the Mess stairs. The only comment was one of them pausing to tell me: “We’re crazy! We couldn’t be bothered to go to the Mess so we’ve been out to eat!”