Stutter

I have a slight stutter.

I keep it under raps.


People I know won't know about it. My parents are long gone, along with any other family members who would remember. My brother will have forgotten. I never told anybody since.

I'd forgotten myself until a few years ago until my response to a neighbour, catching me by surprise when I was deep in thought walking down steps past his house one day, came out all funny and non-sensical, followed by the juddering, puttering, ungainly fluttering of the ensuing stream of my attempted undoing.

Unravelling.

That's what it feels like.

I should look it up really. Try and make some sense of it, because I know it's complex. It's not just about speech in a muscular sense, it's about brain processing.

My brain works very fast. Probably most peoples' do, it would be hard to compare rates, but I hazard a guess that most other peoples' work in a more orderly fashion than mine does. My brain absorbs stuff without my even knowing about it and it tends to scan the whole archive before it arrives at a thought. Or a sentence. All this at super fast broadband rate. I can feel it doing it. The chemicals have a heady effect.

But I digress, as usual.

My inner self has been scanning......






Back to stuttering.

Not to float my own boat, but just to give you the picture, I was a bright child. ( Or so I was told, frequently by doting family members. My Dad disapproved, kept his praise to the bare minimum, preferring to engage me in interesting conversations about science and meteorology, or activities like chess or gardening. He was a very wise man. )

So, an early talker and thinker was I by all accounts. I delighted my family when, at the tender age of 18 months, I had to stay in hospital for a bit and on visiting, a nurse told my mum that she'd been telling me to stop crying because there were poorly babies in there and I had replied that Lizzie was poorly too.

A sad little tale, trotted out ad-nauseum to demonstrate my brightness, but also, for my mother, tortured by not being able to stay with me, an illustration of the nurses' apparent lack of care for me. I became her little shadow for a long time after being released from hospital prison, worried by any slight separation from her and I know it caused her great pain.


Anyway.  My brain and speech were apparently functioning really well at that stage. It was going to school that seemed to initiate the havoc, probably partly as a follow on to that not wanting to be separated from my mother problem, but also because it was all too over-stimulating for me.

Everyone will have tales about what school felt like. Early school for me was about being bombarded with "learning opportunities" (it was in the sixties; there was a lot of experimentation). I could already read before I got there, thanks to my mum and other family members, so I was left on my own amongst the books for much of the day, which is where I felt most comfortable. Being dragged away to "play" with funny little bricks and sticks which I now understand as an early introduction to maths, was one of the myriad of things that had a stultifying effect on me. I felt very sorry to disappoint people, but I could not make the connection between these things and the strange hieroglyphics on the board that were apparently numbers. I quite liked the threading coloured wooden beads on a string game, although I was much more interested in the coloured patterns they made than attempting to count them and divide them up with the flimsy bits of paper marked with the same weird signs that I struggled to get much sense out of from the board. Counting was ok. Counting was a different form of labelling, it was sums I hated. They served no apparent purpose nor were they very entertaining. It drove me quite mad. I developed a recurring nightmare involving spinning, revolving numbers retreating from me then returning at high speed ominously and threateningly in a dark, soupy space that was probably the non-comprehending part of my brain. Some nights it was interspersed with the recurring nazi dream involving soldiers with guns looking for me whilst I hid in various small spaces. Being left to watch All our Yesterdays on my own and allowed to watch war films at 5 influenced my dreams.

Playing with sand didn't engage me either. We were taken to the sea-side a alot as kids, my brother and I. I enjoyed that. It was a whole experience, the anticipation, the arrival at the sudden vast expanse of space and sky, the air, the smells, the sounds, the light, the rituals; the kettle and the camping stove, the hunt for the best spot for the deckchairs, the journey down to the sea with a bucket to collect water with the stones and the shells bruising and cutting your feet, the hazards of slimy slippy seaweed and its black flies, the lurking lethal jellyfish, the snapping, chasing dogs who made you change your straight course and lose sight of where to return to .......

I digress again........

What to do with the unnaturally silky, dry sand in its tray, emptied of shells, or fag ends or bits of sanded glass or oil smears or discoveries of any other sort except for strange objects like aluminium funnels and plastic bottles so unnaturally placed on top of its sterile unfamiliar texture filled me with an anxiety that entangled itself with great boredom. It was beyond my ken. I remember a great urge to sleep. One day, I spied the rocking horse. Every day thereafter, I would hog that rocking horse. I could not be got off the rocking horse, not even for books. My mother was summoned.

Never described as a difficult child, never even really confronted face to face for any of my "aberrations", it seems, on reflection, that I was generally left to go my own sweet way, that is, until things got too far out of hand. Of course, I refused to go to school if I was not allowed to go on the rocking horse. I was told I had to share it, but I knew no-one else was as obsessed with it in the way I was. And anyway, I knew that my sense of time was quite different to everyone elses'. What they deemed as "sufficient" or "enough" was entirely different to my perception.

I can't remember how that problem was resolved.

I can, however, remember how I resolved an eating problem.

Each day in the school canteen, we were expected to eat everything on our plates, including the pudding. To say I was a bit of a faddy eater would, as you might guess, be putting it at the far end of the scale away from my particular problem. I had no appetite whatsoever for food. Full stop. Mealtimes were an annoying interruption to playing in my world and so the school canteen was a battlefield for me. I ate so little, it became a concern to the dinner ladies. I was asigned my own dinner lady. She would cheerily encourage me to eat " just another spoonful " all through the meal, until, that is, unable to contain my revulsion for semolina pudding one day, I just vomited the whole meal up over the dinner table.

I apologise for that last digression. It's an indulgence to relate it and it's not strictly relevant but I like to remember it because I felt so wonderful afterwards. No-one ever bothered trying to get me to eat again, not even my own mother, who had, prior to that, done a similar thing at home, sitting by me for hours trying to encourage me to swallow some hideously healthy concoction from sheep's brain or pig's liver or some other nutritious part of an animal she had lovingly prepared specially for me.

I was a kind, thoughtful child. I didn't like upsetting people, but I did struggle to keep them happy.


So the stuttering. I can't really remember how old I was. Perhaps 8 or 9. It was in the Autumn term and there were preparations for the Christmas nativity. I was chosen to be the narrator. I was often chosen to read because of my "nice reading voice". I'd carefully toned down my Liverpudlian, not really Scouse, accent that marked me out as different in my "woollyback" school by then. I knew I had to if I wanted to avoid being dubbed "posh"and bullied in the toilets and on the way home from school.

My mum was thrilled, of course. It was quite a task because I was asked to learn the words off by heart rather than read them. We set to each night and I learned it. I was word perfect. I managed to reiterate it perfectly at a couple of rehearsals at school until one day, I'm not sure why, my memory skipped a few lines and jumped ahead. I could hear that the sense had gone out of what I was saying and  I heard a few titters. I can't remember why it was funny because I can't remember any of the words involved now, or even the theme of the play. They were usually obscure. It was a progressive school in many respects.

This jumping ahead, skipping the sense of the words, trying to pull out some sense from the remainder of the words which had become just sounds coming out of my mouth automatically, so perfectly had I learned them off by heart, caused some part of me to halt whilst my mouth ran on and performed its function totally unaided by memory or sense. I  wonder what it sounded like. I became very detached as I sallied forth, possibly partly telligible, but probably mostly nonsensical in the usual, recognisable sense. I had become a free agent, floating in some alien world where words were random things that existed entirely separately from meaning.

The teacher supervising was undeterred, unmoved even, if only outwardly, as I remember it. I told my mother I did not want to do it any more and after a certain amount of wrangling and arguing with me, then with the teacher in charge, I was allowed to play the recorder with a couple of other friends instead which was much more fun. I can't remember which poor child was given the task to do instead of me.

I wasn't unduly bothered by the incident, or I at least managed to forget it due to the relief of being releived of the task and so, when, some time afterwards, I was asked to read a passage from a book out loud in class and my eye kept running on ahead of my speech once more, so that I had to keep repeating sentences whose middle had been skipped, then repeat words that had not come out coherently, then emphasise the first letters of words that I found my voice not even uttering, I became aware of what it was to stutter and I was extremely startled by it. I began to pause heavily with anticipation at the beginning of reading, determined to form the first sound precisely, coherently, and the more determined I became, the more the memory of how to do that eluded me.

Somehow, my conscious and unconscious had swapped places. What had been involuntary became a task that required conscious effort. What my conscious brain used to take care of i.e. the pacing of the eye, the tracking of the words, had been delegated to my wandering, meandering, whole encompassing unconscious brain that wouldn't stay focussed on one point.


At home, I briefly became an elective mute. I think I even stopped reading books. Alarmed, my mother summoned her psychological guru; her older brother, my uncle; Wall.

My uncle Wall had been my best pal up until the age of 6. We'd shared a house with him, my nana and my other uncle until we moved away across the water from Liverpool to Runcorn. He'd taught me lots of things, mainly songs, which involved remembering words of course. So, responding to my mother's cry for help, he came to stay with us a while and showed me how to train our naughty dog, Prince, to sit and stay for biscuits, attempted to help cure my insomnia by teaching me to think about relaxing each and every little muscle in my body and finally got me to sing some of our favourite duets together, like On Top of Old Smokey and Yellow Submarine. Words seemed to come out easily if attached to tunes. What a discovery ! I began to say the odd word again, music running alongside in my head.

Well maybe Christmas or Summer came and I got over it, because I can't exactly remember it being a huge apparent problem to me after that. I say apparent because, ever since the incident of nonsense with the neighbour, I have been aware that actually, my spoken memory for words is quite bad. When I speak, I often feel that the correct word has eluded me. It so often feels as if it comes out all wrong. Can I try that again and not only that;

the correct word, the most salient one, if I do find it, is often one I cannot seem to pronounce, that is, summon to the lips. It slips away into the far distant regions of the mind and if I try to chase it, I get tremendously lost. I spend a lot of time mentally running after elusive words and trying to catch my meaning before it collapses through want of support,

if that's not too abstract a description of what it's like,

to feel lost,

in a sea of language,

and thoughts.


I sound fluent most days. I might talk nonsense that sounds like some kind of sense but isn't quite the sense I meant it to have. At best, I contradict myself a lot as I oscillate between words and meaning.

Sometimes I might flounder and hesitate. The right words have defected altogether. I might say a whole stream of things that seem to come from the ether and not my own mind at all. I get into deep water. I suppose I'm always bobbing in it, except when;

I occasionally dry up.


I was given to shaking when speaking for a short time. The muscles in my neck and head became so tense they would judder with the effort it entailed.

Of course, the beginnings of all this coincided with things happening in my life that caused me some distress.

It's my personal reaction to such things I suppose.

That phase passed, thank god.  And now, nearing 60, as my fingers fly over the keyboard effortlessly - I'm so glad I learned to touch type - I can free my mind to wander and wonder and summon all the words it ever forgot or stumbled over saying.

Because I'm writing, not speaking.  And you'll never know, or suspect, I have even the slightest hint o f a speech impediment.


Would you ?

Would you ?

Nurse Moon

She saved me.

I was born with the chord around my neck.

Nurse Moon's swift action with her scissors,

cutting the chord,

gave me breath.

I breathed,

but didn't cry.

The family, gathered downstairs,

waited anxiously

for some time,

it is said.

I didn't disturb the household

for many many days to come.

Except with my uncanny

quietness,

my emotions expressed

only by weak little gestures

my tiny, strangulated cry

audible only

if you held me

very very close.