Sensemaker Daily
<em>Xavier Greenwood</em> considers whether the speech difficulties that dominated his schooldays were a figment of his imagination
In the still of the night I watched Mary give birth. Her partner sat next to her. They wore simple tunics with head coverings made from old cloth. The happy couple, a girl and a boy, were just nine years old.
Shepherds next to me muttered in wonder. I swivelled, stage right. “Shh, you’ll wake the baby,” I yelled.
In a thick northern accent.
It was meant to be a whisper.
Those five words had a long shelf life. Older kids would repeat them and double over, circling like hyenas and emphasising the “eh” of “baby”. I’d stare back, stony-faced, and wish there’d been more cloud cover on the night of the birth.
I was an easy target. It’s not only that in a single sentence I had transported hundreds of pupils, teachers and ardent nativity-goers from an inn on the West Bank to the streets of Burnley. I also had a homemade bowl of blond hair and, wearing corduroy socks that nearly met my corduroy shorts, I was tiny too.
Small enough to be put in a bin. Which I was, sometimes.
My accent wasn’t the only way my voice drew attention. I simply couldn’t talk properly. I didn’t shape my vowels or harden my consonants, couldn’t say Rs or Ss. I spoke at machine-gun speed, something my mum would generously describe as my brain being too fast for my mouth.
Between the ages of four and nine, I had intense speech therapy with a woman called Nicola. Eventually it worked.
At her parents’ house, somewhere on the way to Preston, my voice began to swoop and soar. Like King George VI or Musharaf from Educating Yorkshire, my thoughts slowly became song.
But just as I was making progress I moved schools and counties. I had been at a Burnley primary school run by nuns, where I didn’t have much trouble with the accent. Now I was at a Yorkshire prep school, where I did.
The school was a Famous Five fantasy, where the headteacher banned homework and we played in the grounds until our legs were lead. We spent afternoons in the beck and evenings trying to summon the Grey Lady, the school ghost thought to have thrown herself off a nearby tower. We spent 5 November huddled around a bonfire bigger than a house, garlic in the air as a teacher got hit in the eye by a firework. We climbed the Yorkshire three peaks every year, our wet boots clinging to Pen-yghent rocks in the rain and wind. It was a health and safety nightmare. It was perfect.
Perfect except for my voice. Maybe it was meant to be encouraging that I was often chosen to use it in public, but I didn’t appreciate the sentiment. Not long after the nativity, my face blotchy from a recent bout of chickenpox, I was asked to read Genesis 3. All you need to know is that in this part of the Bible, the word “naked” appears three times. Naked, to some children, is a very funny word. The phrase “I was naked” is completely priceless.
So in the local church I straightened a felt stool, stood on it to raise my head above the pulpit, and solemnly began the story of Adam and Eve. It was going fine, well even. But then, a few lines in, Adam started addressing his nudity. That was when I caught eyes with a classmate. He was overcome with emotion, struggling to stay upright in his pew. But he wasn’t moved by my eloquence. Rather he was bouncing with laughter. The passage, in his mind, was just too funny. The image of his bobbing frame, in mine, was too distracting.
