Her father had dug deep to find a solution to his stammer. He wanted his daughter to do the same. Caroline Hughes-Dunant talks about her own journey.

Caroline Hughes-Dunant

It was the opening of an international screenwriters' conference. The woman next to me in the coffee queue was down in the programme to deliver a keynote address shortly. She was in enviable possession of all the professional weapons. Youthful good looks, successful writing talent and a reputation as a brilliant speaker. I ventured that I was looking forward to her talk. She looked as if she might be sick. "I'm terrified. I never sleep before I do one. We writers live such weird lives, don't we? I go weeks in my jimjams, silent as the tomb, wrapped round the laptop, getting the words down, then bam! I'm at this kind of shindig, praying I don't look daft and I can get the words out." "I know the feeling," I thought, but didn't say it. Her address was funny, erudite, inspirational, and prompted a standing ovation.

I didn't bring up the subject of stammering with her, when it might have been appropriate, or with anyone else. And nor did anyone raise it with me. Perhaps I didn't stammer at all? Of course I did. I'm not completely fluent and neither do I aim for total fluency. I don't think it exists. For anyone. My intention was not to 'pass' as something I am not, as I believe I am no different to those who don't stammer. Besides, the first rule of networking, indeed the first rule of effective communication, is: "It's not about you." Now, you might accuse me of being in denial, of going in for massive avoidance, that I missed an opportunity for telling the world I stammer. And I will say to you, "No".

According to my mother, my stammer began as the result of a shock when I was three, which struck me dumb for a while and turned me from an intrepid child into a nervous one. A plane crashed in the field at the end of the garden where I was playing. The pilot, in flames and screaming, ran towards me and fell just before he reached the fence. I don?t remember this incident and I doubt if it caused my stammer, or not entirely. What I think it did was to increase my propensity, in that my sisters missed out on this particular 'inheritance'.

My father also stammered, but my mother didn't know, and none of us found out until I was grown up. There was no hint of struggle in his speech. His unhurried delivery was always articulate, melodious and eloquent. His voice was almost a Siren call. His speaking skills, indeed his life skills, had brought him phenomenal, all-round success.

The discovery came when I was a student in London, and had gone back to the country for a comforts of home re-charge. My speech was very erratic. A sentence was an obstacle race. I either got to the end without mishap, or crashed amongst the hurdles. I had no control, and fear of speaking was rapidly reducing me to silence. My father said he understood. He completely understood. He had been there himself, but his stammer had been a great deal worse than mine. Oh yes, much worse... He was calm. I was a volcano. I erupted and carried on erupting. Why had he never told me? Why had he never told Mother? My sisters? Anyone? Why had he hidden it? And why, oh why had he never helped me?

Plumbing the depths

When I was quiet, he gathered me into an embrace. His achievements, he said, were very hard won. The ease he displayed had been honed over a lifetime. He had been near speechless as a child and school was not a kind environment. He became afraid to open his mouth, but it was paradoxically in those dark days that he began to reach deep within himself to devise a way forward. Not just a method of speaking. That, he considered, was a surface thing, the tip of the iceberg, but to plumb the depths, to go to where the voice comes from deep within the core of himself.

It had been enormously painful to witness my struggles. He had done wrong, perhaps, in not talking about his own stammer, but he knew he couldn't fix mine. That was not what I wanted to hear. I wanted my father to hand over the package that had evidently worked for him. "No... Every stammer is different," he said, "no two people are alike." Mine was not like his. Therapy could help, methods of control could be applied, but the core of the problem would remain. "I can give you an elastoplast. I cannot offer a panacea. There is no real, lasting, profound answer, a cure if you like, except within yourself. You must find your own way and you will find there is no other that works."

Of course, I tried many other routes before fully taking on board my father's tough advice. He never had any speech therapy, indeed there wasn't much to be had when he was young, whereas our present times are awash with therapies from the trained, orthodox and very well intentioned to the deeply suspect. I have very fond memories of The City Lit. But I was also a sucker, as much as anyone else, for clever come-ons promising The Answer. Life, and speaking, was often a case of two steps forward, one back, but I did advance. However, the wall was always there - it looked like a wall, high and long - and I couldn't scramble over it, nor find the door to go through. I was establishing myself as a writer, but writers must be talkers these days. As well as getting the work done, you have to get yourself out there, market yourself and your words. Give talks, give readings, do signings, broadcast, pitch ideas, hold your own in meetings and network, network, network... I felt I couldn't trust the fluency I had achieved. I lacked the courage, the self belief.

Tackling the wall

"This examination of my Self has brought about a seismic shift; subtle, gradual, organic."

I went on a McGuire course. I couldn't stay within the programme because it offers a belief system I couldn't accept, but I came away with the 'checklist', a very useful tool. Put simply, it is a system for breathing, formulation of content and speech delivery. I couple that with actors' and singers' breathing and voicing excercises. I've always listened to opera and choral music, but I began to sing along, belting it out. Amy Winehouse doesn't quite cut it, whereas Mozart and the Italians, the 'inis' and the 'ettis', do. The music demands you breathe from the 'pit'. I read aloud, poetry for rhythm and dialogue being the most testing, and record myself. I walk. I discovered that you can literally walk a problem out, go from muddle to clarity. And I swim. I am fortunate to have a pool nearby. I go very early in the morning, from horizontal in bed to horizontal in the pool inside half an hour. I am barely awake, still close to dream land. The atmosphere is quiet and focussed. Good technique, in tandem with correct breathing, powers the stroke. It is the same for singing or speech. So, while I am clocking up the lengths, I am both reinforcing that link and achieving a regular space to have an inner conversation with myself. What I did yesterday, and how it went, and what I am facing today, and how that might go. Not only the speech aspects, but everything. Am I afraid? Often. I don't want to deny, cancel or push away any so-called negative feeling. In fact, I don't think in terms of negative or positive. It is all useful. All grist to the mill. Fitness improves a bit too.

This examination of my Self has brought about a seismic shift; subtle, gradual, organic. My inner world has changed and thus my outlook is different. I haven't seen the light, I am not born again, this is not a brand new me. All of it is me. Everything that has happened to me, good, bad and downright awful; every success and failure; everything that I have done, felt, thought and experienced has led to this point. I need it all in order to progress. I don't foreground my stammer because it does not define me. I don't deny that I have a stammer. Indeed, I am grateful for the problem that it presented as it prompted me to work very hard to make as much of myself as I can. As my father said, a lifetime's work. The wall, once so high and insurmountable, has become hoppable. I'm finding my way.

From the Spring 2009 issue of Speaking Out, pages 16-17.