The Headmaster’s office was a stuffy leathery place, a room like the hide of a prehistoric monster, and Scrooge McArdle was the teeth and jaws. I sat repentantly in a chair from which my feet only reached halfway to the floor. Horrie squirmed in the dishevelled suit that he hardly ever wore—deprived of his overalls he was like a tortoise without a shell. My mother sat upright, wearing a purple hat with flowers and black netting, her green coat and gloves, her handbag perched on her lap.
“It isn’t just that he writes backwards. He is...er...backward.”
My mother said nothing, but there was a glance at Horrie that made it plain whose fault that was.
“His teachers are deeply concerned. They fear that they cannot teach him anything.”
“Seems smart enough to me,” Horrie grunted in pure self-defence.
Scrooge McArdle’s tiny smile showed what he thought of that idea. “He just doesn’t seem able to learn anything. He can’t remember anything he’s told and he messes up all the class games as well, being so awkward. We have begun to think he might be dyslexic.”
There it was. Dyslexia. A brand to make the unacceptable perfectly natural.
“Dis-what?” my mother gasped in alarm.
“Dyslexia. It’s a medical condition. Effects a lot of children. They’re normal enough, but they have trouble with reading and writing.”
While my mother battled to overcome the terrifying dis-word, Horrie’s vicelike brain clamped on what he thought important.
“So yer reckon he is normal then.”
“Well...er....no. You don’t seem to have quite grasped the extent of the problem....”
“Wadda yer mean?”
“Well… err… He doesn’t seem to be able to read at all.”
“Rubbish,” Horrie declared. “He’s always wanting bloody books.“
“But does he read them?”
“Well… err…” and Horrie was stumped.
“His sister,” my mother ventured, still recovering from the shock of that dis-word. “His sister Rosalie. She reads to him all the time. Every night. He loves it.”
“But does he read them himself?”
My mother and father looked at each other blankly. Neither could remember a moment when they saw me read to myself. It was because I never had.
The final upshot of all this was that, sadly, Rosely was banned from reading my bedtime stories—it was concluded that this was a bad influence and impeded me from learning to read for myself. But really, I was only in it because it was always such a pleasure. Subsequently, all books were banished from my life. But there are invariably ways around any prohibition.
Dyslexia. You get a word like that in your head and it will not go away easily. All the more so if you don’t actually know what it means but only that it is a disease and you have it. And even more so if you have a meaning for it that is profoundly erroneous.
