The Dictionary of Lost Words(37)

When we were back at Sunnyside, I took out a slip and a pencil. Lizzie refused to tell me the meaning of shaft, but she nodded or shook her head in response to my guesses. The colour in her face told me when I got it right.

We became regular visitors to Mabel’s stall. My vocabulary swelled, and Da delighted in the occasional whittling. They leaned against his pens and pencils in the old dice cup that had always sat on his desk.



Mabel was coughing and clearing her throat of great gobs of phlegm every few words or so. I’d been visiting her with Lizzie for the best part of a year and never known her to be silent, but I thought the cough might impede her. It didn’t; it only made her harder to decipher. When she coughed again, I offered my handkerchief, hoping it would stop her spitting on the flagstones beside her stool. She looked at it, but made no move to take it.

‘Nah, I’s right, lass,’ she said. Then she leaned sideways and hawked what had accumulated in her mouth onto the ground. I flinched. She was pleased.

While I inspected her whittling, Mabel prattled on about the criminal, financial and sexual frailties of her neighbouring stallholders, her commentary barely interrupted to tell me the price of something.

Among her rheumy words was one I thought I’d heard before – one Lizzie had denied any knowledge of, though it had been clear from her reddening face that she was lying.

‘Cunt,’ Mabel said, when I asked her to repeat it.

‘Come on, Esme,’ Lizzie said, taking my arm with uncharacteristic urgency.

‘Cunt,’ Mabel said, a little louder.

‘Esme, we should go. We have a lot to do.’

‘What does it mean?’ I asked Mabel.

‘It means she’s a cunt: a fuckin’ nasty bitch.’ Mabel glanced towards the flower stall.

‘Mabel, lower your voice,’ Lizzie whispered. ‘They’ll have you out of here for that language, you know that.’ She was still trying to pull me away.

‘But what does it actually mean?’ I asked Mabel again.

She looked at me, all gums. She loved it when I asked her to explain a word. ‘You got yer pencil and paper, lass? Yer goin’ ta wan’ ta write this one down.’

I shook Lizzie’s hand from my arm. ‘You go, Lizzie. I’ll catch up.’

‘Esme, if anyone overhears you talking like that … well, Mrs Ballard will know before we’re even home.’

‘It’s alright, Lizzie. Mabel and I are going to whisper,’ I said, turning to look sternly at the old woman. ‘Aren’t we, Mabel?’

She nodded like a waif waiting for a bowl of soup. She wanted her words written down.

I took a blank slip from my pocket and wrote Cunt in the top-left corner.

‘It’s yer quim,’ Mabel said.

I looked at her, hoping the sense of what she’d just said would find me, as it sometimes did after a second or two, but I was stumped.

‘Mabel, that doesn’t help.’ I took another slip and wrote Quim in the top-left corner. ‘Put cunt in a sentence for me,’ I said.

‘I got an itchy cunt,’ she said, scratching the front of her skirts.

It helped, but I didn’t write it down. ‘Is it the same as crotch?’ I whispered.

‘You is dim, lass,’ said Mabel. ‘You got a cunt, I got a cunt, Lizzie got a cunt, but old Ned over there, he ain’t got a cunt. Get it?’

I leaned in a little closer, holding my breath against Mabel’s stink. ‘Is it the vagina?’ I whispered.

‘Fuck, yer a genius, you are.’

I pulled back, but not before the full force of her exhaled laugh hit me in the face. Tobacco and gum disease.

I wrote: Woman’s vagina; insult. Then I crossed out Woman’s.

‘Mabel, I need a sentence that makes it crystal clear what it means,’ I said.

She thought, went to say something, stopped, thought some more. Then she looked at me, a childish joy spreading across the complicated landscape of her face.

‘You ready, lass?’ she asked. I leaned against her crate and wrote her words: There was a young harlot from Kew, who filled her cunt up with glue. She said with a grin, if they pay to get in, they’ll pay to get out of it too.

Her laughter spawned a violent fit of coughing, which required a few swift slaps on the back to ease.

When she was recovered, I wrote, Mabel O’Shaughnessy, 1903 beneath the quotation.

‘And quim?’ I asked.‘Does it mean the same thing?’

She looked up at me, still amused, ‘’Tis the juices, lass,’ she flicked her tongue in and out against her cracked lips. ‘Mine ain’t sweet no more, but once,’ she rubbed her thumb against two fingers. ‘I’d eat well ’cos of me juices. The men loves to think they got you goin’. ’

I thought I understood. I wrote: Vaginal discharge during intimate relations.

‘Is it also an insult?’ I asked

‘’Course,’ Mabel said. ‘Quim’s just proof of yer shame. The likes of us use it just the same as we use cunt.’ Then she looked towards the flower stall. ‘She and ’er old man are fuckin’ quims, and there’s no doubt about it.’

I added: Insult.

‘Thanks, Mabel,’ I said, putting the slips back in my pocket.

‘You don’t want a sentence?’