"The Dictionary of Lost Words"

[fiefoe]

In both tone and theme, Pip Williams's biographical novel of a fictional motherless bondmaid to the OED is remarkably similar to "The Pull of the Stars", and the love story contained within is just as fleeting. Ditte in the novel is such an amazing letter writer.

• I reached in to rescue it, even as the brown paper charred and the letters written on it turned to shadows. I thought I might hold it like an oak leaf, faded and winter-crisp, but when I wrapped my fingers around the word, it shattered.
• When he finally sat at the table, he said, ‘Service means different things to different people, Essy, depending on their position in society.’
• Da said that was fashionable. When I asked him what fashionable meant, he said it was something that mattered a lot to some and not at all to others, and it could be applied to everything from hats to wallpaper to the time you arrived at a party.
  ‘Do we like to be fashionable?’ I asked.
  ‘Not usually,’ he said.
• I closed my eyes and imagined my mother stirring a pot of soup. I tried to dress her in ordinary clothes, but she refused to take off the bridal veil she wore in the photograph by Da’s bed. I loved that picture more than all the others because Da was looking at her and she was looking straight at me. The veil will end up in the soup, I thought, and smiled.
• ‘But when we talk about her, she comes to life.’
  ‘Never forget that, Esme. Words are our tools of resurrection.’
• ‘Consensus? Well, it means everyone agrees.’
  ‘Do you ask everyone?’
  ‘No, clever-boots. But I doubt a book’s been written that we haven’t consulted.’
  ‘And who writes the books?’ I asked.
• I returned to the wardrobe again and again to read Ditte’s letters – there was always something about me; some answer to a query of Da’s. It was as if I were a word and the letters were slips that helped define me.
• Some words were just like baby birds fallen from the nest. With others, I felt as though I’d come across a clue: I knew it was important, but I wasn’t sure why.
• ‘I clean, I help with the cooking, I set the fires. Everything I do gets eaten or dirtied or burned – at the end of a day there’s no proof I’ve been here at all.’ She paused, kneeled down beside me and stroked the embroidery on the edge of my skirt. It hid the repair she’d made when I tore it on brambles.
  ‘Me needlework will always be here,’ she said. ‘I see this and I feel … well, I don’t know the word. Like I’ll always be here.’
• The word was flimsy and uninteresting, but I liked the quotation. When I put it in his hand, Da looked at it as if he didn’t know what it was. As if he didn’t know what he should do with it. I saw his lips move around the word and the sentence that contained it.
  COUNT
  ‘I count you for a fool.’ – Tennyson, 1859
• I thought of the story Ditte told me every birthday. My mother was like a word with a thousand slips. Lizzie’s mother was like a word with only two, barely enough to be counted. And I had treated one as if it were superfluous to need.
• How could she not know? How could something so horrible happen to a person every month and that person not know why?
  ‘Does Mrs Ballard get the bleeding?’
• Menstruosity was the condition of being menstruous. And menstruous had once meant horribly filthy or polluted.
  Menstruous. Like monstrous. It came closest to explaining how I felt.
• As to your parenting being unconventional, well, I suppose that it is, but where Mr Crane meant it as a rebuke, I mean it as a compliment. Convention has never done any woman any good.
• I remembered every word. How could I not? I had written them over and over and over again. They were not the words I had chosen. Those words had been torn up. Your father will only worry, said Miss McKinnon.
• We barely spoke, you and I. I had hoped that time would restore you, but it seems you need more. You are in my heart, dear girl, even if I have been dislodged from yours. I hope it is not permanent.
• ‘Just words, Lizzie,’ I said.
  ‘There’s no “just words” for you, Essymay, ’specially if they end up in the trunk. What do they say?’
  ‘They say I wasn’t alone.’
• I would ride down Parks Road until I got to Broad Street, then I’d dismount and walk among the bustling crowds between Blackwell’s Bookshop and the Old Ashmolean. It was my favourite part of Oxford, where town and gown struck an unusual alliance. Both were superior, in their own minds, to the visitors trying to get a glimpse of the gardens in the grounds of Trinity College, or gain entry to the Sheldonian.
• They each had a manner and script that defined them, just as their shoes and socks had once defined them.
• Silence was all I’d had to punish her with, and then I hadn’t been able to find the right words to breach it. How I missed her.
  I took a blank slip from my desk and copied onto it every word from Ditte’s.
  LOVE
  ‘Love doth move the mynde to merci.’  The Babees’ Book, 1557
• I realise it is unfair to burden any work of Man with the expectation of perfection, and I can only conclude that you, like me, are fallible, and it was an accidental omission.
  I enlighten you, sir, with good intentions and all due respect.
• Dr Murray’s rage came back to me then and I felt mine rising to meet it. It should not be, this word, I thought. It shouldn’t exist. Its meaning should be obscure and unthinkable. It should be a relic, and yet it was as easily understood now as at any time in history. The joy of telling the story faded.
  ‘I’m glad it isn’t in the Dictionary, Lizzie. It’s a horrible word.’
  ‘That it may be, but it’s a true word. Dictionary or no, bondmaids will always exist.’
• Our thinking was limited by convention (the most subtle but oppressive dictator). Please forgive our lack of imagination.
• ‘What does knackered mean, Lizzie?’
  Mrs Ballard scoffed. ‘You could ask anyone in service that question, Esme. We’d all have an answer.’
• I read it to her and she reached for her crucifix. I wondered if I’d upset her.
  ‘Nothing I ever said has been written down,’ she finally said. Then she got up and cleared the table.
• ‘Well, he described it as a remnant cock – proof we were of Adam, he said. But, like you, he had no idea what it could do. Or if he did, he thought it irrelevant.’ She smiled. ‘It brings a woman pleasure, Esme. That’s its only function. Knowing that changes everything, don’t you think?’
  I shook my head, not understanding.
  ‘We’re designed to enjoy it,’ Tilda had said. ‘Not avoid it or endure it. Enjoy it, just like them.’
• ‘How could it not?’ I forgot I was in a hurry. ‘Words are like stories, don’t you think, Mr Sweatman? They change as they are passed from mouth to mouth; their meanings stretch or truncate to fit what needs to be said. The Dictionary can’t possibly capture every variation, especially since so many have never been written down —’ I stopped, suddenly shy.
• Sisters. I searched the pigeon-holes. Sisters had plenty of slips, and already they had been sorted and top-slips written for different senses, but comrades was not one of them.
• Over three evenings, he had explored me. Found seams of pleasure I didn’t know existed.
• I missed them. It was as if they had written a play and constructed the set, and whenever I was with them I had a part to perform. I fell into it so easily: a secondary character, someone ordinary against whom the leads could shine. Now that they had packed up and left, I felt I had forgotten my lines.
• It was knowledge. Bill took words I’d written on slips and turned them into places on my body. He introduced me to sensations that no fine sentence could come close to defining. Near its end, I’d heard the pleasure of it exhaled on my breath, felt my back arch and my neck stretch to expose its pulse. It was a surrender, but not to him. Like an alchemist, Bill had turned Mabel’s vulgarities and Tilda’s practicalities into something beautiful. I was grateful, but I was not in love.
• ‘Fear ’ates the ordinary,’ she said. ‘When yer feared, you need to think ordinary thoughts, do ordinary things. You ’ear me? The fear’ll back off, for a time at least.’
  I nodded again and looked at the slip. Trade was such a common word.
• ‘I get two types of women knocking on my door,’ she said. ‘Those who get around too much and those who get around too little.’ She looked me up and down, took in every article of clothing. ‘You are the latter.’
• GAME
  Prostitution.
  ‘The game is whoring. There are players, like any game, though the dice are always loaded.’
  Mrs Smyth, 1907
  QUICKENING
  Stirrings of life.
  ‘Quickening is the fluttering in your belly which means the baby has decided to stay.’
  Mrs Smyth, 1907
• I’d always thought that Ditte was like the trunk of a great tree: anchored securely to what she knew to be true. After just a few days in Bath, I began to think of Beth as the canopy. In mind and body, she responded to whatever forces came her way. Despite her fifty years she shimmered, and I was mesmerised.
• I expected gentlemen’s anecdotes and hubris, intellectual disagreements argued on ever-diminishing points of logic. I expected the occasional entreaty for an opinion (out of courtesy), and I was already anticipating my disappointment at the automatic taming of language that would be observed due to the fact we three wore skirts.
• The wooden floor announced me to the bent heads and absorbed readers; the architects of that great room had not considered the clip-clop of a lady’s shoe.
• feeling that I understood precisely, but had no words for.
  On the periphery of that feeling, I could see Beth turn from the stove, coffeepot in one hand, her features uncomfortable with the smile they were trying to support.
• ‘Some words are more than letters on a page, don’t you think?’ she said, tying the sash around my belly as best she could. ‘They have shape and texture. They are like bullets, full of energy, and when you give one breath you can feel its sharp edge against your lip. It can be quite cathartic in the right context.’
• I could think of no way to answer. I looked down and noticed milk had pooled at the edge of Her sleeping mouth. I moved a little and watched it dribble down Her chin. I felt the weight of Her, so much heavier than when I’d first held Her. I tried to think of a word that could match Her beauty.
  There was none. There are none. There never would be a word to match Her.
• I didn’t want to be there. But Lizzie had never let me turn back.
  ‘It’s the kind of pain that achieves something,’ she said.
• ‘Bostin,’ Lizzie said, pronouncing the n with care. ‘It means lovely.’ She blushed.
  ‘Can you put it in a sentence?’
  ‘I can, but you must write Natasha’s name below it.’
• ‘God is in this place,’ she said, without shifting her gaze from Wenlock Edge.
  ‘Do you think so, Lizzie?’
  ‘Oh, yes. I feel him more here than I ever have in church. Out here it’s like we’re stripped of all our clothes, of the callouses on our hands that tell our place, of our accents and words. He cares for none of it. All that matters is who you are in your heart. I’ve never loved him as much as I should, but here I do.’
  ‘Why is that?’ I asked.
  ‘I reckon it’s the first time he’s noticed me.’
  For a very long time, neither of us spoke. The sun broke through a long brushstroke of cloud
• ‘It’s a sadness that comes and goes,’ she said, pausing for breath. ‘I get the morbs, you get the morbs, even Miss Lizzie ’ere gets the morbs, though she’d never let on. A woman’s lot, I reckon.’
  ‘It must derive from morbid,’ I said to myself as I began to write out the slip.
  ‘I reckon it derives from grief,’ said Mabel. ‘From what we’ve lost and what we’ve never ’ad and never will. As I said, a woman’s lot.
• My Dictionary of Lost Words was no better than the grille in the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons: it hid what should be seen and silenced what should be heard. When Mabel was gone and I was gone, the trunk would be no more than a coffin.
• 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?
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• He turned towards the sorting table, taking my slips with him. He spread them out like they were a pack of cards. Then he fingered them, moved them about. Manhandling, I thought. I would write a slip for it when he was done.
• CABBAGE
  ‘Come here, my little cabbage, and give me a hug.’
  Deryth Owen
  Deryth, what a beautiful name. The sentence was more or less as Lizzie would have said it.
  ‘Mothers have a vocabulary all their own, don’t you think?’ he said.
• ‘People have always taken different roads to get to the same place,’ Gareth said when he turned back to face us. ‘Women’s suffrage won’t be any different.’
• SISTERHOOD
  ‘I’m glad you have joined the sisterhood and will be adding your voice to the cry.’
  Tilda Taylor, 1912
  I searched the fascicles. Sisterhood was already published. The main sense referred, in one way or another, to the sisterhood experienced by nuns. Tilda’s quotation belonged with the second sense: Used loosely to denote a number of females having some common aim, characteristic or calling. Often in a bad sense.
• ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘They often seem no better than opinion, and if you want opinion to define what something means then you should at least consider all sides. Not all sides have a newspaper to speak for them.’
• ‘It’s the letter S. Four years and we’re not even halfway through. It’s sapping, stupefying, soporific …’ He paused to think of another word.
  ‘Slumberous, somnolent, somniferous,’ I offered.
• Mr Maling was right: the war slowed the Dictionary down. Within a few months, there were only women and old men left in the Scriptorium.
• The printing room was in full operation, huge sheets of paper coming down like the wings of a giant bird or being rolled off large drums in quick succession; the old way and the new, Gareth said. Each had a rhythm for the ear and the eye, and I found it strangely soothing to see the pages pile up.
• We sat opposite each other. Each on our own coat, Gareth looking down now, stunned and silent. I’d told him everything. I’d said words I’d been afraid of – virgin, pregnant, confinement, birth, baby, adopted – and I was calmer.
• There was a whisper from the hole in the wall, and I raised my hand to feel the breath of cold air. It was sharp, almost painful, and I thought about those native peoples who mark their skin at moments in life that define them. Words would be inscribed upon me. But which words?
• I don’t know how long we sat like that, but I felt his eyes roam my face as mine roamed his. Nothing obscured us, no polite gestures clung. We were naked.
  When our eyes finally met, it was as if we had journeyed together and come home more familiar.
• It was a beautiful object, leather-bound and gold-lettered. It must have cost Gareth a month’s wages. Women’s Words and Their Meanings was embossed on the green leather in the same typeface used for the Dictionary volumes. I opened to the first page where the title was repeated. Below that, Edited by Esme Nicoll.
• Was it more obscene to say it, to write it, or to set it in type? On the breath it could be taken by a breeze or crowded out by chatter; it could be misheard or ignored. On the page it was a real thing. It had been caught and pinned to a board, its letters spread in a particular way so that anyone who saw it would know what it was.
• ‘A few slips at a time, and I was always careful to put them back just where I’d found them. Half the Press were in on it by the end. I wanted a hand in every part of it, not just the typesetting. I chose the paper and worked the press. I cut the pages, and the women in the bindery fell over themselves to show me how to put it all together.’
• ‘How proud and happy your father would have been,’ he said, and I held his gaze, knowing the memory of Da was stronger when it was shared.
• I took refuge in the Scriptorium. How long, I wondered, before the slips began to mention this war?
• It felt like the work of the bereaved. The slips were familiar but half forgotten. I kept stopping to remember.
• Horror. It’s war-weary. It is the word we use when we have no words. Perhaps some things are not meant to be described – at least, not by the likes of me. A poet, perhaps, could arrange words in a way that creates the itch of fear or the heaviness of dread. They could make an enemy of mud and damp boots and raise your pulse just at the mention of them. A poet might be able to push this word or that to mean something more than what has been ordained by our Dictionary men.
  I am not a poet, my love. The words I have are pale and slight against the hulking force of this experience.
• It is all of those things, but it is the way it enters you, becomes a taste and a cramping in your throat and belly. You will imagine something awful, but it is worse. And then there is the slaughter. It comes to you in the Times. The ‘Roll of Honour’. Column after column of names in Monotype Modern. I have no way of describing the wrenching of my soul when the ember of a fag still glows in the mud, though the lips that held it have been blown away. I lit that fag, Es. I knew it would be his last.
• Doctor Ostler thinks there might be some merit to your Esperanto therapy and he’s written about it to a colleague there. He’s aware of your work with the Dictionary and thinks your particular expertise might contribute to their linguistic therapy program.
• I would stay there until Women’s Words was accepted, I thought. If I had a chain, I would have gladly locked myself to the grille in front of the desk.
• ‘You’re not a word, Essymay.’
  ‘Not to you. But to Her, that is all I am. And I may not even be that. When the time is right, I want Her to have it.’ I reached over and took Lizzie’s hand from where it rested against her chest. ‘I want Her to know who I am. What She meant. It’s all there.’
  We looked at the trunk, worn from handling, like a well-read book.
  ‘You’ve always been its custodian, Lizzie, from the very first word. Please look after it until I’m settled.’
• She told me, not long ago, that she had always been a bondmaid to the Dictionary. It owned her, she said. Even after she left, it defined her. Still, despite these shackles, she was not afforded even a balcony view.
  ... They drank 1907 Chateau Margaux. We were given the proceedings, and the menu was included – an unintended cruelty, I’m sure.
• When my tears for Esme had dried, I had no need to explore its contents. For me, Esme is like a favourite word that I understand in a particular way and have no desire to understand differently.