The Dictionary of Lost Words

by Pip Williams

  The men nodded and I nodded back, my anger dissipating with each friendly gesture.

  ‘Hello, miss. You looking for Mr Hart?’ said someone familiar whose name I didn’t know.

  ‘Actually, I wanted to say hello to Gareth,’ I said. I barely recognised the confident voice as my own.

  It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that I was wandering around the composing room, and it occurred to me that the intimidation I always felt might have been of my own creation. By the time I was at Gareth’s bench, the emotion that had propelled me was exhausted, my confidence spent.

  He looked up, his face still set in concentration. Then a smile broke through. ‘Well, this is a nice surprise. Esme, isn’t it?’

  I nodded, suddenly aware I’d prepared nothing to say.

  ‘Do you mind if I just finish setting this section? My stick is nearly full.’

  Gareth held the ‘stick’ in his left hand. It was a kind of tray that held lines of metal type. He kept it all in place by pressing his thumb tight against it. His right hand flew around the bench in front of him, gathering more type from small compartments that reminded me of Dr Murray’s pigeon-holes on a tiny scale; each was dedicated to a single letter instead of bundles of words. Before I knew it, his stick was full.

  His eyes flicked up, and he noticed my interest. ‘The next step is to turn it out into the forme,’ he said, indicating a wooden frame beside his bench. ‘Does it look familiar?’

  I looked at the forme. Except for a gap where the new type would go, it was the size and shape of a page of words – but what page of words, I could not tell. ‘It looks like a different language.’

  ‘It’s back-to-front, but it will be a page in the next Dictionary fascicle, as soon as I’ve made this correction.’

  He put the stick down very carefully and rubbed his thumb.

  ‘Compositor’s thumb,’ he said, holding it up for me to have a closer look.

  ‘I should know better than to stare.’

  ‘You’re welcome to stare. It’s a mark of my trade, that’s all.’ He stepped down from his stool. ‘We all have one. But I’m sure you didn’t come here to talk about thumbs.’

  I’d come into the composing room in defiance of some perceived bar. Now, I felt foolish.

  ‘Mr Hart,’ I fumbled. ‘I thought I might find him here.’ I looked around as if he might be hiding behind one of the benches.

  ‘I’ll see if I can find out where he is.’ Gareth dusted the seat of his stool with a white cloth. ‘You can sit here if you like, while you wait.’

  I nodded and let him push the stool beneath me. I looked at the type still held on the stick. It was almost impossible to decipher; not just because the letters were back-to-front, but because there was so little differentiation from the background. It was all gun-metal grey.

  If the other compositors had been interested in the strange woman talking to Gareth, they no longer were. I picked up a bit of type from the nearest compartment.

  It was like a tiny stamp, the letter slightly raised on the end of a piece of metal about an inch long and not much wider than a toothpick. I pressed it against the tip of my finger – it left the imprint of a lowercase e.

  I looked at the stick again. He said it would fit into a page of the Dictionary. It took a while, but the words finally started to make sense. When they did, I felt a rising panic.

  b. Common scold: a woman who disturbs the peace of the neighbourhood by her constant scolding

  Was that what they were, those women in Winson Green? I looked at the proofs beside the forme. It appeared this type wasn’t being set for the first time; rather, Gareth was attending to edits. There was a note from Dr Murray pinned to the edge of an entry.

  No need to define SCOLD’S BRIDLE; simply cross-reference to the relevant entry for BRANKS.

  I read the entry that would be edited.

  c. scold’s bit, bridle: an instrument of punishment used in the case of scolds etc., consisting of a kind of iron framework to enclose the head, having a sharp metal gag or bit which entered the mouth and restrained the tongue.

  I imagined them being held down, their mouths forced open, a tube shoved in, their cries muted. What damage must it do to the sensitive membrane of their lips and mouths and throats? When the procedure was over, would they even be able to speak?

  I searched the bench and picked each letter from a different compartment: the s, the c, the o, the l, the d. They had a weight, these letters. I rolled them about in my hand. My skin prickled with their sharp edges and was marked by the ink of forgotten pages.

  The door of the composing room opened, and Gareth walked in with Mr Hart. I put the type in my pocket and pushed back the stool.

  ‘The first corrections for the letter T,’ I said, handing the proofs to Mr Hart.

  He took them, blind to the smudges of ink on my fingers. I quickly put my hand in my pocket. Gareth was not so distracted, and from the corner of my eye I saw him check the type he had been setting. He found nothing missing, and his gaze swept over the tray. I clutched at the type, felt their sharp edges and held them so tight they hurt.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Mr Hart as he looked over the pages. ‘We inch forward.’ Then he turned to Gareth. ‘We will review these tomorrow. Come and see me at nine.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Gareth.

  Mr Hart headed towards his office, still looking through the proofs.

  ‘I must be off,’ I said, walking away from Gareth without looking at him.

  ‘I hope you visit again,’ I heard him say.

  When I walked my bicycle out of the Press, the sky was darker. Before I reached the Banbury Road, it had split apart. By the time I arrived at the Scriptorium, I was dripping wet and shivering.

  ‘Stop!’ Mr Dankworth shouted when I opened the Scriptorium door.

  I stopped, and only then realised what a sight I must be. Everyone was looking in my direction.

  Rosfrith stood up from where she was sitting at her father’s desk. ‘Mr Dankworth, are you proposing that Esme stand out in the rain all afternoon?’

  ‘She’ll drip all over our papers,’ he said more quietly, then he bent to his work as if uninterested in what happened next. I stayed where I was. My teeth began to chatter.

  ‘Father should never have sent you out. Anyone could see it was going to rain.’ Rosfrith took an umbrella out of the stand and then took my arm. ‘Come with me; he and your father are due back soon, and they’ll both be upset if they see you in this state.’

  Rosfrith held the umbrella over us both as we crossed the garden to the front of the house. I was rarely invited into the main part of the Murray home, and could count on one hand the number of times I’d walked through the front door. In that moment, I imagined I was feeling a little of what Lizzie must have felt every day of her life.

  ‘Wait here,’ Rosfrith said when the front door was closed behind us. She went towards the kitchen, and I could hear her calling to Lizzie. A minute later, Lizzie was in front of me, patting me down with a towel warm from the linen press.

  ‘Why didn’t you just wait it out at the Press?’ Lizzie asked as she kneeled to undo my shoes and remove my soaked stockings.

  ‘Thank you, Lizzie, I’ll take it from here.’ Rosfrith took the towel and led me up the stairs to her bedroom.

  I was older than Rosfrith by almost two years, and yet I’d always felt younger. As she searched through her wardrobe for clothes that might fit me, I saw in her the self-assured practicality of her mother. Mrs Murray was as entitled to a damehood as Dr Murray was to a knighthood, Da had said. ‘Without her, the Dictionary would have faltered long ago.’

  How reassuring it must be to know how you should act: like having a definition of yourself written clearly in black type.

  ‘You’re taller, and thinner, but I think these will fit.’ Rosfrith laid a skirt, blouse, cardigan and undergarments on her bed, then left me to change.

  Before I stepped out of my own skirt, I searched the p
ockets. In one, there was a handkerchief, a pencil and a wad of damp blank slips. I went to throw the wad in the wastepaper basket and couldn’t help but look at the papers on Rosfrith’s desk. Everything was neatly arranged. There was a photograph of her father after receiving his knighthood, and one of the whole family in the garden of Sunnyside. There were proofs and letters at various stages of completion. I recognised the recipient of the letter she’d been working on most recently. It was the governor of Winson Green Gaol. Dear Sir, it said. I wish to object. That was as far as she had gone. Beside it was a copy of the Times of London.

  From my other pocket, I pulled out the type I’d stolen from Gareth, and the slip with his name on it. It was almost translucent from the rain, but his name was still visible.

  After I’d changed into Rosfrith’s clothes, I wrapped the type in my damp handkerchief and put it in one of the skirt pockets. I picked up the slip with Gareth’s name on it. He knew I’d taken the type. I’d be too ashamed to visit him again. I dropped the slip in the wastepaper basket.

  Then I turned again to Rosfrith’s desk. The Times of London gave the women in Winson Green more column space. Tilda wasn’t one of them; not this time, I thought. Charlotte Marsh was the daughter of artist Arthur Hardwick Marsh. Laura Ainsworth’s father was a respected school inspector. Mary Leigh was the wife of a builder. This was how the women were defined.

  Bondmaid. It came back to me then, and I realised that the words most often used to define us were words that described our function in relation to others. Even the most benign words – maiden, wife, mother – told the world whether we were virgins or not. What was the male equivalent of maiden? I could not think of it. What was the male equivalent of Mrs, of whore, of common scold? I looked out the window towards the Scriptorium, the place where the definitions of all these words were being bedded down. Which words would define me? Which would be used to judge or contain? I was no maiden, yet I was no man’s wife. And I had no desire to be.

  As I read how the ‘treatment’ was administered, I felt the ghost of a gag reflex and the pain of a tube scraping membrane from cheek to throat to stomach. It was a kind of rape. The weight of bodies holding you down, restraining your clawing hands and kicking feet. Forcing you open. At that moment, I wasn’t sure whose humanity was more compromised: the women’s or the authorities’. If the authorities’, then the shame was all of ours. What, after all, had I done to help the cause since Tilda left Oxford?

  Rosfrith returned and we descended the stairs together. ‘Are you a suffragette, Rosfrith?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t sneak out at night and smash windows, if that’s what you’re asking. I would prefer to call myself a suffragist.’

  ‘I don’t think I could do what some women do.’

  ‘Starve yourself or be a public nuisance?’

  ‘Neither.’

  Rosfrith paused on the staircase and turned to me. ‘I don’t think I could, either. And I can’t imagine … well, you’ve read the papers. But militancy isn’t the only way, Esme.’

  Rosfrith resumed her descent and I followed, two steps behind. There was so much I wanted to ask her, but despite us both having grown up in the shadow of the Dictionary, I felt we were worlds apart.

  We lingered a while in the kitchen doorway, watching the rain. ‘I’d best make a run for it,’ Rosfrith said eventually. ‘But you’ve been wet enough for one day – wait here in the warm till it’s passed. We certainly can’t have you catching cold.’ She opened her umbrella and trotted the distance between kitchen and Scriptorium.

  Lizzie was crouched in front of the range. ‘Look at your face, Essymay. What on earth is wrong?’

  ‘The papers, Lizzie. You’d be shocked to know what is going on.’

  ‘No need to read the papers; the Market serves just as well.’ She shovelled coal onto the rising flames and shut the heavy cast-iron door with a bang. She looked stiff as she pulled herself up to standing.

  ‘And are they talking about what’s happening to the suffragettes in Birmingham?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. They’re talking about it.’

  ‘Are they angry? About the hunger strikes and the forced feeding?’

  ‘Some are,’ she said as she began slicing vegetables and putting them in a large pot. ‘Others think they’re going about things all wrong. That you catch more flies with honey.’

  ‘But do they think they deserve what’s happening to them? It’s torture.’

  ‘Some think they can’t be left to starve to death.’

  ‘And what do you think, Lizzie?’

  She looked up, her eyes rimmed red and watering from the onions. ‘I wouldn’t be that brave,’ she said.

  It wasn’t an answer, but I might have said the same thing if I’d been honest with myself.

  April 11th, 1910

  Happy birthday, my dear Esme,

  I can’t believe you are twenty-eight. It makes me feel quite old. This year, in light of your continued concerns, I have enclosed a book by Emily Davies. Emily was a friend of my mother’s and has been involved in the suffrage movement for half a century. She has quite a different approach to Mrs Pankhurst and is a firm believer in the equalising effect of women’s education – her arguments are quite compelling. I am hoping that if you read ‘Thoughts on Some Questions Relating to Women’ you might give some thought to taking a degree yourself. Which leads me to your letter.

  I read it aloud over breakfast. Beth and I are at one with your concerns, though we do not feel as impotent as you seem to.

  This is not a new fight, and while the actions of Emmeline Pankhurst’s army of women will certainly draw attention to the cause, they may not hasten a satisfactory resolution. We will get the vote sooner or later, but that will not be the end of it. The fight will go on, and it cannot rely solely on women prepared to starve themselves.

  Our grandfather was outspoken on the topic of women’s right to vote back when ‘universal suffrage’ was the political argument of the day. I wonder how our dictionary will define universal. Back then, it meant all adults, regardless of race, income or property. But it did not mean women, and against this our grandfather railed. It would be a long campaign, he was heard to say, and to be successful it would have to be fought on many fronts.

  You are not a coward, Esme. It pains me to think that any young woman would think such a thing because she is not being brutalised for her convictions. If Tilda is campaigning for the WSPU, it suits her completely. She is an actress and knows how to provoke an audience. If you want to be useful, keep doing what you have always done. You once made the observation that some words were considered more important than others simply because they were written down. You were arguing that by default the words of educated men were more important than the words of the uneducated classes, women among them. Do what you are good at, my dear Esme: keep considering the words we use and record. Once the question of women’s political suffrage has been dealt with, less obvious inequalities will need to be exposed. Without realising it, you are already working for this cause. As grandfather said, it will be a long game. Play a position you are good at, and let others play theirs.

  Now, to other news. I have thought long and hard about whether silence is best, but Beth has convinced me that silence is a void filled with anxieties. Sarah writes that they have settled comfortably in Adelaide and that little Megan is thriving. There is more I could share on that topic, but I will wait to be asked.

  Not unrelated to your enquiries, Sarah has just voted in her first election! Isn’t it wonderful? Women in South Australia have been exercising this right for the past fifteen years. As far as I can glean, none have had to smash any windows or starve themselves for the privilege. You are no doubt aware that a few of those good women have travelled to England to support the cause. Do you recall the young woman who chained herself to the grille in the Ladies’ Gallery and spoke in the House of Commons? Well, she is a local Adelaide girl. From all accounts, South Australia is none the worse for wo
men’s suffrage. To the contrary, Sarah writes that it is quite a pleasant place once you get used to the heat. Society does not seem to have broken down in any way. It is only a matter of time before it happens here.

  Before I sign off, Beth wants me to tell you that ‘A Dragoon’s Wife’ has just been reprinted. It seems the fight for suffrage is not incompatible with the romance of being swept off one’s feet. We are a complicated species.

  Yours,

  Ditte

  Megan. Meg. MeggyMay.

  She had a name and She was thriving. That was all I needed to know. All I could hold without bursting.

  Two more birthdays passed. Megan turned three, then four. An account of Her became part of Ditte’s annual gift, as Lily’s story had once been. She would send a book, a letter, Her first steps, Her first words. The book was always put aside, and Ditte’s news soon forgotten. I struggled to recall the motion of my days.

  Time marked the Scriptorium in subtle ways from one year to the next. Books piled higher and pigeon-holes were built for more slips, the shelving creating a nook for an old chair that Rosfrith brought over from the house. It became a favourite retreat for Mr Maling when he had need to study a foreign text. The beards around the sorting table were greyer, and Dr Murray’s grew ever longer.

  It was never a noisy place, but the Scriptorium had an ensemble of sounds that combined to create a comforting hum. I was used to the shuffling of papers, the scraping of pens and the sounds of frustration that identified each person like a fingerprint. If a word was troubling him, Dr Murray would grunt and get down from his chair to take a lungful of air from the doorway. Mr Dankworth would make a metronome of his pencil, a slow tap marking the rhythm of his thought. Da would cease to make any sound at all. He would remove his glasses and rub the bridge of his nose. Then he’d rest his chin on his hand and raise his eyes to the ceiling, just as he would if our dinner conversation had stumped him.

  Elsie and Rosfrith had their own accompanying sounds, and I loved to hear the hems of their skirts sweep the floor, catching slips that had been carelessly dropped (such windfall, I sometimes thought, and I would watch to see where they ended up so I could collect them if no one else did). The Murray girls – I still thought of them this way, though we had all passed thirty – would also disturb the air with lavender and rose. I would breathe it in as a tonic against the sometimes careless hygiene of the men.