British man has stroke, wakes up speaking only German.(What it's like to forget how to speak English)

A stroke stripped Alf Nestor of his ability to speak English and left him with an upper-class German accent he had never before used

 
was born in Strausberg, to the east of Berlin, in 1941, but my family left as soon as the Russians came during World War Two. My mother and I were put in a refugee camp run by a British soldier who eventually became my stepfather. That’s how we came across to the UK when I was six and ended up in Liverpool.

I stopped speaking German almost from the moment I landed in England, because I quickly realised that speaking it here in 1947 wasn’t a good idea. Then I found out all about the concentration camps, things like that, and I became very anti-German. I didn’t even speak the language with my mum. If she said something in German I would ignore it. Eventually I lost the language completely.

My stepdad adopted me and I became a British citizen; by the time I was seven or eight I had a Liverpool accent and felt totally British.

I ended up working in security. My mother died, and by my early forties I was living with just my stepfather.

One night, I finished a late shift at work and went to bed.



When I woke up I thought the right-hand side of my body felt rather strange, like when you lie awkwardly and your arm goes to sleep. I got out of bed, but when I tried to walk I fell over. I crawled on my hands and knees to my stepdad’s bedroom, but I couldn’t wake him up because I couldn’t speak. All that came out were individual letters and weird sounds.
I managed to get myself dressed and to a doctor’s at the end of our road. He realised I’d had a stroke and called an ambulance. I later found out that, during the night, my neck had pushed against the rail around my bed, crushing my common carotid artery.

I drifted in and out of consciousness in the ward for three or four days. When I finally woke up, I found I could only speak German. I was so confused. The nurses would ask me if there was anything I wanted, and I'd understand them perfectly. But when I replied in what I thought was English, they looked at me as though I was mad.
And the thing is, it wasn’t the same German I would have been taught as a child. I was speaking what’s called Hochdeutsch, or High German, which is very posh – a bit like the Queen’s English.
By pure chance there was a German doctor in the hospital. He explained that the part of my brain where my English was imbedded had been destroyed. I still had the German because it was my first language, so it was in different, unscathed parts.

In my mind I was English. I suddenly couldn’t communicate, even in a broken way, with my stepdad and my friends. It was so frustrating – like being in a dream. For more than a week I could only speak German. Then, gradually, the English crept back. I was relearning the language really; it was a matter of survival.
When I started speaking English again I had a strong French accent because of the way my muscles had been affected. The nurses loved it. Part of me wanted it to stay like that.

I went through months of speech therapy and eventually got back to how I used to sound, even if I do still have problems with pronunciation at times. I’ve got a half-brother and half-sister in Germany so I still speak to them on the phone and we manage, even though my German is a bit rusty now. Apart from those few days after the stroke, I really haven’t used it at all since I was a child.
Ten years later I had another stroke, and that one rewired my brain in another strange way. I felt an urge to write and found I could write beautiful and flowing English, whereas before if I was writing I’d be thinking about each word, getting the spelling right, that schoolboy sort of thing.
Now I’ve written four novels. People think when you’ve had a stroke: that’s it, I’ve had it. But it isn’t always the case – sometimes a good thing can come out of it.