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2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

11. Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Author : Jan Bradford

Published in: Clever Girls

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Mum says I was always a good wee girl…but a clever wee girl too. I could read before I went to school. Teacher said I could read as well as any of the Primary 7 girls when I joined my Primary 1B classmates at a Scottish state primary school in a steadily declining mining town in the mid-1970s. But one day, when I am still only five years old, Teacher tells Mum she is worried about me. I have become very quiet—I am isolated. I no longer read fluently—I stutter. I no longer write—I struggle to hold a pencil in my hand. Mum and Teacher nod and agree…Yes…you can’t be too careful…there is a fine line between genius and madness…and she is such a good wee girl too… And so the well-told family story about my little ‘clever-good-girl’ self was born.

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Footnotes
1
Old-fashioned term for oedema.
 
2
Informal term for ‘tobacco’.
 
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Metadata
Title
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Author
Jan Bradford
Copyright Year
2019
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29658-2_11