The Dictionary of Lost Words(92)

There was a space at the sorting table that no one filled. Perhaps it was out of respect for me, but from where I sat I saw the way Mr Sweatman tucked in Da’s chair, and how often Mr Maling looked in that direction with a query on his tongue. Dr Murray got older in the weeks and months after Da died. He stared along the length of the sorting table and made no effort to look for a new assistant. I hated the space that Da had left and avoided looking at it whenever I came into the Scriptorium.

Grief was all I could feel. It crowded my thoughts and filled my heart and left no room for anything else. I walked out with Gareth every now and then. If it rained we would have lunch in Jericho, but if the weather was fine we walked along the Cherwell. Hawthorn marked the months since Da’s death: berries ripened, then leaves fell. We wondered if the winter might bring snow. I took Gareth’s friendship for granted. I needed it to fill the void and couldn’t contemplate anything more or less than what it was. When he sought to take my arm in his, I didn’t notice until the gesture had been withdrawn.

Christmas loomed, and my aunt insisted I visit her and my cousins in Scotland. Without Da, they seemed almost like strangers. I made excuses and travelled to Bath instead, where Ditte and Beth administered liberal amounts of good humour, pragmatism and Madeira cake. I returned to Oxford feeling lighter than when I’d left.



I walked into the Scriptorium on the third day of 1914 and there was a new lexicographer sitting where Da had once sat. Mr Rawlings wasn’t young and he wasn’t old. He was unremarkable and oblivious to who had sat in that spot at the sorting table before him.

It was an enormous relief to us all.





There was a new hum in the Scriptorium. I felt it as an animal might when there is a decrease in air pressure before a storm. The prospect of war had heightened our senses. All over Oxford, young men were getting about with more spring. Their strides were longer and they talked louder – or so it seemed. The students had always raised their voices above the necessary volume in order to impress a pretty girl or intimidate a townie, but in the past the topics had varied. Not anymore. Student and townie alike talked of nothing but war, and it seemed that most of them couldn’t wait for it to come.

In the Scriptorium, two of the newer assistants began to spend their breaks talking about coming face-to-face with the Kaiser and winning the war before it could start. They were young and pale and thin. They wore spectacles, and if they’d been in any fights at all they would have been awkward scraps over library books or proper grammar. Neither could approach Dr Murray without a hesitant step and a stutter, so I judged them unlikely to persuade the Kaiser to give up Belgium. The older assistants had more sober conversations, their faces darkening in a way that rarely occurred during their disagreements about words. Mr Rawlings had lost a brother in the Boer War, and he told the younger men that there was no glory in killing. They nodded, polite. They didn’t notice the waver in his voice, and before he was out of earshot they were talking again about the particulars of joining up, wondering how long they would have to train before they were sent into the fray. Mr Rawlings bent under the weight of it.

‘This war is going to slow the Dictionary down,’ I heard Mr Maling say to Dr Murray. ‘It’s a gun they want in their hand, not a pencil.’

From then on, I woke every morning with a dread fear.



No one slept on the night of August 3rd, even if they took to their beds and tried. Our two young assistants travelled to London and spent the balmy night carousing in Pall Mall, waiting for word that Germany had withdrawn from Belgium. It didn’t come. As Big Ben chimed the first hour of a new day, they sang ‘God save the King’.

The next day, they returned to the Scriptorium full of a bravado that didn’t suit them. They approached Dr Murray together and told him they had volunteered. ‘Both of you are short-sighted and unfit,’ I heard Dr Murray say. ‘You’d do more good for your country if you stayed here.’

It was impossible to concentrate, so I rode to the Press. I’d never known it to be so quiet. In the composing room, only half the benches had a man standing at them.

‘Just two?’ Gareth said, when I told him what had happened at the Scriptorium. ‘Sixty-three men marched out of the Press this morning. Most were volunteers in the Territorial Force, but not all. There would have been sixty-five, except Mr Hart pulled two out by the collars who he knew to be underage. Said he’d give them a hiding after their mothers had.’

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. Mr Rawlings, who was not quite old, had left because of a nervous complaint, and there was a space at the end of the sorting table once more. No one filled it.

Over at the Old Ashmolean, Mr Bradley’s and Mr Craigie’s teams were similarly reduced, and Mr Hart was down to half his printing and compositing staff.

I’d never worked so hard.

‘You’re enjoying this,’ Gareth said, as he stood beside my desk one day, waiting for me to finish an entry.

I’d been given more responsibility, and I couldn’t deny I was happy about it. He took an envelope out of his satchel.

‘No proofs?’ I said.

‘Just a note for Dr Murray.’

‘Are you the errand boy now?’

‘My duties have multiplied. The juniors have all signed up.’