A rare photograph of plucky fascist tot Tiny Enid.
Archive for the 'Tiny Enid' Category
Dan Chambers sent me this snap of a sampler, taken in the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood. The provenance card states that it was made by a girl named Enid, aged fourteen, so, as Dan says, “maybe not so tiny”. But it may well be that the Museum has not done its research thoroughly, and that the sampler was made by an anonymous needleworker for Tiny Enid. What with the privations of the times (1933) there may have been a dearth of thread, not enough, at any rate, to sew both TINY and ENID.
Dear Mr Key, writes Tim Thurn, Always keen to keep abreast of the latest happenstances in popular culture, last evening I sat me down with a mug of cocoa and a bag of filberts to watch the Mercury Music Prize awards. I was saddened to see that young pop person Tinie Tempah, who was shortlisted, failed to win. Anyway, as I dabbed away my tears, it occurred to me to ask you if Master Tempah is in any way related to that other excellent tiny, Tiny Enid. Please enlighten me.
Dear Tim, In this bewildering world it is critical that we can distinguish one tiny from another. Actually, that isn’t strictly true, now I come to think of it. What matters is that we can tell Tiny Enid apart from all other extant tinies.
Tiny Enid is a heroic clubfooted infant, usually dressed in a polka dot frock, much given to brave, even reckless, deeds of derring-do, and of pronounced Fascist sympathies.
I am not entirely sure who Tinie Tempah is, but I suspect he may be some kind of homunculus, possibly malevolent.
I hope this clears the matter up to your satisfaction.
Recently I posted a piece about a giant who roars “Fee Fi Fo Fum!” and smells the blood of an Englishman, and a couple of years ago I became enthusiastic about Thomas Nashe (1567-c.1601) among whose works is the splendidly titled Have With You To Saffron Walden – which, alas, I never got round to reading. Had I done so, I would already have learned what I found out today.
Father had taken us to see John Gielgud in the title role [of King Lear] at Stratford-upon-Avon, and although Gielgud was marvellous, it was the words of Poor Tom, the Bedlam beggar on the stormy heath (actually Edgar, in disguise), that still rang in my ears:
Child Rowland to the dark tower came;
His word was still
Fie, foh, and fum!
I smell the blood of a British man!
“Did Shakespeare steal that from Jack and the Beanstalk?” I had whispered in Daffy’s ear. Or had the fairytale borrowed the words from Shakespeare? “Neither,” she whispered back: both had cribbed them from Thomas Nashe’s Have With You To Saffron Walden, which, having been staged in 1596, pre-dated them.
This is from The Weed That Strings The Hangman’s Bag by Alan Bradley (2010), the second of his Flavia de Luce mysteries. These are new to me, but I am pleased to tell you that the heroine is an eleven-year-old amateur chemist and sleuth – a plucky and resourceful tot who bears a striking resemblance to our very own Tiny Enid, without the fascism and the club foot. It is a hugely enjoyable read, as one might expect from a book which makes mention of “a pair of gutta-percha motoring galoshes (‘Ideal for Country Breakdowns’)”.
This photograph has yet to be authenticated by the Tiny Enid Photographic Authentication Bureau, but appears to show a tot who could possibly be Tiny Enid standing next to her cardboard submarine. That the plucky little fascist had a cardboard submarine we already know. Remember that stirring line in the Memoirs, “I had a submarine and it was made out of cardboard”?
Photo from the superb Ptak Science Books
[The third part of what may, somewhat to my alarm, become a series. See here and here.]
You will recall, I hope, the time when plucky tot Tiny Enid discovered the Waste Chute of History on the Large Flat Windy Uninhabited Plains. Well, to say she discovered it is something of a misnomer, for others had been there before her, not the least of whom was the very sensible Swiss researcher Erich Von Daniken (b. 1935).
As we know, by the time Tiny Enid came upon the Chute, it extended, as Rossi would put it, down, down, deeper and down, to the very centre of the Earth. So intent was she upon her mission that the wee adventuress never bothered to wonder when and by whom the Chute was built. Yet these were precisely the questions that exercised Von Daniken’s fizzing brainbox. Considering the matter with his characteristic cast iron logic, he worked out that there must have been a time, during its construction, when the Chute was much shorter, and only went a little way into the bowels of the earth. Could it have been, he asked himself, staring out of the window at Swiss cows in Swiss fields under the shadow of looming Swiss Alps, that the original Chute was in fact designed to terminate only a few hundred feet below the surface, at the point where it punctured, perhaps, the roof of a subterranean cave?
And if that were so, was it not the case that its purpose must therefore be not as a Waste Chute, but a Supply Chute? And whom else could it be intended to supply but a race of troglodyte beings inhabiting the subterranean cave, beings perhaps of extraterrestrial origin the velocity of whose spaceship, billions of years ago, had been so freakish that, when it crashed into our lovely planet, had simply kept going, boring through rock until eventually juddering to a halt in the cavernous underworld? Sipping his Swiss Schnapps, Von Daniken realised that his watertight theory actually accounted for the otherwise difficult problem of how the Chute had been built in the first place!
He was about to turn from his chalet window and sit down at his typewriter to bash out a bestseller when a further point occurred to him. As the years passed, the troglodytes, breeding like extraterrestrial space-rabbits, would surely have outgrown their habitation. They must have burrowed their way into other subterranean caves, setting up new colonies. Then they would have faced the problem of how to supply every outpost of their underground empire. Rather than building new chutes, was it not obvious that the simplest way was to retain the original Chute, but to fit it with a series of pivots, so that it could be directionally adjusted to serve each cave as required?
Clapping his Swiss hands with glee, Von Daniken was satisfied that his theory was utterly unassailable. In his mind’s eye, he could already see tottering piles of copies of his next bestseller, Chute-Pivots Of The Space Troglodytes?, eagerly snapped up not just by Swiss persons, but by his fans around the world.
What happened next was a circumstance even Tiny Enid herself would have been powerless to avert. Just as Von Daniken was about to sit down and begin typing, there came a knocking at his chalet door. He opened it and came face to face with a person from Porlock. Yes, that person from Porlock!
She was a plucky tot, a heroic infant, and a little fascist… but was Tiny Enid also a feminist pioneer? On the face of it, the answer to that question seems self-evident. How else would one describe the club-footed young gal, pootling about in her clapped-out jalopy, puffing away at cheroots, essaying deeds of matchless valour, and giving a variety of malefactors a good kicking? Yet such were the constraints imposed by society on what was deemed seemly, Tiny Enid oftbetimes made great pretence of being a helpless weedy flibbertigibbety waif, ready to swoon away or throw a fit of the vapours. Sometimes she put on such a show even while performing one of her brave deeds. In this picture, for example, it looks as if Tiny Enid is about to topple from a hot air balloon basket, and is being saved by a pair of tender-hearted ruffians. She is, of course, acting out the part expected of her in a patriarchal culture. What is actually happening here is that Tiny Enid is cleverly distracting the ruffians – card-carrying members of the Communist Party, no less! – for, moments after the sketch was completed, she was back in the basket, her big black boot stamping on the neck of one ruffian while the other flung himself overboard in a cowardly escape from the tot’s righteous wrath.
Picture courtesy of Agence Eureka
“Now certain Nations there be that account beasts, yea, and some filthie things for gods; yea and many other matters more shamefull to be spoken; swearing by stinking meats, by garlicke, and such like. But surely, to beleeve that gods have contracted mariage, and that in so long continuance of time no children should be borne between them : also that some are aged, and ever hoarie and gray: others againe young and alwaies children: that they be blacke of colour and complexion, winged, lame, hatched of eggs, living and dying each other day; are meere fooleries, little better than childish toies.”
Pliny The Elder, The Naturall Historie, The Second Booke, Chap. 7. Of God in the 1634 English translation by Philomen Holland
One person who was very familiar with the ancient idea that an egg might serve as a childish toy, and that from the egg would hatch a god, was Tiny Enid. On the day of her birth she was presented with an egg by her mysterious, unnamed mentor, and as soon as she grew old enough for childish play it became her favoured toy. It is easy to forget, given the plucky tot’s many deeds of heroism and derring-do, that she was still but a tot, and, when time allowed, she played as other tots do. She played games such as Hide The Egg In The Pantry, Roll The Egg Down A Gentle Incline, and Balance The Egg On A Precipice Over A Yawning Chasm.
It is not entirely clear when Tiny Enid learned that her egg contained an as yet unhatched god. It is also perfectly possible that it did not, and that the venturesome little fascist simply invented the idea for purposes of self-dramatisation. Either way, we do know that one hot summer’s day she stopped treating the egg as a plaything, placed it in a carton, put the carton on her mantelpiece, and spent many hours watching over it, waiting for it to hatch.
Several writers – better to call them hacks – have devoted vast swathes of psychobabble to the suggestion that Tiny Enid was convinced, or convinced herself, that by embarking on ever greater feats of infant heroism she could somehow persuade the god to crack open its egg and burst forth into the world, ushering in a new dispensation under the cope of heaven and, not incidentally, installing the tot as its Archangel. In this reading, Tiny Enid is impelled to acts and adventures of ever greater recklessness for purely selfish reasons. The hacks who peddle this stuff never stop to consider two blindingly obvious facts. One, it makes no sense whatsoever, and two, there is no evidence that, at the end of each of her adventures, Tiny Enid dashed back to her mantelpiece to check on the egg. On the contrary, she was notorious for sticking around to receive plaudits and medals and cups and cash prizes and to watch parades pass by in her honour, and on occasions when these things did not happen, she would bash a few heads together, literally, until she considered due gratitude was displayed. These are not the activities of one who hankers for the imminent intervention of the divine, whether from an egg or from anywhere else.
Indeed, a better case could be made that a child as self-possessed and drunk on her own reputation as Tiny Enid would consider the arrival of a new god as fatally stealing her thunder. It is worth asking what sort of god she was expecting to hatch from the egg on her mantelpiece. Although she was not a religious girl, it is a matter of record that she had, like the Swiss skiing ace Woodcarver Steiner, great ecstasies. During these entrancements, did she have visions of her egg-hatched god? It is a great pity that she never left us an account of at least one of her great ecstasies in her Memoirs. The egg itself is mentioned, over and over again, at first in references to its status as a plaything, as here, on page 47:
I passed many a happy hour playing Carry The Egg Towards The Pond and other delightful pastimes
and then, from page 88 onwards, she constantly reminds us of its numinous presence:
Before revving up my jalopy to speed to the rescue of the stricken and the maimed who had been attacked by the giant lobster being, I paused to look at the egg in its carton on the mantelpiece. It had not yet hatched.
for example, and
The next Thursday was a particularly dull day without any opportunity for daring rescues of those imperilled. I spent much of my time contemplating the egg in its carton on the mantelpiece, from which no god had yet hatched.
In her lifetime, no god ever did hatch from the egg, but I suppose it is not impossible that one might still do so. For though Tiny Enid herself grew old and died, she always kept the egg with her wherever she roamed in her long life, and at her death it was found among her effects. Carefully catalogued by those who keep her flame alive, the egg, in its carton, is now kept in the Tiny Enid Museum, recently established in a cavernous hangar on a so-called “rustic industrial estate” on the edge of the mephitic marshes on the outskirts of Pointy Town. If you visit, and pay through the nose for an entrance ticket, seek out the egg in its refrigerated chamber, and who knows?, perhaps while you are there you will see the shell crack, and a god hatch out, come blind and trembling into the world.
There are certain impenetrable mysteries which tug at our imaginations and allow us no peace of mind. I am sure I am not the only person to be kept awake at night, tossing and turning, chewing the pillow, my brain fuming as I ponder in perplexity for the umpteenth time whether, for example, Badge Man was a living, breathing, armed maniac or merely a trick of the light, whether the Loch Ness Monster truly exists or is just a figment in the minds of socially inept men in anoraks who like to spend their time sitting in the lochside drizzle with Thermos flask and binoculars, whether it is permissible simply to wipe over one’s socks when performing wudhu. These are all terrifically mysterious matters, and there are many more, so many more it is a wonder we are not stunned into mental collapse.
Every now and then, we stumble upon some fragmentary clue which promises to shed light where previously there has been only darkness, ignorance, and numbing stupidity. One of the greatest puzzles gnawing away inside my head has long been to find an answer to the question: what did Tiny Enid do, once she had grown up and was no longer tiny? Though I am still unable to give a full account of her adult doings, I can, today, say one thing with a modicum of confidence – she dressed up as a bat.
There remains some doubt whether this really is Tiny Enid. It may be an impostor, or even a hallucination brought on by a surfeit of lampreys. I am clutching at straws, dammit, but sometimes that is all we can do.
OutaSpaceman dropped me a line to inform me that when he searched Google Images for “moorhen”+”mezzotint”, nearly all the results linked to Hooting Yard. I explained to him that all interweb searches lead eventually, by twists and turns, back to here, for it is the uberhub lying at the centre of the entire network, a sort of throbbing pulse from which all else emanates. What I must do, one day, is to discover which single Hooting Yard postage lies at the very core of the hub, is the glistening jewel which, by who knows what mighty and mysterious forces, has generated everything else on the interweb. I would not be surprised to find that the postage in question is something to do with plucky tot Tiny Enid.
Speaking of whom, here is a rare picture of Tiny Enid in later life, taking a break from writing her Memoirs.
One blustery and bitter springtime morning, Tiny Enid decided to make a goodly supply of bathtub gin. The plucky tot was wholly ignorant about the distillation of spiritous liquors, but she was a resourceful girl, and so she clumped with great determination along the streets, past the duckpond and the hazardous waste facility, to her local library. Now, it may surprise some younger readers, but in those days of Tiny Enid’s tinydom, libraries were filled with books, and had not yet become chat ‘n’ snack zones for diverse and vibrant hoodie teenpersons. So the heroic infant was able to gen up on all she needed to know about the making of bathtub gin by consulting a selection of large and impressive volumes in the reference section. Having crammed her sparkling brain with information, Tiny Enid picked up all the things she would need as she made her way home, taking a different route which took her past the badger sanctuary and the moonshine supplies emporium.
With her usual excessive, if not deranged, zeal, Tiny Enid set to work, and soon had a bathtub full of gin. This she decanted into a jerrybuilt vat, and proceeded with a second bathtubful. Only when the vat was filled to the brim with rotgut gin did Tiny Enid relax, sitting down in her favourite armchair, smoking a cheroot, and listening to gramophone records of Xavier Cugat And His Orchestra.
While at the library, Tiny Enid had taken the opportunity to borrow an instructive book, by Gabbitas, entitled Large-Scale Sabotage Of Civic Plumbing Infrastructure. She speed-read this while gobbling down her supper of jugged hare and bloater paste sandwiches, so that before bedtime she was able to pipe her vat of bathtub gin into the local water supply.
By the afternoon of the following day, Tiny Enid was pleased to note that the whole town was a scene of moral degradation and unparalleled debauch, a Hogarth print come to life. She checked that her vat was now empty, readjusted the piping system back to normal, plunked a cloche hat on her head, and went out into the teeming streets to set the world to rights.
Many, many years later, when she wrote her Memoirs, Tiny Enid explained:
It can be difficult to imagine the frustrations of a brave, adventurous tot, such as I was, growing up in a peaceable, indeed an idyllic, little townlet. Those who have read Lark Rise To Candleford by Flora Thompson, or watched the television adaptation, may have some idea how few opportunities I was granted to perform acts of heroic derring-do, when everybody was basically quite well-behaved and knew their place. I much preferred situations of chaos and abandonment, in which I was able to assert my Fascist Supertiny persona. The poisoning of the town’s water supply with bathtub gin was one of my more successful provocations. And while some might have used it to preach and hand out temperance tracts, I had a good deal of fun kicking people in the head and shouting my head off until they all sobered up. After that, they began to realise who they were dealing with. They even struck a medal for me, to commemorate the way in which I dragged the town back from the brink of moral collapse.
My oh my, she was a proper caution, that Tiny Enid.
My appointment with destiny, or dentistry, I forget which, was cancelled, and I had an afternoon to play with, so I thought I would try my hand at piling Ossa upon Pelion, as the Aloadae did in the old story. In some versions, they piled Pelion upon Ossa, so to be on the safe side it seemed best to attempt both. Now obviously my withered limbs and general puniness prevented me from literally piling one mountain on top of another. I had in mind to construct miniatures, to scale, out of cardboard and rags and cotton wool and glue.
Before turning my hand to this exciting if pointless project, it occurred to me that it was just the kind of thing Tiny Enid might have done when she found herself at a loose end. The plucky infant fascist could not bear to be idle, and it was quite possible that, between adventures, she might have piled Ossa upon Pelion, or vice versa, although in her case I am sure she had the resourcefulness to tackle the real mountains instead of small lightweight copies. Had she ever passed the time in this fashion, I was keen to pick up any tips, so I consulted the literature. Ever since the publication of Mavis Gasball’s majestic Complete Reference Guide To All The Doings Attributed To Tiny Enid, In Twenty Volumes, With Rotogravures, it takes even the dull-witted a matter of minutes to track down the most obscure episodes in the life of the heroic tot. The afternoon was still young when I slammed the books shut, satisfied that there was nothing Tiny Enid could teach me about the task ahead. There was mention of neither Ossa nor Pelion in the index, nor of the Aloadae, nor of Otus nor Ephialtes, and the sole reference to Mount Olympus led to a thrilling, yet unrelated, account of Tiny Enid setting fire to a paper aeroplane upon its pinnacle at the culmination of the affaire désagréable in 1955. I was too familiar with this to reread it, so I replaced the books on the shelf, buckled up my boots, and pranced off across the greensward to the hut wherein I kept my cardboard and rags and cotton wool and glue.
Was ever a hut so cherished as mine? It is filthy and in a state of collapse, but to me it is a kind of paradise.
I switched on my radio to listen to Cardboard Mountain Modeller’s Playtime as I worked. They were playing Scriabin. How curious, I thought, that so accomplished a pianist had such tiny little hands! My own hands are leaden and fat and clumsy, more’s the pity. I am afraid that after an hour or two of inexpert fumbling and mashing and prodding I had created a quartet of shapeless compacted clumps. A quartet, because I strived to make two model Ossas and two model Pelions, that I might pile Ossa upon Pelion, and pile Pelion upon Ossa, simultaneously rather than consecutively. Perhaps, in so doing, I was overambitious, and would have obtained better results had I been satisfied with a single pair, the positions of which, Ossa atop Pelion, or Pelion atop Ossa, I could have switched as often as the fancy took me, or, indeed, never, were one tableau more pleasing to the eye than the other. As it was, all I had to show for an afternoon of strenuous cackhandedness were four almost identical messes of cardboard and rags and cotton wool and glue, a fuming temper, an overheated radio set, and a sense of defeat I would struggle to shake off for years to come.
I bundled my Ossas and Pelions into a burlap sack and, on my way home, chucked the sack into a pond, where it floated for a while, until it was eventually destroyed by the ferocious pecking of swans.
Outa_Spaceman rightly calls into question the caption on this photograph. “Surely this is none other than Tiny Enid?” he asks. Indeed, it is almost certainly the plucky little fascist, and one wonders why the captioneer felt the need to pretend it was a tot called Doreen. Note that the besuited chap in the background is holding the heroic infant’s lit cigarillo and bakelite prize ashtray behind his back.
There have of course been innumerable attempts to rewrite the true history of Tiny Enid. Readers are advised to rely solely on the accounts given here. We know what we’re talking about at Hooting Yard.
The two most consistently popular search terms leading interweb hikers to swing open the gates of Hooting Yard, far ahead of all rivals, are bees and ectoplasm. Occasionally, some befuddled soul gets here after searching for bee ectoplasm. Another favourite, much to my delight, is Googie Withers, though the 92-year-old screen siren gets misspelled as Google Withers in some searches, which makes one wonder what is going on inside some people’s cranial integuments. And then of course there are the search terms which are arresting in their singularity. Today someone came to Hooting Yard because they wanted to find out about character flaw of mediaeval peasant.
Anyway, perhaps I should write a piece in which Googie Withers, taunted by a particularly pesky bee, paralyses it with a splurge of ectoplasm. Or, alternatively, a bee taunted by a particularly pesky nonagenarian actress stops her in her tracks by emitting a jet of ectoplasmic bee goo.
Either scenario could provide heroic tot Tiny Enid with the perfect pretext to come clomping club-footedly to the rescue, of either Googie Withers or the bee.
Which scene warms your cockles? Vote now and vote often!
