Susan Torr couldn’t read until she was 38. As a dinner lady in Plymouth she dreaded rainy playtimes because the children would ask her to read to them. “I used to say, ‘Put your books down, I’ll make up my own story’,” Ms Torr, now 50, says.

For years she kept her illiteracy a secret from everyone including her husband who was in the Navy. “I didn’t want him to think I was backward. I asked my neighbours to read his letters out to me. On my wedding day I couldn’t even spell my middle name on the register.”

Her three children suspected that she had difficulty reading when they wanted her to fill in forms from school and she asked them to help her to spell words.

“It was a nightmare. I was so embarrassed for my children. I missed out on so much. All the time that you can’t read, you just exist. If you get invited to meetings you say you can’t be bothered to go because you are scared there will be reading involved.”

Having left school at 15 unable to read, Ms Torr took a series of jobs including working in a restaurant. “I couldn’t even read the menu,” she says. She then became a dinner lady.

It wasn’t until she agreed to read to a girl during school break-time and the child spotted she was making it up as she went along, that Ms Torr was inspired to learn. “It went around the playground that I couldn’t read and they would say to me, ‘I’m only nine and I can read and write’. The children used to give me spelling tests. I thought, ‘I shouldn’t be in this playground, I can’t help these children’.”

The school’s adult education worker helped Ms Torr on the road to reading and writing. “It’s another world and it’s like magic. But it’s a strain because you have got to use your eyes and your mind more. It was fantastic when I first learnt to read. I read my first book out loud to my family, I wanted to shout it to the world.”

Since learning to read Ms Torr has won a Sony Radio award for one of her three plays and written a book called Secrets in collaboration with Catherine White, about the struggle of going through life illiterate.

She has also been appointed MBE for services to adult literacy and tours prisons, schools and libraries around the world promoting adult literacy. A creative writing and drama course that she runs is facing funding difficulties but she hopes to be able to publish her plays for use in schools.

Next month Ms Torr will go to Downing Street to collect another prize for her role as a Reading Hero in the National Year of Reading last year.

“I have never ever looked back. You are never too old to learn and if you can’t read you are missing out on such a lot in life.”

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