Acting DAFt

In my professional and hobby life, I speak with many people; on phones and intercoms, giving talks and, on occasion, speaking on TV and radio. This does not, at first glance, appear to be anything special. But to me, it is a small, happy miracle. Here's why. In 1976, I was exposed to a technique called delayed auditory feedback (DAF) and it changed my life.

I grew up with a serious speech impediment which, in almost all cases has a profound effect on the social and emotional development of anyone so afflicted. My parents tell me I did not begin to speak until I was three or four. When I did, my speech was riddled with nervous stutters.

Visits to a child guidance clinic in my early school years had no effect. In pre-teen years, my parents spent an awful lot of money sending me to an elocution teacher who managed to bring out an ability to speak the poetry of Robert Burns quite well, and in front of an audience no less. Despite this apparent victory over the stutter, the impediment changed its nature and became a nerves-induced stammer. It would be there, like a brick wall between the words in my brain and their ability to leave my mouth, especially for sentences beginning with vowels. My final attempt at Burns speaking was littered with embarrassing pauses as I struggled with the tightness that impeded my speech.

My time at secondary school (age 12 to 16) was punctuated with visits to various proper speech therapists. I forget most of their names but not one of the later ladies, Mrs or Miss Crawford - Joan Crawford, I believe. I didn't know it then but when I started to visit her, I think she placed me on a course that would lead to effective control of my speech defect.

The effects of a speech impediment on a person are on many levels. The cruellest in my memory is seeing thirty or more faces in a classroom turn to face me when I was asked to stand and read from a book. A good few of them were aping the open-mouthed struggle they were about to witness. But these were superficial events and to be expected in an environment renown for the tribal flocking of kids against those who show weakness. More subtle is the effect on mere conversation.

Watch a group of humans chat and you see how each one perfectly times the moment to begin speaking off the back of the previous speaker so that a collective stream of consciousness seems to flow between all the participants. This skill, of beginning to speak just at the right time to be part of a conversation, is presumably learned throughout childhood where thoughts instantly turn themselves into words as soon as the moment allows. I think the loss of practice at this skill was one of the most damaging effects of the stammer. My Dad's nickname at his work was 'The Quiet Man' after the John Wayne film. It was given to him by an Irish priest, Father O'Flynn, who, when hosting dinner for a group of mostly talkative men said, "Pass the cabbage to the Quiet Man." My Dad is a quiet, introverted man but the name equally applies to his son who could sit for hours on the outside of a group and listen to the conversation wash back and forth without ever taking part. To do so would require far too much effort to interrupt the flow while working out how to get a sentence started with maximum success.

As with many sufferers, I did find some surprising tricks to get around the impediment. Like Gareth Gates, I found refuge in singing and my family reports that though I had barely learned to talk, I would sing merrily in my bed the songs I had heard on Top Of The Pops.

I developed a tick. Not the involuntary twitch that most might associate with the word but an actual, audible 'tick'. By pulling my tongue away from my upper palate as I went to form a word, I would make a single 'click' noise that seemed to trigger the start of the sentence. Speech was therefore routinely preceded by these clicks as I dealt with situations like phone calls and shop requests (in the days when you often asked for items at a counter instead of lifting them off a shelf).

In my head, I felt smart enough. I understood what was going on around me alright. There was simply this tendency not to have my point of view, my opinion, my instruction or request put out among others for their reaction. As a result, one becomes introspective, quiet and left to feel very much not part of a crowd.

During my fifth year at secondary school, the visits to Ms Crawford, the speech therapist, began to change. There came to be an increased focus on relaxation. She would play a tape of voiced instructions on how to relax each of the muscle groups. I had my own reel-to-reel tape machine at home so she gave me a copy to use in my own time. Then one day, my speech appointment was with a different person. This meeting turned out to be an in-depth interview about myself and how I reckoned my life had been affected by the speech problem. Like the relaxation, I think this was part of the preparation for the coming course. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview. I wasn't used to people asking me questions about how I felt and I took this opportunity to give it a full wring out. It was a chance to take a damn good look at myself and I came away chuffed with what I had learned. The feeling I came out with was that I had probably gained more than I had lost. I had gained interests - astronomy, spaceflight and science in general - and I had gained in terms of my social attitudes. I felt I was strong within even if others could not see it and I thought that the humility the impediment had forced upon me was far better than the arrogance that might have resulted from a quick mouth.

Then as the time approached for a one-week course of DAF, I was sent to face the TV camera. I went to Gartnavel Hospital where they had a TV studio. I had to sit and read from a book in front of a real TV camera. This was in 1976 and television still had a cachet about it. There were no camcorders or VCRs in people's homes and almost no security cameras. The UK had only three TV channels to its name. Trying to read while that camera focussed on me was terrifying and it brought out the worst of my stammer.

With that awful experience out of the way, we began the course. It was held at the Ear, Nose and Throat hospital in Glasgow - now no longer there. I was one of five guys and there were at least four speech therapists, all women and two of them trainees. This was to be an intensive course that would hopefully provide a path to a cure, and apparently, we were only the second group to try it. A typical day began with relaxation - evidently that was why I had been coached on its techniques. We subjects lay on the floor listening to the tape and relaxing our bodies. Afterwards, one by one, we were taken to a room to experience delayed auditory feedback.

The mechanism was simple. You spoke into a microphone while wearing headphones and your speech was delayed, either by a tape-loop echo machine from the music industry or an experimental solid state device they had. You then hear it back in your ears a fraction of a second later. It turns out that this does interesting things to a speaker's brain. It becomes difficult to move onto the next syllable of speech until the previous one has been heard and since the previous one has been delayed, speech... be... comes... ve... ry... slow. More important, the speech takes on a more rhythmic nature as the length of the delay dominates the pace of speech and, as with singing, a stammer magically disappears.

Having brought the pace of their subject's speech right down - as slow as one syllable per second - the therapists sat with stopwatches to make sure that all speech from that point on was uttered at the desired speed. Nominal fines were levied against those who departed from their set pace. With a fine at only a penny, we understood the point of them. For the rest of the day we were made to converse in our painfully slow discourse and we were instructed to continue at that pace in the evening.

Each day followed the same pattern except that the delay imposed by the machine would be shorter than the previous day so that the resulting speech would be a little faster. Gradually, the women were bringing us up to a normal speed. What they hoped for was that, in the process, they would also bring a rhythm to our speech that we could use to overcome the impediment. As an additional task, we were sent to shops to buy items using our new, more measured talking technique.

The final afternoon took us back to the dreaded TV camera. Again I was recorded reading from a book but this time, there were few signs of the nervous brick walls that usually got in the way of my speech and no longer was it peppered with embarrassing pauses. I found that when the familiar tension in my chest arose, I could easily defeat it by invoking a rhythm in my head and talking with it. After the session, the speech therapists had us watch both our before and after videos recordings. The improvement was dramatic. In fact, to see the recordings so juxtaposed and have the change brought home gave a huge boost in confidence - except for one chap.

For whatever reason, this one guy had not been able to attend his recording prior to the course. When he tried to invoke his new skills for the 'after' session, the nerves defeated him. We watched his replay with him and felt awful as he walked out of the room in tears. I took from this that both the before and after recordings were a crucial part of the course's psychology, perhaps because they provided a baseline against which progress could be measured, especially for me, the subject. I clung on to my new confidence and felt ready to wield it at any opportunity it may be needed.

The course was finished. The guys felt they should get gifts for the therapists for all their help and hard work, but the only thing someone managed to come up with in the hospital shop were pairs of tights. Coming from a houseful of women, it just felt - not quite right. But I was baby of the group at only seventeen and it wasn't my decision. Nevertheless, our therapists took the gesture in good spirit. The last I ever had to do with them was to take the same bus home with the two trainees.

What happened next has bothered me ever since. There was a follow-up appointment which I unintentionally missed. I don't think they ever tried to get in touch again and I got on with my new life, able to speak at will and only rarely feeling the awful tension rise, instantly able to beat it down with a thought of rhythm. I never got to show those women what a difference they had made to my life and I don't feel I properly thanked them.

Some time later, I caught sight of Joan Crawford from the bus I was on. That's the nearest I got. I wonder if I was ever plotted as a positive data point in the continuing study of DAF.

I read now that DAF is a tried and trusted method of reducing the stutter and stammer of a certain subset of sufferers of which I must be one. Meantime, I began a career where I talk on intercoms to groups of people, give talks to the public on topics that interest me and, sometimes, I even appear on TV. Who would have thought it?