Speech Therapy

In this short recollection, I am attending a school in London at the age of eight or nine. I’d had a cleft palate surgically repaired when I was too young to remember, and now I was required to undergo speech therapy. Looking back, I marvel at the therapist’s infinite patience.

* * *

I hated to sing. Back in Miss Tomlinson’s class, I’d kept my voice down and mouth all but closed when she had us gather around her at the piano. She’d have none of my shyness. In front of the class, she told me, “Make your mouth big as an orange.” For some reason, I was repelled by the idea of someone peering down my “gob” (London slang for mouth), but I made a show of trying. With a flicker of her smile, she looked steadily at me and repeated my name. I made another show of trying, all the while trying to conceal the inside of my mouth.

I did try to sing during hymns in morning service, when I thought other voices would drown mine out, but children around me turned to gape.

My speech therapist, someone else who stared at my gob, sought to comfort me with an explanation. “Your voice sounds like your nose gets in the way. We call it ‘nasal.’ It’s caused by your cleft palate. Do you understand? Also, because of the skin they grafted to the roof, your mouth is small inside, which makes your voice less resonant.”

“Reson—?” I wasn’t happy about her saying my nose got in the way. I doubted I’d like this other idea any better.

“Meaning less resounding,” she said. “Your voice is less full when you sing.”

I’d been seeing the speech therapist at school an afternoon a week for as long as I could remember. I wondered why when I knew no one else who did.

“Because,” she said, “when you speak, you don’t pronounce some sounds the way we’re supposed to.”

“Everyone understands what I say.”

“People who know you are used to how you speak. People who don’t can have difficulty.”

I probably gurned up my face at that, something that annoyed Mum and Dad.

She gave me an exercise book in which we both drew pictures and wrote captions. Cats said ee and oo, and kettles had st and ts blowing out their spouts. Having learned our family’s beloved cat was named Monty, she wrote next to a green snake with three s‘s emerging from his mouth:

Monty the snake says,

s s s

But he doesn’t pull a face when he says s.

Unlike Monty the snake, I did.

Despite the repair of my cleft palate, separation between the nasal and oral cavities was incomplete. She said grimacing, pulling a face, came from my effort to block the nasal flow of air as I spoke. “You put a lot of unconscious effort into speaking clearly so people can understand you.”

“I’m not aware of it.”

“That’s what I mean by ‘unconscious.’ You don’t realize it.”

“These lessons are tons of effort.” It was hard to hear what a sound should be, and harder still to break old habits and make new habits of the right tongue and lip positions.

When giving me a few weeks’ break from therapy, she wrote to my parents:

I wonder if you would occasionally remind him about the nasal grimace, i.e., not to make it. He appears unaware of when he is doing it, so I think a little reminder would help him. He speaks very well in the clinic, although his class teacher still feels he needs to be more distinct.

Resuming the lessons, I made progress. A picture in the exercise book showed a grumpy-looking railway engine with the caption, “This engine is pulling a face. You don’t pull a face when you make s now.”

Then it was the turn of f. She wrote in my book: “Watch yourself in a mirror and bite your bottom lip with your top teeth.” My illustration for f was of a fat man and a double-decker bus aimed at his stomach.

Just when we’d got somewhere with f, she wanted me to learn how not to say it when I meant th. On top of everything else, I’d picked up some Londoners’ way of saying f. I never “thought” something, but “fought” it. Now I had to make myself use my tongue instead of my lips to make the th phoneme, as she called it.