With new film The King’s Speech putting the spotlight on coping with stammering, Adam Wakelin finds out how Colin Marsh has learned to live with his own speech problems

Colin Marsh is sorry. He knows he's talking 19-to-the-dozen and it's hard to get it all down in a notebook. Words shove up against one another, jostling to get out. Sentences arrive at a sprint.

This is something of a surprise. Non-stop is not what you expect when you ring someone with a stammer.

But then life, for Colin, is a constant race for the line.

Speaking quickly is one of his coping strategies, he explains. It's what he does to stay one step of ahead of the stammer that's always trying to trip him up, to hold him back and drag him down.

There's another reason, too.

"I talk fast and often because I have to," says the 63-year-old from Thurmaston. "I've learned that if I don't get my oar in, someone else will.

"One of the things about having a stammer is that you use the wrong word. You have certain difficulties with certain letters, so you think of others.

"It can be the most infuriating thing if you're in a meeting and you pause and someone finishes your sentence for you."

There's little opportunity to do that today.

"I'm okay because you put me in the right frame of mind and I'm talking about something I'm passionate about," says Colin, a trustee of the British Stammering Association (BSA).

Tomorrow sees the release of The King's Speech, a film that tells the story of King George VI's battle to overcome his crippling stammer after he came to the throne in 1936.

The BSA has high hopes for the movie, believing Colin Firth's sympathetic portrayal of the King will at last alter perceptions of a condition that is so often ridiculed.

"I've not seen it yet, but I think the film is going to bring back some painful memories for me," says Colin.

"I understand the King was bullied. I got a certain amount of that. 'You're never going to be any good because you stammer', that sort of thing.

"I was born five years before the King died. I don't remember hearing him speak. But I stammered quite badly as a child. Everybody said to me, 'If the King can get over it, then so can you'."

Colin never did get over his stammer. Most stammerers never do, he says. They just try not to let it rule their lives.

You order fish instead of beef in a restaurant because you know you struggle with Bs. You shy away from speaking in public.

But sometimes it does rule your life. Colin, a careers adviser, once lost a job because of his stammer. He doesn't want to go into details, but his manager said he couldn't be trusted to represent the organisation in high-level meetings because of his speech.

"I hit the roof, but my union told me not to push it," he says. "They said they would just try to find something else to get me out."

Colin is a person who stammers. That's the preferred term of the British Stammering Association. Calling someone a "stammerer" is seen as a bit pejorative, he says, but it's fine with him.

"When I was a kid, my parents used to say I had a 'speech hesitancy'," he says. "They couldn't face up to the word 'stutterer'."

Where it came from he doesn't know. Some experts believe it's to do with the way your brain is wired. Others say it's psychological, perhaps triggered by a childhood trauma.

The truth is that no-one really knows.

Colin's mother was taken into hospital with polio when he was five. He was packed off to his grandparents and sent to a new school.

"Whether that triggered it, I don't know," he says. "I don't really remember not stammering. It has always been there."

His school days, at least in the early years, were "pretty awful".

"I was always 'the boy that talks funny'," he says. "One parent told even her son not to speak to me, as though it was catching. I remember the kids running behind me, imitating my speech: 'A-a-a-a-ah', that sort of thing'".

His teachers, elderly, often irascible and impatient, did little to help him fit in.

"One particular teacher bullied me because I stammered. She used to take the rise out of me all the time, much worse than the kids.

"I went for speech therapy, but my parents weren't happy about me missing school. So, while all the other kids went swimming on a Friday, I went there. To this day I can't swim. I'd rather have a stammer and be able to swim."

Colin was a bright boy, a lot cleverer than most of the kids who tried to torment him; smart enough to pass his 11-plus and get into grammar school.

He once got called a "gibbering loon" by one less-than-enlightened Sir, but things were a lot better at grammar school.

He helped out backstage with the amateur dramatic society, took part in debates and began to enjoy his status as something of an intellectual.

"I developed a reputation for being slightly better-read than I am," he chuckles. "If you sense a difficult word coming up you try to find an alternative. That's one of the ways to get round a stammer. It does wonders for your vocabulary."

Colin, for a reason he has never been able to fathom, has trouble with words beginning with E and C.

That's a bit of a problem when your name's Colin. Being in one of those meetings when everyone sits around a table and takes turns to say their name can be excruciating, he says.

"I know I won't be able to say 'Colin Marsh'. I just won't. I have to prefix it with something.

"I used to catch a bus into Leicester years ago. The fare was 18p. I got in all sorts of tangles with that," he says. "I was delighted when they put it up to 19p."

He's a nice guy is Colin, wry and self-deprecating but no-one's fool. There came a time, as he got older, he says, when he just thought, "Sod it. I'll do what I want to do."

After leaving university he trained as a careers adviser, ignoring the arched eyebrows of someone on the interview panel who raised questions about his "speech defect".

"And I'm still doing it 40 years later," he says. "I was in the part-time Navy as a communications rating, partly to force myself to overcome my stammer. It's too easy to back off and not do things. I've never done that. There's a certain cussedness about me."

There have been lots of bad experiences. The worst, says Colin, was being laughed at by a class of 16-year-olds when he was trying to give them a presentation.

A stammer can be a horrible thing, feeding off the frustration and embarrassment it causes. You just can't let it win, says Colin.

Lots of things have changed since he was a boy. And lots of things haven't. People can still be cruel without realising it. They still roll their eyes or say the wrong thing.

"I hope The King's Speech will do something about that," says Colin. "They say it couldn't have been made until the Queen Mother had died because she was so sensitive about her husband's stutter. We have to get past that.

"A stammer is something no-one should have to feel ashamed about."