Not lost for words: The reporter’s stutter which left him

I was lucky to have a relatively sheltered, privileged upbringing where if it was noted at all, it was seen as a vaguely charming mark of distinction. A musty old Classics teacher would tell me about the great Athenian rhetorician Demosthenes standing on the beach with stones in his mouth to cure his stutter. It didn’t really appeal.

Any time there was some distance that needed to be bridged – like speaking on a phone or asking for a bus ticket – it could be a problem. Anything too formal, too. And I found early on that it was really a stammer, not a stutter.

Words didn’t fracture and become staccato. They simply sat in the path like great unblinking toads, slyly preventing anything from getting past. But a stutter always sounded classier to me, so I’ve stuck with that.

It’s been everywhere with me – at school, university, work. It’s been quite remarkably even-handed in showing up in formal or casual situations. And utterly capricious, suddenly coming up with an entirely new syllable or consonant to place out of bounds.

People would ask: Is it nerves? Are you very anxious? Which would of course give me anxiety – so I never mentioned it. This meant that if suddenly, halfway through a sentence, I was struck dumb, people would react as if it were some biblical curse.

Once in Jordan after a 12-hour bus journey through the endless scrubland from Riyadh, I was suddenly unable to sound out a single word, a great imaginary boulder having materialised on my tongue through the night.

Across the Middle East, beyond the endless strife and complication, certain things were at least clear to me – “Lebanon” was no problem, “Iraq” and “Iran” were easy – “Israel” too – “Egypt” a doddle – but “Tunisia”, “Tel Aviv” and “Turkey” were temperamental, withdrawing access at a moment’s notice.

I would try to avoid listening to a fellow correspondent on the same story before going on air, in case my inner voice should triumphantly extricate the key word from their report and place it in quarantine.

That voice has however become ever more forgiving and forbearing down the years; now it is mostly a whisper of itself. But it’s never gone away – or so I thought.

Maybe I was just holding onto it as a precious fragment of a long-lost self – a sense that there was always something latent and untapped that lay beyond the surface. A connection – semi secret – to entire worlds of people that were gone.

As she sank ever deeper into Alzheimer’s, my mother, who had helped make it so that I never felt it a burden or a hindrance, simply denied outright that my stutter had ever existed – a last link broken with the past.

Perhaps it’s her gentleness and elegant humour that the trace of sudden silence on my tongue still keeps alive. Or did.

So, the next time I am lost for words, it may simply be because there are none left to convey what is happening in Gaza, Israel and beyond.