Fighting word blindness

Press, 5 June 1982, Page 16

Fighting word blindness

Susan’s Story: an autobiographical account of my struggle with words. By Susan Hampshire. Sidgwick and Jackson, 1981. Illusts, appendices. 155 pp. $24.50.

(Reviewed by

Joan Curry),

Susan Hampshire finds it difficult to read stories to her small son. In the kitchen she uses only those recipes she has memorised. She is unable to help with homework, read long, uncomplicated . letters, check her change quickly in shops, complete any. but the simplest forms. She would not dare to trust her own version of the instructions on a bottle of strange medicine for fear of making a dangerous mistake. She confuses left and rignt. She once bought a nightdress, priced as she thought at £3O, and discovered through her bank statement that she had paid £ 300. Susan Hampshire’s problem is dyslexia, or word blindness. Her brain makes unreliable , connections when confronted with words on a page, with the result that a piece of writing can appear garbled and meaningless. She describes what it was like to grapple with these mysterious, intractable symbols as a child: “It actually felt as though my skull housed a whole ball of string, with an end sticking out of my.crown. 1 thought that if I pulled at' this I couldget the string but, empty

my head of it, unravel the tangle in my brain.”.

She could not cope with learning how to read and write as the other children did and she resorted to all kinds of manoeuvres to deflect examination of her progress at school, the humiliations of reading aloud and the hazards of activities such as word games and puzzles. She grew up with the secret knowledge that she did not have the basic skills that everyone else seemed to take for granted. Such a disability would be significant in the life of anybody in a literate world. For Susan Hampshire in her chosen career as ah actress, dyslexia is a handicap that directly affects her work. An actress depends on her ability to audition well, to read a given -set of lines .better than anyone else. striving for the same part. Susan Hampshire needed more than talent to succeed as well as she has done on the stage, in films and on television. She needed courage and determination and the wits to compensate for a condition that she found inexplicable and humiliating. She was 30 years old before a committee of doctors gave a name to her disability and explained that there can sometimes be abnormalities in the way that a brain is put together. Such abnormalities in the section of the brain charged with, the control of language can result in dyslexia. Since then Susan Hampshire has worked to foster understanding and support for dyslexic people everywhere. She is helping to disprove the idea that the lack of reading and writing skills equals lack of intelligence.