The Dictionary of Lost Words(29)

‘You can have that in your room, if you like,’ said Da, startling me. ‘Your mother wasn’t a vain woman, but she loved that mirror.’

I blushed, shy of my own reflection and conscious of being examined, and compared. Lily had been tall and slender, like me, and I had her clear skin and brown eyes. But instead of her flaxen tresses, Da’s flame-red curls crowned my head. I saw him in the glass and wondered what he saw.

‘She would be proud,’ he said.

At Sunnyside, Da checked the morning post, and instead of joining Lizzie and Mrs Ballard in the kitchen I walked with him to the Scriptorium. He turned on the new electric lights and tended the coals until they glowed. The temperature barely shifted, but there was an illusion of warmth. I stood by the sorting table, nervous and awaiting instruction.

Da passed me the bundle of letters. ‘This will be your job from now on, Essy,’ he said. ‘Collect and sort the letters as you’ve seen me do it. You’re lucky Dr Murray no longer makes appeals for words; we used to get sack-loads. But you still need to open everything to check for slips.’ He opened one of the envelopes. ‘This is a letter, so it gets pinned to the envelope and left for whomever it is intended – you know where everyone sits?’

I nodded. Of course I knew.

I took the letters to the back of the Scriptorium. My desk sat in the alcove made by two shelves of old dictionaries and the only visible section of wall. I imagined it as a large pigeon-hole, built especially for my dimensions. From it, I could see the assistants at the sorting table and Dr Murray at his high desk. To see me, they would have to turn and crane their necks.

It was a relief to realise I could still observe without being observed, but my presence was not accidental. I had a desk, and the assistants would not be instructed to ignore me. I would serve the words as they served the words. And Dr Murray said he would pay me ￡1. 5s. per month. It was barely a quarter of what Da earned, and it was even less than Lizzie’s wage, but it would be enough to buy flowers every week and have curtains made for the sitting room. And I wouldn’t have to ask Da for money when I wanted a new dress.



I looked forward to the daily ritual of sorting the post, and the predictable responses of the assistants when I delivered it. They each had a manner and script that defined them, just as their shoes and socks had once defined them.

Mr Maling was the first on my rounds. ‘Dankon,’ he would say, with a little bow of his upper body. Mr Balk rarely looked up and always called me Miss Murray. Hilda had left the year before to take up a lectureship at Royal Holloway College, in Surrey, and Elsie had taken her place beside their father’s desk. Mr Balk seemed unable to tell us all apart, despite my height and hair. Da simply said thank you, looking up or not, depending on the complexity of his work.

Only with Mr Sweatman would I linger. He would put down his pencil and twist in his chair. ‘What intelligence do you have from Mrs B’s kitchen, Esme?’ he always asked.

‘She has promised a sponge for afternoon tea,’ I might say.

‘Excellent. You may proceed.’

Most of the letters were for Dr Murray.

‘The post, Dr Murray.’

‘Is it worth reading?’ he would say, looking at me over his spectacles.

‘I couldn’t say.’

Then he would take the letters and reorder them according to the agreeability of the senders. Certain gentlemen from the Philological Society would be shifted back, but letters from the Press Delegates always ended up on the bottom.

My post round over, I would return to my desk to attend to any small task I might have been given, but the bulk of my day was spent sorting through piles of slips for particular words beginning with M and putting them in order, from oldest quotation to most recent.

The days when the post brought slips were my favourite. I would examine each in the hope of being the one to share a new word with Da or Dr Murray. Every word, no matter where in the alphabet it fell, would have to be checked against the words that had already been collected. The quotation might show a slightly different meaning, or it could pre-date the quotations already collected. When there were slips in the post, I could spend hours among the pigeon-holes and barely notice the time turning.





I worked hard, and another year passed. Each day followed the same pattern, though the words coloured them differently. There was the post, the slips, replies to letters. In the afternoon I still delivered books and checked quotations at the Bodleian. I was never restless or bored. Not even the passing of Queen Victoria could depress me; I wore black, like everybody else, but I was the happiest I’d been since my days beneath the sorting table.

When winter passed into spring, Mr Bradley moved from the Press into his new Dictionary Room at the Old Ashmolean, and the third editor, Mr Craigie, joined him with two assistants. Dr Murray did not approve of the new editor and responded by pushing his own team to produce words more quickly. It was as if he wanted to prove the new editor unnecessary, although we all knew the Dictionary was already a decade overdue.

By the summer of 1901, Mr Balk had finally started calling me Miss Nicoll.



‘It will be hot in the Scrippy today,’ said Lizzie, when I popped my head into the kitchen to say good morning.

‘Will you make up some lemonade for us?’ I asked.

‘I’ve already been to the market.’ She tilted her head towards a bowl of bright-yellow lemons.