Fighting for little voices

Estelle Gerrett’s fight to give her deaf son a voice is helping generations of children find theirs, too.

- Carole Richardson

When Estelle Gerrett’s deaf son Nathan spoke his first clumsy sentence around the age of five, she promptly burst into tears. It wasn’t what he said – ‘moon hind cloud’ – but the fact that he’d strung three words together and said them at all that triggered her emotional response.

“It was the same when he was 20 and phoned me for the first time. I had to tell him it wasn’t the telephone making my voice sound weird; it was because I was crying,” laughs Estelle (65) from Buckinghamshire.

In September she’s expecting to shed more tears at Nathan’s graduation when he qualifies as an audiologist – inspired by his mum’s passion to change lives for deaf children through specialist therapy.

To reach any of those milestones has been no easy feat for mother or son. Nathan had contracted meningitis around the time of his first birthday which had left him profoundly deaf. Back then, the family was living in Hong Kong, where Nathan’s late father, an Army Major, was stationed. When he became sick one night, Estelle instinctively knew something was seriously wrong. “There was something about it that really scared me and I became more and more anxious,” she recalls. By the time she got him to hospital around midnight, he was coughing up blood. Nevertheless, doctors were unconvinced. “One asked my husband: ‘Does your wife always get this anxious when the children are ill?’” she adds.