Finding my voice

I was cured of a lifelong stammer by a technique even Lionel Logue, George VI’s celebrated speech therapist, never tried. The cure lasted exactly three minutes, and has never been repeated.

In the mid-1990s, when I was stationed in Hong Kong as the East Asia editor of the Times, the BBC commissioned me to write and broadcast three three-minute pieces to be called Secrets in China. A producer arrived with a cameraman. What I had written was now in front of me on an autocue. I told the producer that I, a stutterer, couldn’t read smoothly from a text; when reading out loud stutterers can’t employ those little tricks — pauses for thought, substituting easy words for hard ones, purring a bit — that the lifelong hesitator knows to a t-t-t. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It’s not live. We can just repeat it until it’s right.’ I tried about ten times and couldn’t get past the second sentence.