Thank you Miss…

As is the lot of many artists, including Rodin and Leonardo da Vinci, I am dyslexic. 

I know that now but no one knew about dyslexia when I was a child.  I could not talk until I was five (my brother claims that I’ve made up for it since) and, until the next to the last year at secondary school, I was invariably the bottom of the class in all subjects but art.   

Incidentally, had there been a way of testing inventiveness, I would have excelled in that too.  When I was nine, I designed and built a model aircraft.  It had a thirty-inch wingspan and flew the length of a football field.

But back to art and the year 1953.  My primary school teacher asked the class to paint a picture of the coronation.  By the time the bell rang, she had thirty-four paintings of the coronation coach.  The thirty-fifth painting  was of a thousand heads all trying to catch a glimpse of the coach, the portrayal of which was left to the imagination. 

(Incidentally, I had to ask Denise how to spell “fifth”. The spell-check could not recognise the spelling that my dyslexic brain came up with.)

The teacher singled me out and told me that if kept on painting like that, one day I could be an artist.  Thank you Miss Ackroyd, you were the first to encourage me.

Here is Miss Ackroyd with her Class of 1953.  I am on the back row, third from the right, not counting the teacher.