Thursdays with Mr Hughes — Bay Hughes'la Perşembeler

Ayşe had come to Bristol to study architecture, and for the first few months she barely left the studio. Her English was good on paper, but in conversation she still felt slow and clumsy. "You need to talk to real people, not just to your models," her tutor told her one day. So when she saw a poster asking for volunteers to read to elderly people with poor eyesight, she signed up almost without thinking.

She was matched with a man called Mr Hughes, who lived alone in a narrow house full of books. He was ninety-one, almost completely blind, and, as the coordinator warned her, "a little particular". On her first Thursday, he listened to her read two pages of a Dickens novel without saying a word. Then he raised one finger. "Thorough," he said. "Not 'through'. They are different words, young lady." Ayşe repeated it, and he shook his head. "Softer at the end. Thur-uh. Again." By the end of the hour they had read only six pages, and she had been corrected forty times.

She almost didn't go back. But something about the old man made her curious, so the following Thursday she knocked on his door again. This time he had made tea, which he poured with remarkable accuracy for someone who couldn't see the cup. Gradually the corrections became fewer and the conversations longer. He asked about her studies, and she described her designs to him in such detail that he said he could almost see them. In return, he told her stories about Bristol in the old days, about the ships in the harbour, and about his late wife, who had grown roses in the back garden. The roses were still there, wild and enormous, because nobody had cut them for years.

One afternoon in March, Ayşe arrived to find him sitting by the window with a small wooden box on his knees. "You've never asked me what I did for a living," he said. "I assumed you were a teacher," she replied. "You certainly correct people like one." He laughed, which he rarely did. "Quite right. I taught English for thirty years, and seven of those years were in Ankara." Ayşe nearly dropped her cup. "Ankara? But you never said anything!" "You never asked," he said, clearly enjoying himself. "Also, I wanted to hear your English, not my terrible Turkish." Then he said, slowly and with a strong accent: "Kızım, çayın soğuyor."

He opened the box and took out a bundle of old photographs. "Describe them to me," he said. "My memory is better than my eyes, but not by much." Ayşe described a group of students standing in front of a grey building, then a picnic by a lake, then a classroom with a blackboard covered in irregular verbs. In the classroom photo, a young man with thick glasses stood next to a girl in the front row. The girl had a long dark plait and a very serious expression. Ayşe looked at her face for a long moment, and her heart began to beat faster. She took out her phone, found a picture and held it next to the photograph, even though he couldn't see either of them. "Mr Hughes," she said quietly, "is there a name written on the back?"

He turned the photo over and ran his fingers over the faded pencil marks, as if he could read them by touch. "Class 3B, 1978," Ayşe read aloud. "And here, in different handwriting: 'Thank you, teacher. Nesrin.'" "Nesrin," he repeated with a smile. "My best student. She wanted to become a translator." "She did," Ayşe said, and her voice shook a little. "She's my mother." For once, Mr Hughes had nothing to correct.

That evening Ayşe called her mother in Ankara and told her everything. There was a long silence, and then her mother said, "Tell him I still pronounce 'thorough' properly." Two months later she came to Bristol, and the three of them had tea in the garden among the wild roses. Mr Hughes spent most of the afternoon correcting both of them, and nobody minded at all. Before they left, Ayşe's mother cut the roses back, just as his wife used to do. "They'll be beautiful next summer," she told him. "Then you'll both have to come back and describe them to me," he said. "Thoroughly."