The burden that cannot speak its name: my years of struggle against a stammer

Stammerers know the torture of being lost for words — they also know the comfort of silence, writes Miriam O’Callaghan

EVERY day I walk around, heart in mouth, in case someone might ask me who I am. It’s not that I don’t know. Rather, I might not be able to tell them. You see, I stammer, and Ms are among my bad letters. Worse even than Ls or Ss. Which, for people who know me, is s-s-s-s-saying a lot. On a good day, I can pass myself off as fluent. On a really, really bad day, were I to meet someone I’d never see again, I’d happily tell them my name was Anna or Barbara or George or Joseph. Anything to avoid the twitching, grimacing, jerking, blinking, sweating prelude to the three syllables I hate most in the world: Mir-i-am.

There’s great company, though, in the stammering. We’re a mixed bunch, too: Marilyn Monroe; Fintan O’Toole; Noel Gallagher; Lewis Carroll; Isaac Newton; Joe Biden; Emily Blunt; BB King; James Earl Jones; Nicole Kidman; Sam Neil; Ed Sheeran; Carly Simon; Jimmy Stewart; Bruce Willis; Charles Darwin; Margaret Drabble; John Updike; Somerset Maugham;

Andrew Lloyd Webber. Even The King himself. Elvis that is.

Watching King George VI’s speech in the movie was something I put off for a long time. I could imagine the freezing, the fidgeting, the pounding in the chest, the sweat under the eyes, the weightlessness in the legs, the rolling of the eyes, the rigidity in the tongue as the reluctant monarch attempts to do the impossible and say ‘‘Good evening’’.

In my list of famous stammerers, you’ll see more men than women. In fact, according to the studies, the male-tofemale ratio in stammering is between 3:1 to 5:1. While I’ve come across quite a few men who stammer, I know only two women who do: one, a family member, the other a friend. Both women are highly creative, successful professionals, well regarded in their fields.

The three of us have a special ease, because we know and share one another’s disease. We can also clock a fellow-stammerer, or a cured one, a visual or acoustic mile away, our spidey senses attuned to that exquisite millisecond of hesitation before a particular word, vowel, consonant.

Today, my stammer has good days and bad. If I’m tired or stressed? M-m-m-mother of God.

At primary school, stammering made life torture. Which is why I feel for the 19,000 children — yes 19,000 — currently awaiting speech therapy in this gilded country of ours.

For a child with any kind of speech difficulty, the hours 9am to 4pm can be what I called Disappearing Time. Every school day I wished and prayed to disappear. Anything, even death itself, would be better than having to read aloud when my turn came around. In class I would be frantic, skipping along the text to the lines I might get. Invariably, there would be the tripwires of those killer consonants. The lethal Ms and Ls and Ss; sometimes the Ts and Ds. And oh, the eternally-evil vowel-sound Eh.

In RTE’s Young Musician of the Future competition, the wonderful nun who taught us singing, Sr Benedicta, told the studio interviewer Jane Carty “Ta stad ina glor aici”.

But Jane Carty beamed and said “sit down there Miriam ’til I talk to you. You’ll be wonderful”.

And she made me feel like I was, until I told her and the nation I was ‘E-e-e-eleven’. I can remember the insulated walls of the studio, the space expanding and contracting, as if a bomb had been detonated.

I had started school at four with the high articulacy of the only child, privy to good adult conversation and read to constantly.

At home, the stammer was nothing: I would grow out of it. In my head, my speech was fluent and complex. It was on

MIXED BUNCH: Famous stammerers include Marilyn Monroe my tongue and in the air betrayed me.

Though at five, I knew all about Imre Nagy’s address to the Hungarian people (my mother believed fiveyear-olds in Ireland should never be complacent over Communism), and had the advanced reading age that is common in stammerers.

I spent first class to third class in the dunces’ row. At home, I was devouring small print Heidi, The Secret Garden and Black Beauty but in the classroom with its Mary Altar, poled windows and chalk-dust drifting in our lungs, it was all it super-simple Peter and Jane, with their perfect knees and Colgate smiles and shopping with mother and meeting a never-ending procession of greengrocers, butchers and smiling policemen. Every word of which stayed, like Snow White’s bite of apple, stuck firmly in my throat.

At home, I said nothing about it. This was school and I had been found out: I was thick. Officially. So, I retreated into the secret life of a silent, sophisticated reader, pretending to be relieved when the teacher, with her patience and powdery scent and netted hair, broke up the two-syllable words with her mechanically and maniacally-sharpened 2B pencil.

And I really was relieved. My ‘‘inability’’ to read meant I didn’t even have to speak the divided word. All I had to do was nod.

And then? Came the Christmas Miracle. Thanks to the teacher’s kindness, even the thickest girl could be an angel in the play, with white gown, silver cardboard wings and tinsel halo. Not being ‘‘able’’ to read she would teach me my lines. Instead, I read them upside down on her desk, memorised them. And the same day, stood up, recited them fluently to her open mouth.

“Fear not, for behold I bring you tidings of great joy. For unto you is born this day in the City of David, a saviour who is Christ the Lord.”

I was so happy to speak any words at all that didn’t involve apple sellers, victuallers, officers of the law and two perfect fools, living perfect lives with their perfect mother, in perfectly dull suburban England, I had forgotten to listen to the sound I was making. Instead of speaking, I had recited.

Much like the angel’s message, it was a revelation. This act of recitation — of ‘‘summoning from memory’’ — had allowed me bypass the Mad Cow Roundabout of speech from which, at school at least, I could never find the exit.

At secondary school, I thought of and heard myself as Prioinsias de Rossa without the beard. But I had good friends — still my friends today — who, exasperated at times, would say ‘‘ah, for feck sake sing it’’.

Crucially, they weren’t embarrassed. As Fintan O’Toole said once, the embarrassment in people waiting for you to start or continue speaking, is even worse than the stammer itself.

So, I stammered through Shakespeare and John Donne and Thomas Kinsella and Guy de M-m-m-maupassant and upstairs in the Phoenix on Union Quay and in the Downtown Kampus on the Lower Road, if a young fella offered me a drink, the girls would say in unison “she’ll have a glass of Carling, thanks”. Saturday night was for dancing, not for waiting.

Hard to believe, then, that a stammerer would work in radio. Doing It Says in the Papers on RTE, I’d go in super early, shooing the family foxes from the door, meeting their Stillorgan cousins on the dualway.

Script written, I’d head for the studio before Morning Ireland started, speak it three times like it was a charm from Macbeth. The sound team must have considered it a kind of perfectionist tic. In fact, I did it out of pure terror. Speaking it? I might stammer. Reciting it, well-placed on the tongue and breath? Since my life as an angel, I knew I would not.

There is no empirical evidence that stammerers are more creative than the fluent. But Fintan O’Toole says he would be a different person without his stammer, as I suspect I would without mine. Betrayed by the body, hit with the psychological juddering, the dislocation of being halted without and fluent within, perhaps the words we stammerers write on a page or a screen continue to beguile us. We know they don’t need to be uttered. There is comfort in their silence and its keeping.

For now, I hope the 19,000 children on the speech-therapy waiting list have better luck with the new government than with the old.

And as the boxes are opened this morning, we know that the people have s-s-s-spoken. The question is now, what did they s-s-s-say?