Tony’s new – and very personal book ‘Parts of Speech’ was launched last night (Thursday 10 November) at the White Horse Bookshop.
Tony Millett, a locally based but widely respected journalist and author (and also one of the founding partners of Marlborough.news, but since retired) gave us an insight into what inspired him to start writing this book. Below are his words in answer to the question ‘why’:
I remember my father-in-law railing against a politician who thought his life was worth three volumes of autobiography: “No one’s worth more than one volume – especially a politician. And not everyone’s worth even one volume of autobiography.” So I must explain quickly that Parts of Speech is not an autobiography.
It is a memoir-plus about stammering. But why, I asked myself as I started scribbling a memoir during the first Covid lockdown, write about something that is not much talked about. That’s precisely the point. Stammering is not talked about enough.
So part of my aim in writing Parts of Speech is simply to help open up stammering to more general discourse. In doing so I wanted to show how a life-long stammer can affect someone in their daily life – my daily life while growing up and then working as a journalist. Then I realised that three stammering lives in one family, though regrettably by no means unique, was a story worth telling. My father’s story had never been told. I knew quite enough about my own stammer. And the day our grandson, Thomas, started to stammer was only too fresh in my mind.
I also wanted to highlight advances that have been made in speech therapy since I first attended a clinic all those decades ago. In addition, I aimed to show how stammering is beginning to come into the open.
In the introduction I write that Parts of Speech (a title chosen by Alison – my wife) is ‘political’. More wretched Westminster charades? Certainly not. Just that I want us all to badger our politicians to ensure all youngsters who stammer get appropriate therapy and support as early as is necessary. Catch ’em young is the best policy. But under recent austerity (and now probably under the new austerity) the provision of speech therapy for children has gone backwards.
Thomas had amazing success with the family-based courses provided by the Michael Palin Centre which is supported by the charity Action for Stammering Children (ASC). And ASC will benefit from sales on Parts of Speech. Ed Balls is a Vice President of ASC and has written a very perceptive Foreword to my book. I am most grateful for his support.
I was especially keen to record what I knew about my father’s stammer. He was a professional soldier who overcame his stammer to make a successful career in the British army. He was killed in Holland in December 1944 – when I was not yet three years old. I wanted to tell the story his successful life – cut horribly short as it was.
The book is not all gloom and doom and regrets. I was so fortunate after losing two jobs because of my stammer, to find at ITN supportive editorial bosses who allowed me to have a long and rewarding career as a television journalist. Among the book’s walk-on stammerers are screen idols Marilyn Monroe and Marion Davies, Joe Biden and Annie Glenn (astronaut John Glenn’s wife). The book’s last word goes to grandson Thomas. Now a fourth year university student, he has learnt to cope with his stammer very effectively.
‘Parts of Speech‘ is published by Brown Dog Books. Paperback: ISBN 978-1-83952-563-6 – RRP £10.99. E-book: ISBN 978-1-83952-564-3 – RRP £3.99.
‘Parts of Speech‘ is available from the White Horse Bookshop, the independent online bookseller browndogbooks.uk and from Amazon UK who also sell the Kindle version.
Sales benefit the charity Action for Stammering Children.
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