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Ah thank you. I was on the right track but scuppered by the mistake in 9d. Back to the drawing board for that and 17a methinks.

After much grid staring I am none the wiser. I think I have backed myself into a corner by getting 9d and 17a “confidently” wrong and now not being able to see past the wrong entries. I now have ENS** and *LA*. A final nudge for a frustrated struggler would be welcome.

Charlesberg, I've no longer got my copy and you haven't given the clues - but I think ENS... was an unusual word. If split in two, it'd be a 'printing measure' and 'an area above your head'. I can't remember the other one.

Charlesberg - in 9d the word vault refers to the sky and your first three letters are correct. In 17a use the shortform for force with your two correct words. Hope this helps.

Words should read letters...

In the case of the first clue for example, H is a letter shared with its answer. The letter that immediately precedes the first occurrence of H is W.
Similarly, S, P and A are possibilities, so as worded the preamble is ambiguous.

But that is not the "first occurrence" of a letter shared with its answer. In 1a the first occurrence is A and the preceding letter is S.

On the contrary, it is the first occurrence of H, a letter shared with its answer. I can see what you are saying, but the wording is nethertheless ambiguous, as alluded to in orson's post above.

Until mentioned did not realise any ambiguity - read it as letters in answers will be shared by letters in clues - choose the first one that appears in the clue...If I had read it differently (as some of the answers share up to all their letters with their clues) would have had a huge list of letters supposedly spelling out a message...

That is exactly what held me up crates, until I read the intended interpretation on here - most frustrating !

If you plug the possible letters from the first 4 clues into wordfinder
([swpa][osdt][rtn][ogdn]), the following words are possible:

pond pong porn song sord sorn word worn

I had made an educated guess that the first word would be 'song' or 'word', but of course had no way of knowing for certain that the first word in the message was not shorter than 4 letters, and on that basis didn't have the will to proceed - thank goodness for this site !