Scenes From The Past Lives Of Tiny Enid

During one of her thrilling adventures – it may have been the time when she rescued some ducks from a toxic puddle – Tiny Enid suffered a clonk on the head. Thereafter, every so often, she began to have visions, and she became convinced that she was seeing tableaux from her previous lives. It had never before occurred to the plucky tot that she might have lived before, under other guises, and that “Tiny Enid” was but one character her Gaar, or essence of being, had inhabited. Her mysterious mentor, whom we have a very vague picture of from earlier Tiny Enid adventure stories, pooh-poohed her visions and recommended that she eat heartier breakfasts, but Tiny Enid was wedded to her morning milk slops and had an independent spirit. Although she valued her mysterious mentor’s sage counsel, she also thought him a bit of a doddery old foolish person, and she picked and chose which pieces of advice to follow. In many ways Tiny Enid’s personality was akin to that of Charles Lindbergh, the aviation ace, daring and reckless and with a fascist bent. Chronologically, of course, it was impossible that Tiny Enid could be the reincarnation of Lindbergh, and in any case, in all her past life hallucinations she was a girl. Most of the time, too, she was tiny.

Contemporary fans of the heroic infant, those who keep her memory alive, often seem embarrassed by this aspect of Tiny Enid’s character. They prefer to think of her as level-headed and no-nonsense and gritty, and of course she was all these, but drawing a veil over her post-head-clonk belief in various types of ethereal woo does her a disservice. To see Tiny Enid in the round is to accept that she thought her Gaar was as real as a pebble she could hold in her hand and as important as a telegram alerting her to the imperilment of some ducks in a toxic puddle.

One Tiny Enidist who is keen to pay due attention to this sort of guff is Basil Groove. The name may be familiar to those of you who grooved to the fab sounds of the sixties, for Basil was a member of the psychedelic pop group Turquoise Eye Of The Lobster King. Having hung up his plectrum, Basil Groove has been scouring the world’s picture libraries seeking illustrations which depict figures who may be Tiny Enid avant l’Enid, as it were. He has compiled these into an album to be published later this year, entitled Scenes From The Past Lives Of Plucky Tot Tiny Enid, and it is with great pleasure that we are able to show one of the drawings here. It shows a small female child, armed only with a pin-cushion and a pencil sharpener, confronting a dreadful knight. She may not have a club foot, but, as Basil Groove says, “who else could this possibly be than the fearless infant heroine whose venturesomeness delights us all?”

4 thoughts on “Scenes From The Past Lives Of Tiny Enid

  1. Wait. What is the difference gaar and bomba again? ❓

    The last time I was Queued in Akismet I ticked the wrong box in some infernal document the Bat-Headed God called a “SATS” and I wasn’t allowed to reincarnate as a worm.

  2. Mr Webster has my sympathy – I know many people who have fallen foul of fate by ticking the wrong box on one of the hideous bat-God Fatso’s forms.
    I always imagined bomba pertained to internal vim and vigour, and gaar to one’s essence. In the case of Tiny Enid, it is her gaar that causes Basil and others to seek the ur-Enid of history, and her bomba that gives her pluck.
    Incidentally Outaspaceman, my belated thanks for the splendid seasonal gift. We put its constituents in a patent box frame on the credenza, where it looks quite magisterial.

  3. We worms perform the Universe’s most important tasks equipped with nothing but Phlegm, Industry and Stakhanovism. There might well be another 4.18×10²³ bodily humours present in various combinations in other sorts of bodies, but they are completely abstract concepts to us worms and they are never covered in our in-service training. (We’re using a special slide-rule to express “Sorrow” and “Resentment” right now. God knows if we’re doing it right.) Our job is to bioturbate. We turn the Earth’s topsoil inside-out every two years and we polish the surface of the Sun. If we kept stopping to look up “gaar” or “bomba” in Wikipedia you’d all be stumbling around in the dark trying to exercise your “vim” and “pluck” knee-deep in your own excretions, be you Gods or not. So it is terribly unfair to throw these multi-choice questions about bomba and garr at us from left field.

    But getting back to the subject of Tiny Enid: we worms will be sinking Darwin’s worm-stone an additional 2.2 millimeters this year in celebration of the Tiny Enidist’s mighty industry. May our academic Enidist brothers leave no stone unturned!

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