Moving
around her mother-in-law's house, Sue Torr picked up the local
paper. From the next room, her husband's mother asked her
what was on television.
Sue froze. She lived every day in dread of
a moment like this. Heart thudding, she muttered, "It's a
load of rubbish." Dave's mother persisted. "What about BBC2?
Or Channel 4?" Sue shouted, "It's all a load of rubbish."
Crying with shame and fright, she ran upstairs.
Sue Torr had a secret she hid from her family,
friends, in-laws and even her husband. She could not read
or write. Born in March 1952 and brought up in Plymouth, England,
Sue was the fourth of eight children. Her parents worked long
hours and had little time to listen to the children's problems.
At school Sue was a well-behaved child and was good at sports.
Her teacher didn't seem to notice that she was not learning
to read and write.
She would struggle to copy the letters on
the blackboard, without understanding them. If asked to read
aloud, she would find some excuse, "I'd say I wanted to go
to the toilet, or pretend to cry."
As her friends' reading improved, Sue grew
ashamed of herself. "You think they're saying, ‘Oh, I'm better
than her,' and that they're right, you can't do it. So you
don't try."
When she left school at 15, her mother found
work for her and her sister Elaine, 11 months older, as waitresses
in a friend's restaurant.Sue
lived on her wits. If someone ordered Dover sole,
she would take the menu to Elaine and ask: "Do we sell Dover
sole?" Elaine would point to "Dover sole" on the menu, and
Sue would secretly copy it out.
Drinks were her worst nightmare. One day a
woman ordered Liebfraumilch
wine. Sue drew a hopeless script on the order,
dropped it on the bar and went away in confusion. When the
barmaid demanded, "Who wrote this?" Sue went back to the customer
and asked, as if she'd forgotten, "What was it you wanted?"
"Liebfraumilch," repeated the customer. Sue
called to the barmaid, "Oh, it was a glass of Liebfraumilch,”"
and lived to work another day. "I did it because I needed
the job, but I was really crying inside."
Soon they decided to marry. But her wedding
day sprang a trap: her signature in the register would have
to include her middle name, Carol. She knew how to sign Susan
Torr but had always found Carol tricky.
She ran out of the room and asked someone,
"How do you spell Carol─with an E or an O?" She wrote the
answer on the inside of her hand. All through the wedding
ceremony, the worry gnawed at her: Will Dave see it? How am
I going to look at my hand when I sign? But nobody saw her
copying the name. Nothing , she thought, could harm her now.
At 19, Sue gave birth to Tanya, followed six
years later by a son, Glen. She vowed she would always listen
to their problems. But when they reached school age, her yearning
to help ran up against a brick wall.
"I dreaded my kids going to
school," she admits. "I knew they would ask me to help them with their books─and
I knew I couldn't. So I'd say, ‘Ask your father,' and if he
was out, I'd say, ‘Well, I can't help you, I'm busy.' And
I would shout because I was so frustrated with myself."
As the years passed, the young bride turned
into a shy woman who rarely went out. The
misery of
living a lie
took its
toll on her marriage. She and Dave divorced. Sue
returned with her children to her mother's in Plymouth. But
Tanya, at 14, missed her friends, so she returned to live
with her father. Sue would make use of Glen's help to write
to her. "He's
gone through hell with me,"
she says. "All his life it's been, ‘Glen, I want to write
to Tanya, can you spare ten minutes?'"
While she was going through the painful process
of divorce, Sue became involved with a man in the same situation
and gave birth to a son, Brian John, whom she calls B.J. But
she and her new partner split up.
Meanwhile, Sue had made a vow. This time she
would help her child with his homework. Somehow she would
learn to read. When B.J. started nursery school, Sue went
with him as a helper. There were anxious moments. When a child
finished a painting, Sue should write his or her name on the
back. "I would ask a teacher the name, and they would say,
‘Josephine,' and I'd think, ‘Oh Lord, how do you spell that?'"
The children saw through her. If one gave
her a book to read aloud, she'd make up the story when she
couldn't guess the words. She would feel their big eyes on
her, and they'd say, "Miss, you can't read, can you?"
"I used to say, ‘No, I
can't.' and I would
tell them, ‘You pay attention and make sure you learn to read
and spell.'" But Sue knew she was the one who needed encouragement.
She was 37, and had to steel
herself to act.
On B.J.'s first day at primary school in March
1990, she kissed him goodbye, then remarked to the friendly
stranger at the school gate, "Time to do something myself."
Susan Cousins, a parent education worker employed
by the county council, was there to look out for any parent
who might want to further his or her own education. She pulled
out books covering different levels of ability and held them
out to Sue., "Would you like to read one of these?"
Sue picked one with large print and pictures.
But when she got home, she could only make
out a few words.
A few days later, Susan Cousins was again
at the school gate. "How did you get on?" she asked. Sue looked
down. "It was really good," she said, then confessed: "But
I can't read. A couple of words only."
Susan took Sue back to her office, sat down
beside her and read the book aloud. Called Never in a Loving
Way, by Josie Byrnes, it had only two or three paragraphs
to a page, like a child's first reading book. But the story
caught Sue's heart because the writer had herself been unable
to read and described how hard it was.
Sue carried the book home again. Having heard
the story, she managed to work slowly through the book, spelling
out each word and memorizing it before she moved on. After
going through it 15 times, she realized that she had done
it: she could read every word.
From then on Sue went day after day to Susan
Cousins for lessons. It was slow, hard work, but with Susan's
encouragement, she kept
at it.
In 1991 the county council offered an empty
apartment as a community center. It was a base for the
writers'
group Susan Cousins was organizing.
Secretly Sue had always dreamed of being a
writer. "All the time I couldn't read, I was writing, just
for me. I never showed it to anyone because all the spellings
were completely wrong─my own invention." She attended every
twice-weekly session of the group. After going through Sue's
work with her, Susan would type out what she'd written and
give it back so she could learn the correct spellings.
Then Susan Cousins suggested Sue should write
down everything she couldn't do because she couldn't read.
Sue walked home with her head spinning. It was as if she finally
had permission to tell the truth. As she thought of the suffering,
fear and humiliation of the past 30 years, tears rolled down
her cheeks. But she pressed on, determined to make people
understand.
In September 1992, Dee Evans, who helped
Plymouth's
Theatre Royal build links with the community, visited the
center. She listened to some of the group's work and asked
if they would read it on stage.
As Sue worked on her material for Dee Evans,
something extraordinary happened─it developed from a brief
reading into a play. It was about all the events that had
hurt her most: the terror in the classroom, the job interview
where she couldn't fill in an application form, her inability
to help her children with homework.
Susan Cousins, turning the group's work into
a script, could hardly keep pace with Sue's vivid dialogue. "She would say, ‘I went in, and he said this to me and I said
this,' and I was scribbling it down as fast as I could. It
was great fun, so creative."
The final script ran 35 minutes. The other
writers' work was used to break up the scenes, but the overwhelming
impression was the hurt and burning accuracy of Sue's episodes.
She also gave it a title: Shout It Out. "There's a scene where
I get frustrated and say, ‘I'll shout it out: I can't read!
Are you satisfied?'"
The first performance was at B.J.'s school.
Sue was very much afraid. What would people think? She walked
off the stage in panic. Backstage, Dee put her arms round
Sue and begged her to go back. "I can't," whispered Sue. Then
she thought of the thousands of people still going through
the misery she had suffered. She walked on stage again, shaking
from head to foot, and started speaking. "It was the bravest
thing ever," says Susan Cousins. "And people cried."
One day in January 1993 Ian Phillips, a senior
radio producer with BBC Devon, saw an item about it in the
evening paper. He telephoned the center. Would they like to
broadcast the play to a bigger audience?
Shout It Out was broadcast on Radio Devon that May to mark
Adult Learners' Week. A few months later the Young Women's Christian Association named Sue Torr
as "Woman of the West Country"
for outstanding service to the community.
The play entered
in the famous 1994 Sony Awards. Out of 850 entries, it was
chosen as one of three finalists in its category. On April
27 Sue went to the awards ceremony in London. She sat through
the awards lunch in a trance. At last the winner of the community
radio award was announced: "Shout It Out─Susan Torr.”"
Sue, now 43, still lives in her council apartment
and works in the cafeteria at B.J.'s school. But what she
has achieved has changed her life. She seizes every chance
to meet people working in adult literacy, begging them to
search out others who still have difficulty reading and writing.
She is also working on a video of her play.
A government agency has promised $8 000 toward making it. "Every time we performed the play, there was someone in the
audience who couldn't read, and they would say it was like
looking into their lives. And afterward they would say, ‘I'm
going to get help. Can you tell me where to go?' "
"Once they've seen the play, they think,
‘I'm
not stupid. If she can do it, I can do it.'"
