Woman hears heirloom mechanical bird for first time
BBCA woman who was born profoundly deaf has had a mechanical musical bird restored on the television programme The Repair Shop, allowing her to hear it for the first time.
Fenella Haffenden from Tavistock said the bird belonged to her grandmother who she used to visit in Jersey as a child. She could only watch when it was wound up for people to hear it sing.
About 20 years ago she had a cochlear implant and has finally heard the bird sing.
She said it was "so special because I've been waiting for years and years to hear that".
Haffenden learned to speak by feeling the vibrations of a speech therapist's throat and observing how the flame of a candle responded to breath, she also learned lip reading.
When she got her cochlear implant she said she wondered what the bird sounded like and asked her stepmother about it but was told it was thought to be lost.
Her stepmother found the bird when she moved house and gave it to Haffenden.
"I looked at it and it was really shabby, it was dull, it was black and I thought this is not the bird that I remember," Haffenden said.
"And then someone said to me, why don't you contact the TV repair shop, see whether they would be able to help you out."
Haffenden said she was shocked when she got it back because she did not expect it to have been restored "so beautifully".
"They were so brilliant and I mean, honestly, the work they do is just astonishing," she said.
"After this was restored, I took it home and we had a family Christmas party and I did the exact same thing that my grandmother would have done.
"And I said, 'right, everybody, are we ready?' And I played it... it doesn't matter how old you are or how young, you all have the same reaction."
She said she hoped to continue the tradition every year in honour of her grandmother.
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