'All my life I felt I was senile'

ANN Swain has written a novel. It runs to 300 pages and she'd love to see it in print. In this, she is no different to thousands of others. Even her age, 74, is not exceptional for a first time author, as more people turn to writing in retirement. What makes her stand out is that until a few years ago she could barely read and write.

For almost seven decades, Ann believed she was stupid. Everyone told her she was, so it must be true.

It started at school, where she was made to stand in the corner with a dunce's cap, continued through her working life, where she went to great lengths to prevent her secret from discovery, and through a marriage made unhappy as her difficulties in reading and writing stripped away her confidence, and at one stage saw her subjected to electric shock treatment.

It was only when she was 68 that she could finally rid herself of the label, or as she puts it, that "the window was cleaned". It was then that she was diagnosed as dyslexic, that she was given aids to help her read and write, and that she could cast aside the feeling that she was inferior to everybody else.

"All my life I felt like I was senile. There was something there that I knew was not right," says Ann. "It made my life a misery, it really did. People look at you as though you were stupid but your head is like a spider's web and all the strands are tangled."

She left school at 13, but not before she had endured humiliation both inside and outside the classroom. No matter what they did, the teachers couldn't get her to read or to learn her tables. Their frustration exploded in corporal punishment - she was caned almost every day. It also made her a target for bullies.

"School was miserable. I used to just go into the toilet and sit there sobbing my eyes out. I have spent all my life crying," says Ann, a mother of four who lives in Darlington.

"I couldn't remember my tables, no matter what they did. They put you in the dunce's corner with a hat on your head and I got the cane every day and the ruler over my knuckles so many times."

After leaving school, she drifted into a succession of jobs, but sooner or later her inability to read or write would become an issue and she would have to leave. And it wasn't just her literacy. She also has memory problems and difficulties with communicating. "I could say to somebody I'm off to Scarborough tomorrow, but I have heard myself say I'm going to Whitby," she says. All in all, they made it difficult to hold down a job.

At one point she was a nurse, a job she loved. She tried to find ways to disguise her problems, but eventually this too came to an end.

"I kept a pad in my pocket and anything that was said I had to scribble it down, and I couldn't do all the volumes so I used to say to one of the other girls, 'I'll let you do this'.

"One day I was left on the ward on my own to do the patients' records and I just copied all the pages but the spelling was all wrong. The doctor threw the book on the floor and I had to go and see the matron. That was the end of my career," she says.

After divorcing her first husband she married again, but by this time her confidence was so low she was too frightened to stand up for herself.

"It is not just reading and writing, it is emotional. You just get put down in the gutter and it affects your emotional side and you jump at people's commands because you can't defend yourself.

"When visitors came he used to say, 'Don't take any notice of her, she's stupid'. You feel like a zombie and you do what other people tell you because you are frightened to do anything else."

She remembers having electric shock treatment at Winterton Hospital in Sedgefield in the 1960s. She can't remember if she was told why, but she went along with it, as she went along with everything else, because she was scared.

After being made to lie on her table, she remembers earphones being attached to her head and then the current passing through her body. She remembers seeing her legs convulsing in front of her.

"Ten times I had that done. You feel the electricity going through you and you think, 'Why am I being punished?' All my life I have been punished." She says she was so depressed she attempted suicide. "It's like a black bag on your head and you just hate yourself," she says.

Her husband died 15 years ago but it was almost ten years later that a neighbour suggested she took a test to see if there was more to her inability to read. She went to the Dyslexia Institute in Barnard Castle, where she was diagnosed as dyslexic.

"It felt brilliant. I knew I was not senile. Just knowing that has cleaned a window for me to look into a new world. I can't put the joy into words."

She was given practical help to read and now places a green sheet of plastic over the words, "to stop them jumping about", with a ruler underneath each line to keep it still. She has been given phonetic help to aid her writing, and uses a computer with over-sized type. It has also given her the relief of understanding what is wrong.

"It has made a huge difference to me. If I'd known this 40 years ago things might have changed, but if I hadn't gone to the Dyslexia Institute I don't think I would be alive today. It's like all the wires in your head are mixed up. If one wire is not touching another wire it is not going to work," she says.

But the feelings of stupidity returned last month when she read of an academic who was calling into question the existence of dyslexia as it is normally understood. In an article accompanied by a television programme, The Dyslexia Myth, Durham University's Professor Julian Elliott claimed that dyslexia was largely fulfilling an emotional need to put a label on a problem, rather than diagnosing a biological condition.

Ann watched the programme in horror. "It is cruel. It is only people who don't have dyslexia who can doubt it, but thousands of people are going to be neglected because of this," she says.

"People are so cruel when they say there is no such thing as dyslexia. I really want to hit them. You see teachers saying to a child they are just being stupid, but that is going to get into that child's mind and they're going to think they're being stupid. But knowing I have got dyslexia means I'm not stupid."

Now, Ann has her novel and she still goes to the Dyslexia Institute once a week. But most of all she has the knowledge that the judgements that have dogged her most of her life were wrong. It may have come late, but at least it came.

"I have spent most of my life feeling miserable but this has given me a new life," she says. "I'm happier now than I have ever been. Nobody is going to call me stupid now."