“To prove them wrong” ……….

 I have never hidden that I had and still do have difficulties with literacy.

It made many aspects of learning in school a daily torture which presented a vast chasm between me and many of my contemporaries and plunged me into acres of self-doubt and feelings of unworthiness.

All of which was compounded by Miss Reeves in Junior Four who on the cusp of the eleven plus examination told Mother that I “was not academically inclined”.

A Solomon like judgement which burned in mum, and doomed dad and I to endless nights practicing eleven plus past papers in the kitchen by the stove through the winter months.

All to no avail, as I failed that “test of intelligence and future promise” confirming the assessment of Miss Reeves and consigning me to a Secondary Modern School.

A fact that years later further underlined my lack of academic credentials when I became a teacher in a Manchester High School and realized that I was the only Secondary Modern kid amongst an entire staff who had gone to grammar schools.*

Made worse by that simple realization that I could not trust myself to write on the blackboard, and so painfully all the words I might need to fall back on were written in advance.

At 75 the shame, and indignation still walk with me, but less so, but were reignited today while listening to Nigel McCrery on Saturday Live from BBC Radio Four.**

He is responsible for the long running crime series, Silent Witness and the delightful New Tricks along with a range of other works.

He is dyslexic suffered greatly at school, and confessed at 71 that he still hates a teacher who regularly publicly humiliated him. 

And it so chimed with me.

He said people thought he is well read, when in fact he is "very well listened" having spent ages with Talking Books, and said of his reason for writing that it was to "write for revenge" and so "prove them wrong".  Adding that "there are always "ways around things" to cover the difficulties with literacy.

So, as a policeman he would take his reports home and work on them to correct grammatical mistakes, and because he couldn’t read the menus in transport cafés he visited as a lorry driver he would work out what was on the board from the smells.

I still have to rely on a spell check and when it doesn’t recognise my attempts at spelling a word, I fall back on a different word which often means I am forced to rewrite the sentence.

Many of us will have those moments which can be as vivid now as when we were young.

For me, one of them was when I was sent out of class by the teacher to check the time on the hall clock only to be confronted by a bout of wild terror as the numerals and the hands meant nothing, and I clung on desperately to the hope someone would pass through and help me.

Of course, in the great sweep of physical and learning difficulties encountered by many, my dyslexia might not seem to count for a "hill of beans", but it was real then and still is now.

But like many I coped, came through it and while it still sits on my shoulder, I do now wear it with a bit of pride.

Not that I rank myself beside Mr. McCrery whose skill as a writer and whose literary output far outweighs me, but it is a confirmation that perhaps Miss Reeves was wrong and  I was not thick.

Location; 75 years of my time

Pictures; Young Andrew, circa 1958, and 1961

*To be strictly accurate, there amongst the staff, three who had been "emergency trained" after the war having gone straight from the services into teaching and one plumber who switched from one the Direct Works Department of the City Council to the Education Department.

**Saturday Live Radio Four, BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0024lhd