Dictionaries

I grew up on dictionaries.  My mother placed a few in my cot to force my head lie on a particular side.  She had plenty of them because she was a translator: there was Larousse for French, Collins for English and and assortment of bilingual aids to translation, from the general to the highly specialised.  I still own a trilingual chemical dictionary in French, English and German, forty-odd years old, which I couldn’t bring myself to part with after her death.

There were also the tiny Collinses for going truly abroad to a country whose language none of us could actually speak.  I still have the Italian one in which my sister and I taught ourselves to count.  And now I have added more for the languages I have dabbled in since: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch.

Growing up bilingual meant that my sister and I learned our French and English more slowly than other native speakers.  We could deal with some topics only in one language until the other had had time to catch up.  Often a sentence begun in one language would call for a word we could only think of in the other, while the right word hovered on the edge of our consciousness.  Our mother, ever the strict matriarch, would not allow us to dodge the problem by talking Franglais.  Worse, some words in one language really do resemble words of the other while having a totally different meaning, and woe betide the girl who used one out of context.

As we turned constantly to our mother, the oracle of the right word in the right place in the right language, she grew exasperated and evolved a stock answer to all our languague queries:  “Look it up on the dictionary.”  This would have us reaching for the shelf and taking down the fat volume in which all the answers were inscribed.

This reflex stayed with me later on as I began to tackle the big questions in life.  Why are we here?  Is there a God?  Why do people suffer?  These existential problems plagued me, and so I longed to reach for the simple solution, the big book in which the answers were neatly listed in alphabetical order.

Whatever philosophers and theologians have written, there is no such book.  Study the Bible as I might, I still have to think for myself – growing up is the art of living with the imperfect, the tension between the ideal and the achievable.  There are no indexed answers waiting between folded pages, on a shelf in a corner of the lounge.

And yet I am still fond of browsing dictionaries.  I am often distracted, as I search for an entry, by the words in bold type at the top of each page that mark the searcher’s place in the all-powerful alphabet – filbert, overweening, purdah, thulium.  Such ill-assorted words rise to the surface of my mind as I move onto other tasks.  They may not have done much good in the cot but dictionaries remain a non-negotiable part of my life.

Hospital

Padua Children’s Ward, at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, Kent (UK), exudes a sense of permanence.  There is a parents’ room with comfy sofa, a TV, fridge, microwave, kettle and sink.  In the early evening parents are playing with their children in the side rooms, some with the radio on softly in the background.  A couple of hours later the little ones are asleep and all is quiet.  The place feels unhurried – to me anyway; staff are friendly and the other parents respectful.  For a place that is transient by its very nature, the ward has been made to feel like a home of sorts.

While I worked as a microbiologist at London’s Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital (GOSH), I never saw the wards.  I saw plenty of little patients in lifts and corridors as I moved between labs in my white coat.  As GOSH takes only the severest cases, I knew that every adult I passed who wasn’t staff was the parent of a seriouly ill child.  This awareness was enough to sober me during my daily rounds.

So it was also a sobering experience bringing my son to Padua Ward two days ago.  We were assigned a “cubicle”, actually a tiny room with just one bed.  On our way there we passed a woman in tears outside another room where a baby squalled.  “She’s been like this for hours,” she explained to a nurse who was doing her best to comfort her.  Behind this ward’s calm façade lies the hidden drama of sick children, of parents condemned to spent long periods here, waiting, worrying, suffering.

I felt humbled as my son began to rally.  With his headache, fever, weakness and dehydration from nearly 24 hours of vomiting, he really did look terrible.  But as the time passed and he continued to keep his fluids down, I knew he was improving, and that we’d be home later that night.