Observer Magazine, July 1980
Poor old Elvis couldn’t help it: his eyes glazed over when I started to speak and an expression of strained patience settled across his features. It was the same with James Baldwin and even Georgie Best, while Muhammad Ali solved the problem by steadfastly keeping his eyes closed during the whole of our meeting. Supermen with closed eyes can’t be embarrassed.
You see, I’m a stammerer, a PhD of a stammerer sometimes when I’m at home and supposedly relaxed, and even on a good day I still have moments of tongue twistedness which would get me an E grade at O level. I’ve stammered all over the place and before the most distinguished people. I’ve stammered in bed and I’ve stammered in the bath.
Not all eyes become frozen in embarrassment as soon as a stammerer begins to ply his handicap. Some people try to help by finishing words which he was not going to say in the first place; others look at him as though he’s a bit barmy and either try humouring him in case he should happen to be carrying an axe in his raincoat pocket, or speak in a VERY LOUD VOICE, imagining him to be also afflicted with deafness.
Then, of course, there are the comedians who are so besotted with the fluidity of their own vocal chords that they cannot resist mimicking the staccato rhythms of the less gifted. That happened to me quite a lot at school: one Latin teacher called me C-C-C-Connolly for years.
To be a child stammerer is a bit like being invisible: no one ever asks you any questions, and I was at university before I was expected or even encouraged to participate in discussions. Yet, like the person who is small and feels big, I don’t feel like a stammerer. With my looks, wit and intelligence I feel like a star, and I spend many happy hours dreaming up the rapier-like-witticisms I will deliver when I’m invited to be the star guest on Parkinson.
I read somewhere recently that something like two per cent of the population (usually men) have some kind of speech impediment. But I am beginning to think that there is a conspiracy of secrecy against us. Nobody ever discusses stammering on television, and nobody ever writes about it in the newspapers? Are they trying to suppress us? If we were dyslexic, or impotent, or battered brides there would be no end of documentaries on us and The Guardian women’s pages would be full of us. But here we are, stammering away at a hundred and thirty three and a third to the dozen and no-one even gives us the time of day. That’s why I’m writing this. I’m redressing the balance a bit.
I didn’t always stammer, but when I got going I made up for lost time. As a child I went to elocutionists, speech therapists and psychiatrists. It didn’t do my speech much good, but the speech therapist used to feel me all over in efforts to get me to relax. I was 13 and she was 23. It was almost wonderful.
Then when I was at university my psychology tutor thought I should see the college shrink. ‘When do you stammer most of all, Mr Connolly?’ he asked. Since I stammered most of all on every conceivable occasion I was a bit stumped for an answer, until I mentioned my difficulties in projecting my voice through the hole in the glass window at the tube station.
The psychiatrist beamed. I’d obviously said the right thing. ‘Do you think this fear of projection might in some way be due to a sexual problem?’ he asked, demonstrating graphically with his hands where he thought the problem might lie.
‘Absolutely not,’ I thought. How could I have a sexual problem when I hadn’t even had sex.
Getting a job wasn’t that easy either. In New York I was told I couldn’t be a cash clerk in a hamburger joint, and in London they wouldn’t even take me on as a bank counter clerk in case I should upset the customers with my impediment. (I didn’t want the job anyway, and had only gone along for the interview because they promised to pay my rail fare from Lancashire when I was actually living in Kensington.)
But then I discovered writing. A very wise man at the London Evening Standard gave me a job going around interviewing people, and in no time I was off and pedaling fast. I couldn’t be invisible any more. And the more questions I asked, the less I seemed to stammer, until here I am at the age of 39, not fluent enough to read the news (as a man from ITN once told me), but then I never wanted to, anyway.
Writing was my salvation. No one can tell that I stammer when I write. If they could this article would need two pages because I’ve been stammering away all the time I’ve been writing it, and all those fractioned consonants take up an awful lot of space. I stammer most now when I am at home with the children and feeling relaxed and lazy. It’s the true me, you see.
Nobody ever wrote pieces like this when I was growing up. I wish they had done. So if you know of any stammerers or parents of stammerers who are on the point of despair it is your duty to cut out this article and show it to them.
All right?
