I was born in 1959 in Ipswich Hospital, the first child of an English mother and a Welsh-speaking father. Two more hybrid sons followed soon after.
Like many kids from the baby boomer generation, my state primary school was bursting at the seams and I was placed in a class of thirty-nine children. In those days it was learning by reciting lines from a dusty blackboard. It was a teaching method totally inappropriate for a dyslexic child like me with a hopeless auditory memory; the words went in one ear and out of the other. I sat at the back of the class and daydreamed. When, at the age of eight, I failed to learn my times tables and showed no sign of being able to read, I was moved to the remedial class with other, “educationally subnormal” kids with “mental disabilities”. It still makes me angry thinking how my teachers threw me on the scrapheap at such a young age and made me feel worthless.
Fortunately my mother was determined not to allow her son to be consigned to an educational dustbin and arranged for me to have an IQ test. I remember the parents' evening when she
placed the results on the table. “Finally,” she told my teacher, “we found out who the stupid one is, and it isn’t Gwyn!”
A Dyslexic Writer
In the 1960’s nobody knew much about dyslexia but mum was convinced I had ‘word blindness,’ the term used at the time for dyslexia. The family decided I needed help and my Welsh grandmother agreed to pay for me to be privately educated. I was sent to Ipswich Prep School and found myself in a class of eight boys being taught by Miss Jones, one of the few teachers who had some understanding of my needs. The small class size and different teaching methods had a dramatic effect. Within a few terms I was reading and writing.
Like many dyslexics I have a vivid imagination so, once the key to the printed word had been unlocked, I became a voracious reader. I enjoy a wide range of books, mainly fiction, including thrillers, whodunnits and historical novels. My favourite genre is fantasy with Tolkein's The Hobbit being my all time top novel.
I won’t pretend academic work wasn’t a struggle. Exams measure a student’s ability to remember stuff and regurgitate it on paper rather than their capacity to think independently. In other words exams measure the things dyslexics are bad at and not what they are good at. Somehow I managed a respectable clutch of 'O' and 'A' levels followed by a “sportsman’s” (2.2) BSc in Geography from Portsmouth Polytechnic.
It wasn’t until I started work, selling animal feed to farmers, that I began to understand that being dyslexic could be an advantage. The company I joined had a progressive graduate training programme that used psychometric tests to measure strengths and weaknesses and identify learning styles. Suddenly I realised it was my interpersonal skills that mattered and my ability to think outside the box. It was like a light bulb being switched on.
My story is far from unique; Dyslexics’ brains are wired up differently to most people, which make them creative and natural problem solvers. Lots of Dyslexics labelled as “thick” at school went on to do great things in later life; some famous names include Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs and Agatha Christie.
Another Dyslexic, Richard Branson, who left school at fifteen, describes Dyslexia as his superpower. He believes that dyslexics with their creative minds are ideally suited to pilot the emerging AI technology, which is already shaping our future.
I started writing on a whim when a late night flight home after a business trip was cancelled. That evening the plot of 'Reflections in Time' came to me while bored in the departure lounge. I was an export manager at the time developing sales of animal feed in the EU and what was then Eastern Europe. The book became a diversion to while away the hours travelling and languishing in ghastly hotel rooms. When I finished the last chapter I saved it on my work laptop - and forgot about it.
I rediscovered the book years later, a few days before I retired, when transferring private files from my work laptop to my shiny new Mac. I remembered my mother had wanted me to publish the book. She’d died the previous year so I decided to give it a go. I sent a synopsis and some sample chapters to a bunch of literary agents and waited. Surely someone would be interested? Nobody replied.
Undeterred I contacted a writers' group who met in a village hall a few miles from my home in Suffolk. I was all revved up to attend when Covid intervened. When I eventually met my fellow writers I was part way through writing my second book, Kingslayer.
I remember how nervous I was before the first meeting, I’d spent a lifetime hiding my dyslexia and now I was expected to read an extract of my work to a group of writers some of whom had published multiple novels.
In the event everyone was very encouraging but as they returned copies of the extract I’d read, with their suggestions scrawled in the margin and with my spelling and grammatical errors marked, I realised I had a lot of work to do to bring my writing up to standard.
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Photo of writers' group
After each meeting I gathered together everyone’s feedback, reworked the piece I’d read and worked on the next instalment. The process was bruising on the ego but effective and as the weeks rolled by my writing style improved. When I finished writing Kingslayer, I went back and rewrote 'Reflections in Time' using what I learned.
I decided to self publish and was eager to see my work in print but my manuscripts weren’t ready for publication. Nobody wants to read a book riddled with silly mistakes and, being dyslexic, I can’t see my own spelling or punctuation errors. So I hired a young aspiring editor to correct and polish my script and a designer to produce the cover and format the text. I don’t feel bad about this, authors who are traditionally published hand over their scripts to an agent and a team of people from a publishing house do the rest.
Writing my first two books has been quite a voyage. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did writing them. I’m not going to stop now; the plot of the concluding Novel in my Celtic Dreamtime series is in my head and itching to get out. There’s also a book to come out of my travels selling peach and vanilla piglet feed in Eastern Europe and Russia and then there’s the ratting, but that’s another story.
f you are one of the one in five people out there with Dyslexia, I hope my story encourages you to have a go at writing. After all I expect your extraordinary creative brain is brimming with weird and wonderful tales that deserve to be told.
I will be donating 10% of the royalties for my Celtic Dreamtime novels to Made by Dyslexia, a charity supported by Richard Branson that is reframing the way the world views Dyslexia. If you want to learn more, visit their website at www.madebydyslexia.org
