Other young scribes had special tricks, such as turning their fractions upside down or running two or more words into one. “Leggerbeef” and “dryaddick” recurred week after week in one book, and “lberpeces” in another. The first two only had to be pronounced to solve their own riddle, but the third had to be worried through recollection after recollection till it turned out to mean “1 lb. of pieces,” or 1 lb. of scraps of meat.
The women who kept their accounts for themselves were found to be better arithmeticians than they were writers. Their addition had a disconcerting way of being correct, even when the visitor seemed to get a different total. But, then, the spelling was sometimes beyond the sharpened wits of the most experienced Fabian women to comprehend. Great care had to be taken not to hurt their feelings as they sat anxiously watching the visitor wrestling with the ungainly collection of words and figures. “Coull” did not mean coal, which appeared as “coles” quite clearly lower down. It was Lambeth for cow-heel. “Earrins too d” meant “herrings, 2d.” “Sewuitt” is simple, more so than “suit,” a common form of “suet”; but “wudanole” and “curince” gave some trouble. They stood for “wood and oil” and “currants.” Seeing the visitor hesitate over the item “yearn 1d.,” the offended mother wrote next week “yearn is for mending sokes.”
Some of the women—in fact, the majority—wrote a good hand and spelled fairly well. Those who had before marriage been in work where anything of the kind was expected of them—such as that of a tea-shop waitress or of a superior domestic servant—quickly turned into interested and competent accountants. But the older women, and those who had had no reason to use a pencil after leaving school, had completely lost the power of connecting knowledge which might be in their minds with marks made by their hand on a piece of paper. These women were curiously efficient in a kind of mental arithmetic, though utterly at sea directly pencil touched paper. On the whole, accounts came into being sooner than at first sight seemed possible.
The women were suspicious and reserved. They were all legally married women, because the hospital from whose lists their names had been taken dealt only with married women. They conquered their reserve in most cases, but not in all. Some were grateful; some were critical. At the beginning of each case the woman seemed to steel herself to sit patiently and bear it while the expected questions or teaching of something should follow. She generally appeared to be conscious that the strange lady would probably like to sit in a draught, and, if complimented on her knowledge of the value of fresh air and open windows, she might repeat in a weary manner commonplaces on the subject which had obviously been picked up from nurse, doctor, or sanitary inspector.