Other people’s embarrassment is the worst part of having a stammer – but it forces you to expand your vocabulary and gives you an unusually strong appreciation of the written word

“When I was 10 I prayed that God would strike me dumb. If I were dumb, people would not expect me to speak. And if I didn’t have to speak, I wouldn’t have to stammer. I could imagine no sweeter serenity

AS A CHILD I prayed often, but the words seldom had a meaning beyond the ritual of repetition. Only once did I pray hard for something specific and immediate. When I was 10 I prayed that God would strike me dumb.

It seems ridiculously melodramatic now, but I thought it a perfectly reasonable request at the time. If I were dumb, people would not expect me to speak. And if I didn’t have to speak, I wouldn’t have to stammer. People would ask me things and I would reply in writing. I could imagine no sweeter image of serenity.

Watching The King's Speech, Tom Hooper's elegant film about King George VI's stammer, two painful memories surfaced from the depths of deliberate oblivion. The first was triggered by the look on Colin Firth's face at the beginning of the film as he is waiting to deliver his first big public speech at the close of the Empire Exhibition at Wembley Stadium.

Firth fixes that look with absolute precision. It is not an expression of panic or witless terror. His face speaks of abject and desolate despair. He is not afraid the speech will be a disaster; he knows it will. He has already thought over and over of every stumble, blockage and infinitely painful silence. He has mapped his speech like a showjumper in reverse, seeing every fence his horse will refuse, every pole he will clatter, every jump at which he must take a humiliating fall.

That look brought back to me exactly what it was like to be a child preparing to read aloud in class. Reading set texts was always the worst, because you couldn’t use the evasive strategies that stammerers develop: swapping words for synonyms, surprising yourself with improvisations.

So you read the text over to yourself with the kind of attention the other kids never could imagine. Where they saw a flat, more or less boring landscape, you surveyed a minefield, marking in your head all the inevitable detonations: the sentences that began with vowels, the maddening m-m-ms, the precarious p-p-ps, the cursed c-c-cs.

And the more you pondered them, the more powerless you knew yourself to be.

The other part of the stammerer's experience that The King's Speechcaptures so brilliantly is the thing that I actually hated most: other people's embarrassment.

You get used to your own humiliation. You even get used to the childish teasing (though I can’t remember being teased all that much). What you never get used to is that look on other people’s faces, the unique mixture of pity and impatience that the stammerer evokes.

They feel sorry for you and they want you to bloody well get on with it. Sometimes they shout at you; sometimes they “helpfully” finish your sentences. Mostly, as the film captures so well, they just shift uncomfortably, averting their eyes, hovering between irritation and mortification. I came to dread that reaction more than the stammering itself.

The infuriating thing about stammering is that it has no logic. It is not a disease or a disability with an easily identifiable cause in the brain or the body. (There is some tenuous evidence of a genetic link, though in my case there was no family history.)

You can speak fluently when on your own or when your voice is drowned out by other noises. You can sing the most complicated lyrics. In my case, and I know for others, some words would be almost unsayable though words with very similar sounds would be fine.

For a kid this lack of logic or explanation is intolerable. I dealt with it by creating my own story. The first time I was conscious of stammering badly was when reading aloud in class when I was nine. The previous day the teacher had given out to me for reading too quickly. I later linked these events and decided that my stammer was caused by becoming too anxious and self-conscious about the way I was reading.

But I don’t quite trust this memory. The need for an explanation, any explanation, was so strong I certainly would have been capable of inventing one and projecting it backwards.

Watching The King's Speech, I was startled by one passage of dialogue between Firth and Geoffrey Rush, who played his therapist, Lionel Logue. The king reveals that he was naturally left-handed but was forced to write with his right hand. Logue suggests that this is a common experience for children who stammer. It certainly is what happened to me. The same superstitious assault on citeogs was still present in Irish schools in the early 1960s.

There were, however, no Lionel Logues to help us. Speech therapy was (and still is) a rarity. I was probably fortunate in that my stammer was not as bad as those of some others.

I dealt with it gradually in the only way I could think of, forcing myself into all the situations I dreaded most. As I got older I spoke a lot in public, then began to do live radio and television broadcasts. In the mid-1990s I presented a live TV show for the BBC every week for a year. It was the ultimate form of immersion therapy.

Watching Firth in the film waiting for the red light to come on in the studio brought back the sensation of looking into the camera with the first words of the Autocue visible and ready to roll and feeling, paradoxically, more alone than at any other time.

I wouldn’t wish a stammer on any child, but I do know that I would be a very different person without mine. It’s not an entirely bad thing to learn early on what it feels like to be a bit of a freak, especially when the thing that sets you apart is relatively minor.

And I imagine the stammerer’s love of language is a little bit special.

You may learn to read texts with an acute wariness, an avid suspicion, but you certainly pay attention to them. When you become accustomed to scrutinising words for their hidden trapdoors and tripwires, you never quite take them for granted again.

Stammering certainly is good for the vocabulary. The verbal shuffle that comedians always do when they are playing stammerers – “Darling, I l-l-l-l . . . have the height of regard for you” – is quite accurate. The stammerer becomes a human thesaurus. Can’t say passionate? Try fervent. Stuck on fervent? Try ardent. The quicker you can shuffle the pack, the better your chances of surprising the brain before it can register the problematic sounds in the new words.

And when speaking is an ordeal, reading and writing acquire a special halo of bliss. Sitting silently with a book hearing words so fluently in your head, the minefields transformed again into lush meadows of language, is like steeping in a warm bath of verbal fluency.

Writing, the act of turning words from barbed sounds into smooth symbols on a white page, becomes a working definition of freedom. It also feels a little like vengeance: the slithery vowels and jagged consonants that would not come at your call are meekly obedient to your thoughts. For the stammerer, that feels f-f-f-ing marvellous.