Finding my voice

I was cured of a lifelong stammer by a technique even Lionel Logue, George VI’s celebrated speech therapist, never tried. The cure lasted exactly three minutes, and has never been repeated.

In the mid-1990s, when I was stationed in Hong Kong as the East Asia editor of the Times, the BBC commissioned me to write and broadcast three three-minute pieces to be called Secrets in China. A producer arrived with a cameraman. What I had written was now in front of me on an autocue. I told the producer that I, a stutterer, couldn’t read smoothly from a text; when reading out loud stutterers can’t employ those little tricks — pauses for thought, substituting easy words for hard ones, purring a bit — that the lifelong hesitator knows to a t-t-t. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It’s not live. We can just repeat it until it’s right.’ I tried about ten times and couldn’t get past the second sentence. The producer suddenly snapped: ‘Hey, let’s forget the fucking brain damage and just read it, OK?’ In six decades no one had ever said anything like that to me, and I read it straight off. The producer, a thalidomide victim with only three vestigial fingers, apologised fervently. ‘How could I of all people say that?’ I instantly forgave him. What a cure! But it didn’t last for the next two pieces, through which I hacked my usual halting way.

In the book The King’s Speech, co-written by Mark Logue, Lionel’s grandson, there is some information on stammering. Much better in this respect is Stutter, by Marc Shell, a Harvard professor of comparative literature. There it all is, the catalogue of stuttering: who, how and when. Besides George VI and Shell himself, Moses stuttered, as did Demosthenes, Darwin, Henry James, Churchill, and Somerset Maugham (whose ‘thoughtful’ pauses were famous) and among the very few women who stutter, Marilyn Monroe and Margaret Drabble.