On the Face of It Class 12 NCERT Solutions Vistas Ch 5

Several small things, taken together, draw Derry back to Mr Lamb's garden against his own habit of running away from people. The play is careful to show that the pull is not one sentimental moment; it is a steady accumulation of differences between Mr Lamb and everyone else Derry has met.

• Mr Lamb does not pretend. The other adults in Derry's life either avoid his face or look at it with pity. Mr Lamb, on the contrary, asks ``you got burned in a fire'' straightforwardly. Derry corrects him (``acid all down that side of my face''), but the very fact that the old man asks is a relief. Honesty, in a play full of polite avoidance, is a magnet.
• Mr Lamb refuses the ``poor boy'' script. Derry knows the script by heart: Here's a boy. Poor boy. Mr Lamb breaks the script in the opening minute. ``Mind the apples,'' is his first line. He treats Derry as somebody who might step on a windfall, not as a wound on legs.
• Mr Lamb makes disability ordinary. ``I've got a tin leg. Not important. You're standing there.... I'm sitting here. Where's the difference?'' By placing his own missing leg next to Derry's burnt face, Mr Lamb normalises both. Derry has never had his condition treated as ordinary before, and the ease of it is hard to leave behind.
• Mr Lamb makes the world larger. The garden is full of crab apples, weeds, sun-flowers, bees, a spider on its silken ladder. Mr Lamb keeps directing Derry's attention outwards. For a boy who has been spending his time looking inwards at his own scar, that outward turn is a quiet rescue.
• Mr Lamb listens. ``Bees singing. Him talking. Things that matter. Things nobody else has ever said,'' Derry tells his mother. Most people speak at Derry; Mr Lamb speaks with him. The difference is the whole reason for the play.
• Mr Lamb's loneliness is a mirror. Mr Lamb's house has no curtains; he leaves the gate open; he calls every visitor ``a friend''. Derry senses, even if he does not say so, that Mr Lamb is as alone behind his garden wall as Derry is behind his face. Two solitudes recognise each other.

Derry is drawn to Mr Lamb because Mr Lamb refuses to play the script the rest of the world plays around him: he neither pities Derry nor avoids the burnt face, he treats his own tin leg as ordinary, and he keeps redirecting Derry's attention to crab apples, weeds and sun-flowers rather than to the scar. Honesty, ordinariness, and the chance to be listened to draw the boy back, even though he tells himself he hates being with people.

Mr Lamb's loneliness surfaces most clearly in the first scene of the play, in the long stretch after Derry has agreed to stay and the conversation has loosened. The play does not let Mr Lamb weep or complain; the loneliness shows in small details that the careful reader notices.

• The open gate. Mr Lamb leaves the garden gate permanently unlocked and the house has no curtains. He is not protecting privacy; he is hoping for company. The architectural detail is the loneliness.
• The whole-world-is-my-friend dodge. When Derry asks ``Do you have any friends?'' Mr Lamb answers ``Hundreds.'' He then widens the word until it is meaningless: ``Friends everywhere. People come in everybody knows me.'' Kids who come for the apples are friends; the postman is a friend. The widening is the giveaway. He has no one in particular.
• The list of small tasks. Mr Lamb fills his afternoons by sitting in the sun and reading books, picking crab apples and making jelly, listening to bees. The life is full of small busy-ness precisely because there is no one waiting at the kitchen table.
• The reaction to Derry running off. When Derry shouts ``I'm going. But I'll come back. You see. You wait I'll be back,'' and runs out, Mr Lamb only murmurs to himself, `` I'll come back. They never do, though. Not them. Never do come back.'' That quiet, unargued admission, after a long conversation, is the clearest signal of disappointment in the play.
• The accident in Scene Three. Mr Lamb's last sound is the crash of the ladder. He had postponed the crab-apple picking to wait for Derry. The fall is, on one reading, the consequence of doing alone what he had hoped to do together.

To overcome these feelings the old man uses an entire small philosophy:

• Hospitality without conditions. The gate stays open, the garden is for ``all welcome'', the apples are shared. Mr Lamb manages loneliness by removing every obstacle to a possible visit.
• Attention to nature. Bees, sun-flowers, weeds, crab apples. He keeps his mind on small, irreducible things, the way a person keeps a candle lit in a long evening.
• Reading and curiosity. ``There's nothing God made that doesn't interest me.'' Curiosity is an anti-loneliness strategy that does not depend on other people turning up.
• Equanimity about teasing. Children call him Lamey-Lamb. He has stopped minding. He absorbs cruelty rather than letting it close off the world.
• Refusing self-pity. ``Not important. You're standing there I'm sitting here. Where's the difference?'' By placing his disability inside the ordinary furniture of the day, he keeps it from becoming the whole story.

Mr Lamb's loneliness shows mainly in Scene One: the always-open gate, the curtain-less house, the ``Hundreds Friends everywhere'' evasion when asked about specific friends, the long unbroken solitude of his afternoons, and the murmured ``They never do, though Never do come back'' after Derry runs away. To overcome it he keeps the garden open to strangers, fixes his attention on crab apples and sun-flowers, reads books and listens to bees, ignores the cruel nickname ``Lamey-Lamb'', and refuses to let his tin leg become the whole of him. The strategy is largely successful, though the play's ending hints at its cost.

The statement reads Hill's play correctly. Derry's burns no longer hurt; what hurts is being looked at. The whole point of his early speeches is that the wound is not the problem; the audience for the wound is. So the question is really asking what kind of audience the person with a disability hopes for.

• To be addressed, not stared at. Derry's first complaint is the gaze: people look, look away, look back, pretend not to look. He wants to be spoken to normally, the way Mr Lamb speaks to him. Eye-contact and ordinary conversation are the simplest gift.
• Honesty. Derry asks Mr Lamb, ``Why don't you ask me?'' He prefers ``you got burned in a fire'' to the polite avoidance of grown-ups. Honest questions treat the disability as a fact, not a taboo.
• Refusal of pity. The word poor is the word Derry hates most. Pity replaces the person with the disability. He wants to be met as a fourteen-year- old, not as a case.
• No false reassurance. ``It's not what you look like, it's what you are inside,'' is the line Derry has heard most often. He calls it ``that fairy story''. Reassurances that pretend the disability is invisible are themselves a form of denial.
• Inclusion in ordinary activity. Derry warms to Mr Lamb the moment he is offered a task: ``You could give me a hand,'' Mr Lamb says about the crab apples. Being asked to do something, like everyone else, is the practical form of acceptance.
• Patience without surveillance. Mr Lamb does not chase Derry, does not insist, does not check up on him. He simply tells him, ``The gate's always open Everything's yours if you want it.'' The person with a disability often wants the door left open without being supervised through it.
• Treating the disability as part of the person, not the whole. Mr Lamb's tin leg goes into a list with Derry's face, the spider's silken ladder and the sun-flowers. The disability is one feature among many, not the headline.

The person with a disability hopes for an audience that addresses rather than stares, asks honest questions rather than avoids the subject, refuses both pity and false reassurance, includes them in ordinary tasks, leaves space without insisting on attention, and treats the disability as one feature among many. Derry's response to Mr Lamb is the playbook: he comes back to the only adult who has met him on those terms.

The play does not finish the answer. It ends with Mr Lamb's fall, Derry on his knees in the long grass, and the curtain on ``Lamey-Lamb. I did come back.'' The reader is left to weigh the evidence on both sides; the honest answer is a qualified yes, but slowly.

• Evidence for change. Derry's decision to come back is the play's most important fact. He has defied his mother, climbed the garden wall a second time, and spoken the only complete sentence of self-assertion in the play (``If I don't go back there, I'll never go anywhere in this world again''). A boy who has named that need has already begun to change.
• The language has shifted. The first half of Derry's speech is full of they, nobody, never. By the time he leaves his mother's house he is speaking in I want, I think, I feel. Self- report has replaced self-pity.
• The mother's veto has been refused. Derry's scene with his mother is the small revolution. To go back to Mr Lamb against his mother's instruction is to do, for the first time, something that the world says he cannot do because of his face. That refusal is habit-forming.
• The model has been seen. Mr Lamb is the proof that a person with a visible disability can live a full, curious, kind, hospitable life. Once Derry has seen the model he has the option of trying it on, even after the old man is gone.
• Counter-evidence: the fall. The model dies (or at least falls silent) at the end of the play. Derry's most important source of encouragement is suddenly removed. A change that depended only on one friendly adult would now collapse.
• Counter-evidence: the world is unchanged. The children who taunted Mr Lamb (``Lamey-Lamb'') will go on taunting Derry. The mother will still kiss him on the other side of his face. The conditions that produced his withdrawal are still in place.

The play, on balance, suggests that the change has begun but is not finished. The visible step is the return to the garden; the invisible step is the slow rearrangement of Derry's idea of himself, which the play does not have time to show. Hill is too careful a writer to promise a cure. She has shown an opening; the reader is asked to imagine the future on that basis.

The play leaves the future open, but the weight of the evidence is that Mr Lamb's brief association has shifted Derry permanently. He has defied his mother, named his own need, climbed the wall a second time, and seen the model of a disabled adult who lives a full and curious life. The accident that ends the play removes Derry's main support, and the prejudiced world outside the garden is unchanged; the work of keeping the shift alive will be slow and largely his own. The old seclusion is unlikely to return in its earlier, total form, but the new openness will need to survive without Mr Lamb's company.