I Didn’t Need More Time

There’s a word I couldn’t spell for years.

Father.

Somewhere in there, I kept slipping in an R that didn’t belong.

Farther, not father.

Teachers told me to sound it out.

“Spell it as it sounds, Francine.”

But nobody says fat-her.

Nobody says, “Hello, fat-her.”

The instruction itself didn’t work, and no one seemed to notice that the problem wasn’t me failing to try.

I could spell necessary.

I could spell because.

I could spell elephant.

Longer, more awkward words could somehow be completely fine.

But father?

Absolutely not.

Why would a word like father be harder than elephant?

That question sat underneath a lot of my childhood, mostly unasked, because nobody around me seemed particularly interested in the logic of how my brain was getting things wrong.

They were interested in correcting it.

My mum worked hard to get me whatever support she could within the school system.

From very early on in primary school, I was being removed from ordinary lessons and taken to additional English classes, often in a small room with a small group of children.

It was always boys.

Usually the rougher boys.

The ones other kids noticed for the wrong reasons.

Snotty sleeves.

Bogies.

Scruffy uniforms.

And me.

The only girl.

I remember feeling as though I had been filed into the dunce’s corner.

I didn’t feel like I belonged there.

I didn’t feel like I was one of them.

I just felt embarrassed.

School, for me, had never really been about learning anyway.

From nursery onwards, it was socialisation.

People.

Friends.

The noise of the playground.

Who was sitting with whom.

Who was playing what.

Who had fallen out.

Who had made up.

I wanted to be with people.

I wasn’t particularly interested in books or reading or most of the topics we were being taught.

But that didn’t mean I didn’t know things.

I remember sitting in classrooms with my hand thrust into the air because I knew the answer.

And somehow it would always be:

“Yes, Rebecca?”

“Yes, Helen?”

Never:

“Yes, Francine?”

I knew the bloody answer.

But I wasn’t asked.

Strangely, though, teachers were always very happy to ask me to read aloud.

That they remembered.

Every form tutor, every teacher, every person who ever picked me to read a paragraph from a book in front of a classroom has somehow remained lodged in my body.

I remember the trepidation.

The physical fear of it.

My hands shaking.

My whole body tightening while I waited for my turn, knowing I was going to have to decipher the words on the page and make them come out of my mouth coherently in front of everybody.

Because I read fast.

Too fast.

My brain would be at the end of the word before my eyes had properly dealt with the beginning.

Sometimes I would put words into sentences that weren’t even there.

Sometimes I would race through a sentence, realise I had read it wrongly, go back, and race through it again.

That is still how I read now.

My brain has always moved faster than the mechanisms I was being asked to use.

Writing was even worse.

By the time I reached the end of a thought, I had barely managed to write the beginning of it down.

The next thought had already arrived.

And then the next.

And the next.

The thoughts whip through my brain like a steam train, each one flattening the one before it.

There is no slowing it down.

And there was no way my hand could move quickly enough to capture the significance of each thought before it disappeared.

But if you let me talk?

Completely different story.

Ask me the question.

Let me answer aloud.

Let me explain it.

Let me speak into a machine.

I could tell you exactly what I knew.

My difficulty was never having thoughts.

My difficulty was getting them from my head, through a pen, onto a piece of paper in the particular format school had decided counted as intelligence.

One of my extra English teachers was called Mrs Padazza.

She was very striking.

Jet-black hair.

Beautiful.

Strict.

There were three of us in the room.

Lee.

Andrew.

And me.

I barely remember what she taught us.

But I remember the view.

I remember staring out of the window at the building across the way.

The bright yellow doors.

The Year Three block.

The blue reception door.

I knew the outside of that building better than I knew the classroom I was sitting in.

Years later, once I understood I also had ADHD, that memory became almost painfully obvious.

I wasn’t absorbing the classroom.

I was somewhere else entirely.

One day Mrs Padazza asked us to spell the word bike.

I wrote:

Dick.

For years I mixed up my Bs and Ds.

She thought I was taking the piss.

Royally taking the piss.

She kept pointing at the word and saying:

“What does this say?”

“Bike.”

“It does not say bike.”

“It says bike.”

I genuinely believed it said bike.

Then I looked again.

And realised.

Dick.

I was mortified.

She probably still thought I was messing about.

I wasn’t.

My brother used to find my B and D confusion hilarious too.

He would say things like:

“Oh, Francine took her bog to the bus stop.”

Instead of:

“Francine took her dog to the bus stop.”

And laugh and laugh in my face.

My extra English classes continued all the way through high school.

And this is the part that still makes me angry.

Because the school took me out of the subjects I loved to attend:

Art.

Design.

Textiles.

Woodwork.

Cooking.

The places where I could make something.

The places where my imagination could go somewhere.

The places where my brain actually seemed to work exactly as it was supposed to.

Those were the lessons I was removed from.

Instead, I was sat in another room practising basic spelling.

At the time, it felt like punishment.

There were endless assessments.

People came into school from outside.

Word patterns.

Recognition exercises.

Hearing tests to make sure I was listening properly.

Someone once showed me drawings from my school file that I had apparently made when I was six or seven.

By then I was thirteen or fourteen.

“Do you remember drawing this?”

No.

Of course I didn’t.

I was practically a different human being.

I also couldn’t get French.

I was terrible at French.

Eventually I had to recite bits of it in song form just to get them to stick.

That is probably another story.

But even then I remember thinking:

How exactly am I supposed to grasp French when I’m still trying to work out English?

One assessor once asked me to spell father.

Miraculously, on this occasion, I got it right.

F-A-T-H-E-R.

I looked upwards and slightly to one side while I was doing it.

He noticed.

“When you’re spelling, do you visualise the words?”

My mum was sitting next to me.

And I thought:

I’m going to have some fun with this guy.

“Yes.”

His eyes lit up.

“What does the word look like?”

So I started describing it.

Huge bubble writing.

Cloud-like.

Massive letters.

Black clouds written across the sky.

My mum was looking at me with an expression that said:

I know exactly what you’re doing.

But he swallowed the whole thing.

Then he turned to my mum and said:

“Get this girl a seat at university. She’s going places.”

I was playing with him.

But somehow he had found something real underneath the joke anyway.

Imagination.

Play.

Spontaneity.

Creativity.

Everybody else seemed to be looking for what was wrong.

He accidentally noticed what was right.

That gap — between what the system saw and what was actually there — turned out to be the shape of my whole education.

I didn’t receive a formal dyslexia diagnosis until my first year at college, once funding for proper testing became available.

By then I had already sat my GCSEs.

I had worked unbelievably hard.

Probably ten times harder than many of the students around me.

I got a B in English Language.

I got an A in spoken English.

And then I was formally diagnosed as dyslexic.

Which was confusing in itself.

Because for years, dyslexia had been presented to me as evidence that I wasn’t good at English.

But apparently I was.

Just not in the way school expected me to be.

By high school, I had started refusing to read aloud.

I would say:

“I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to do that. My extra English teacher has asked that I don’t read aloud because I get too nervous.”

That should probably have been enough.

Instead, teachers often responded with irritation.

Disdain.

“You will read this because I have said you will read this, Francine.”

So I would read.

Shaking.

Humiliated.

Again.

One of the accommodations given to dyslexic students was extra time in exams.

For me, this was possibly the worst accommodation imaginable.

I didn’t want to be there in the first place.

And now I had to sit there for an extra fifteen or twenty minutes.

Soul destroying.

It wasn’t that I needed fifteen more minutes to think.

I needed another way to show you what I knew.

Give me a dictaphone.

Ask me the question.

Let me speak.

I know the answer.

I can tell you straight away.

But if I had to write it down, suddenly spelling became part of the assessment.

Handwriting became part of it.

Working memory became part of it.

My thoughts disappearing midway through a sentence became part of it.

And none of those things necessarily had anything to do with whether I understood the question.

At college we had to sit General Studies A levels.

There was one exam question about gambling.

I remember thinking this was a particularly strange thing to ask a sixteen-year-old because I knew absolutely nothing about gambling.

So naturally, I went off on an enormous tangent.

At some point I started writing about backing a three-legged horse.

I became completely absorbed in the story of this three-legged horse and why anybody would possibly place a bet on it.

I had turned the exam into storytelling.

I walked out after about an hour with my hand aching and the certain knowledge that I had written pages of absolute nonsense.

Some examiner somewhere was going to open that paper and think:

What the hell happened here?

But I know that if somebody had asked me the same question aloud, I could probably have answered it coherently.

That difference matters.

I don’t read for pleasure.

I don’t particularly enjoy books.

I think I have read perhaps two or three books from cover to cover in my entire forty-two years.

People sometimes find that surprising because I love language.

But reading itself gives me very little comfort.

I can read quickly.

Very quickly.

Probably faster than many people.

But sometimes I reach the bottom of a page and realise I have absolutely no idea what I just read.

So I go back.

I read it again.

Still nothing.

By the third attempt, I already recognise the sentences because I have seen them twice, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the meaning has settled.

Then occasionally the opposite happens.

Something sticks so firmly that years later I can remember the page.

The sentence structure.

The doodle I drew beside it.

I can recall television programmes almost visually.

I remember pages from my old philosophy books partly because I drew pictures all over them to help myself remember.

I am visual.

I am auditory.

I am kinaesthetic.

I understand things through people, images, sounds, stories, conversation, experience.

Reading just isn’t my preferred doorway.

And yet I love words.

I love poetry.

I love what words can do.

I love the feeling of language.

I love the emotional weight of a sentence.

I love Shakespeare.

I don’t particularly want to sit down and read Shakespeare silently from a page, but give me Shakespeare performed, spoken, explained, inhabited?

I understand it.

I’m not an idiot.

And that sentence matters more than I wish it did.

Because I spent a lot of my childhood feeling as though adults thought I was one.

For a long time I didn’t like telling people I was dyslexic.

Because somehow:

“I’m dyslexic”

could become:

“So you’re thick.”

“So you aren’t very clever.”

“So you can’t write.”

None of those things are true.

I have written professional reports for child protection meetings.

I have written funding bids for. 

Managed million pound budgets. 

I went to uni learned how to Harvard reference. 

I have written several dissertation sized documents just to get my last business on national television advertising. 

I write stories.

I write poetry.

I write because I love language.

If I care about something, I can write about it.

If something interests me, I can explore it endlessly.

At university, I kept a diary.

My flatmate Mark and I were very close, and I would often go into his room, sit on his bed and sometimes fall asleep there because I was exhausted.

One day he somehow ended up reading my diary.

I don’t think he initially realised quite how personal it was.

Then he spotted something I had written.

“Dyslexia? What’s dyslexia?”

Except I had not written dyslexia.

I had written my own version of it - Dyslia! 

I was eighteen years old and I could not spell the name of the thing I had been diagnosed with.

He absolutely pissed himself laughing.

And I remember thinking:

In what world do you give dyslexic people the word dyslexia and expect us to spell it?

It feels like some sort of elaborate joke.

Not necessarily a very funny one.

For years I said I had Dyslia.

The irony was almost too perfect.

And then there were the smaller humiliations.

The everyday corrections.

The way people point at something and say:

“You’ve spelt that wrong.”

The laughter.

“Why have you written it like that?”

As though the spelling error automatically means the person who made it is less intelligent than the person correcting it.

I once worked at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and created the programme board for the week.

It was enormous.

Hand drawn.

Every performance.

Every time slot.

From ten in the morning until midnight.

Seven days a week.

An extraordinary amount of information carefully laid out by hand.

It took me hours and hours.

There was one mistake.

I had misspelled a performer’s name.

He came over and looked at it.

“Well, that’s all going to have to be redone, isn’t it?”

I looked at this enormous board.

Hours of work.

One spelling mistake.

“Why?”

“My name is wrong.”

I told him I was dyslexic.

I told him how long it had taken.

And essentially told him he could jolly well fuck off.

Because sometimes the correction stops being helpful.

Sometimes it becomes one-upmanship.

I noticed something you didn’t.

I can spell something you can’t.

Therefore I am cleverer than you.

That has been my experience far too often.

The mistake becomes bigger than everything surrounding it.

Competence gets reduced to correctness.

And perhaps that is the part of dyslexia I resent most.

Not the spelling.

Not the reading.

Not the Bs and Ds.

The assumption.

The tiny shift in somebody’s face when they decide something about your intelligence.

The urge people have to mould you into the version of learning they understand rather than giving you the tools that allow your own brain to work.

Because I didn’t need more time.

I needed another way to show you what I knew.

Now I’m the one doing the teaching.

I home educate my daughters.

And sometimes I see my childhood brain appearing right in front of me.

I see Nell rushing to speak because the words seem to be fighting to get out of her mouth faster than she can physically say them.

Sometimes she stammers because the thought is already three sentences ahead.

And I look at her and think:

I see you, kid.

You are me.

But I don’t look at her and see deficiency.

I don’t see a child who needs to be pulled away from everything she loves and sat at a desk until she conforms.

I don’t see something to fix.

I see a brain working in its own remarkable way.

So I play to their strengths.

They talk.

They make.

They create.

They explain.

They build.

They imagine.

They use enormous words.

Their vocabulary surprises me constantly.

And I refuse to make them feel inferior because their way of reaching an answer might look different from somebody else’s.

I spent years feeling that adults believed I wasn’t capable.

Years trying to prove I wasn’t stupid.

Years trying to demonstrate that the person they had decided I was did not exist.

It has been exhausting.

And I will never do that to my children.

They will not have to convince me that they are intelligent.

They will not have to earn the right to be seen as capable.

They will not have the things they love taken away from them in order to spend more time practising the things they find difficult.

We will find another way.

I still don’t know exactly why father held out against me for so long while elephant never did.

Maybe there isn’t a tidy answer.

But I know this now:

the question was never really,

“What is wrong with the way this girl spells?”

It was,

“What is this mind actually doing?”

And what might it have shown you, if you had given it a way to speak instead of insisting it write?