(Written to mark International Stuttering Awareness Day – October 22
Do you stammer? If you do, you’re among one per cent of the world’s population, and Tuesday is your big day. Because October 22 is International Stuttering Awareness Day – to give its’ American title. And whether we describe ourselves as stammerers or stutterers, having our own awareness day is something to celebrate.
I’ve been a lifelong stammerer. In fact, I’ve stammered in conversation with some of the most famous people in the world. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t stammer.
Friends who knew me when I was much younger will sometimes ask me when and how I was ‘cured’ of my stammer. But I was never cured. There is no cure for stammering. I just got better at disguising it.
In recent decades speech therapists have developed many techniques to help stammerers speak more fluently. But they can never offer a complete fix-it for what is now recognised as a complex neurodevelopmental disorder that affects five per cent of children. Most of whom will grow out of it, anyway/
The modern thinking around stammering, which occurs in five times as many boys as girls, is that it’s more likely to be caused by blood flow patterns in the brain than some terrible psychological trauma in early life, which was the psychological line previously taken.
But, whatever its causes, the effects of stammering on the individual can be disastrous. When I was young, stammerers were often mocked and widely considered to be timid creatures. Probably some of us were timid, not necessarily because we were born naturally shy creatures, but because when we talked we stammered.
In my case, when I couldn’t get out the words that I wanted to say, my face would weld into contortions of frustration. So, no wonder that my hand never went up to answer the teachers’ questions. And when other children would, in turn, read aloud in class, I was always missed out.
The teachers were probably being kind, but they made me feel as though I’d disappeared, because stammering doesn’t only render a child dumb. It makes the child invisible, too.
Actually, being overlooked or ignored wasn’t the worst thing. It was certainly better than being ridiculed as ‘C’-C-ConnOlly’, as my Latin master chose to address me. Then there was the chemistry teacher who, irritated by my struggles to get ‘H20’ past my lips, said ‘Sit down, you wouldn’t be doing all that pulling your face if you knew the answer’.
And the French teacher who hadn’t got time to waste on my ‘mee-mawing’ and suggested I go to the front of the class and write my answers on the blackboard. I never did. That would have meant making an even worse exhibition of myself.
Looking back, however, she may inadvertently have been on to something. ‘If you can’t say it, write it,’ another more sensitive teacher told me.
All of this happened back in the mid-Fifties, and hopefully teachers like this are no longer allowed anywhere near any school. But such examples of impatience and mockery will not come as a surprise to any readers who themselves struggled to speak; or to the worried parents of any children who now do.
My teenage years’ seeing an elocutionist, a speech therapist and a psychiatrist weren’t very fruitful, but at around that time I would marvel at newspaper accounts of how some actors would stammer off stage but be fluent when the curtain went up. How did they do it, I wondered.
Gradually I came to realize. They didn’t stammer when they were on stage because they were playing characters who didn’t stammer.
Like all stammerers, I always swopped words that I couldn’t say for those I could, but by my twenties I’d sometimes begun acting out in real life the part of a man who didn’t have a speech impediment.
I was still turned down for jobs, of course, because it didn’t work all the time. The Westminster Bank didn’t want me as a bank clerk because I might put off their customers, so they sent me off to be a research economist in the City instead – which was laughable and short lived.
While the editor of ITN said after a few minutes’ conversation, ‘I don’t think you’re cut out to read the News at Ten, do you?’ He was right. I’d just been hoping to get my foot in the door, any door, at any lowest level.
Eventually, I got a job on a newspaper in Liverpool, and my girlfriend, Plum, and I decided to get married, despite a warning to her from a well-meaning aunt that my stammer would probably mean that I would never get a decent job.
It turned out that she was wrong. Less than two years later I had my own interview page on the London Evening Standard and three of the Beatles were soon telling me about a pal of theirs in Liverpool who stammered very badly in conversation but never when he sang. Actually, stammerers never do stammer when they sing.
Over the following decades I interviewed hundreds of well-known people, and my stammer gradually grew less as I perfected my technique of playing the part of a man who didn’t stammer.
If you met me now, you might not even detect it, although another stammerer probably would. I spotted Elvis Presley’s repetitive little ticks straight off, and I’m sure he noticed mine. It takes one to spot one.
I can be as fluent and confident as anyone else when speaking on TV or the radio. But when I’m at home with my family the stammer always returns, which
I imagine is because I’m totally myself in their company. I don’t need to put on the kind of performance that has become so much second nature to me now that I do it without even thinking.
Reading the recent obituaries of the actor James Earl Jones, who will be known forever as the booming baritone voice of Darth Vader, I was heartened to learn how he didn’t speak at all for several boyhood years because of his stammer. Only when a kindly English teacher got him to read Shakespeare out loud did he find his voice again. And what a voice!
‘One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can’t utter,’ James Earl Jones would say. And every stammerer, from Samuel L. Jackson, to Emily Blunt and on to Bruce Willis, Ed Sheeran and Ed Balls would agree – all of whom found their professional way around their speech problem.
On stage, on film or on TV they all sound so fluent when they talk. But we’ve all seen President Biden searching for alternative words when he gets blocked by his stammer.
All stammerers still get blocked at some point, as James Earl Jones admitted. And, if they are anything like him or me, they will probably do it at home, too, when they are most relaxed and not having to play the part of someone who doesn’t stammer.
Ray Connolly’s memoir, Born At The Right Time, published by Malignon Books, is now available from Amazon
