When I started school at five, I could not read or write.

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I could, however, talk. In fact, I talked a lot. My mother had been known as “Miss Chatterbox” while growing up in Durban, South Africa. I was determined to outdo her. I was curious about everything. If I did not understand an answer, I asked someone else. If that failed, I kept asking or tried something else. I learnt by listening, talking and doing. As far as I was concerned, the world was already teaching me.

My class teacher saw things differently. After a few weeks, she called my mother into school after lessons while I waited outside the classroom. Eventually the door opened, and my mother came out in tears. The teacher had told her that my inability to read or write was entirely my mother's fault. My mother was South African. Her accent had apparently confused me so completely that I could not connect the words I heard at home with the words on the page.

It was nonsense. A year later I was diagnosed with very severe dyslexia and dyspraxia. The problem was not my mother’s accent. Nor was it intelligence. My brain processed language differently from the way the school expected.  That taught me something I have never forgotten. People often confuse difficulty in communicating with a lack of intelligence.

They are not the same thing. Throughout my career, I could analyse businesses, negotiate transactions and recognise patterns that others missed. I could see things, understand them, argue them and explain them out loud.

But writing remains painfully difficult. My spelling age is that of a seven-year-old. Spellcheck........

© LBC