Saturday, April the 29th, 2006

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The Slovenly Gibbets

They were torn down long ago, but the slovenly gibbets standing high on the hill still haunt the history of this thy land. Silhouetted against a leaden sky, the slovenly gibbets creaked in the wind, and did so for years and years, but they are gone now. Their destruction was Tiny Enid's first recorded act of heroism.

She was just eight years old, and was sat in the kitchen of the cabin at the foot of those grim hills eating her milk slops for breakfast, when loud clanking and clunking noises, accompanied by shouts and screams, led her outside. In the pale light of dawn she saw malefactors being dragged up the hill in chains by Prince Fulgencio's henchmen. Wiping some spilled slops off her polka dot shift with an old rag, she confronted the henchman whose tabard was emblazoned with a captain's crest.

“What crimes have these sorry-looking wretches committed, O captain?” she piped, in her shrill infantile voice.

The captain growled at her, and one of his fellow-henchmen picked her up with one mighty, hairy hand, and slobbered at her.

“Unhand me, brute!” cried Tiny Enid, at which her assailant cackled. He carried her over to the roaring river which crashed with such ferocity down the hillside, and was about to throw her in when, with great presence of mind, the tiny child unlaced the big black boot in which her club foot was encased, eased it off, and bashed the henchman's face in, so violently that he dropped her at once on the springy green grass. Replacing her big boot in one sprightly movement, Tiny Enid clomped over to the captain and rebuked him.

It is our uncommon good fortune that one of the other henchmen was carrying a portable metal tapping machine to which was attached a recording device. In an uncanny parallel with the dictaphone belt of Dallas Police Officer W B McLain which inadvertently recorded the assassination of President John F Kennedy in Dealey Plaza on 22nd November 1963, the henchman's device was jammed in the ‘on’ position. We thus know the precise words with which Tiny Enid upbraided the captain.

“You should be mightily ashamed of yourself, O captain,” she said, “For allowing one of your men to manhandle me. I am but a tiny infant in a polka dot shift, and he is a gigantic fellow. Had I not had my wits about me, even now I would be gurgling at the bottom of the terrifying river, the life draining out of me. Instead it is your cruel colleague who has toppled to the earth covered in his own gore. He will live, I think, though his already ugly mug will be further disfigured. Ha! Perhaps the imprint of my big black boot will improve his appearance. Now, captain, you too will feel my wrath unless you loose the manacles from this piteous gaggle of wrongdoers and release them into my care. Release them, I say, or you will go the way of Tarleton and Scobie and O'Houlihan!”

Such was the terror with which the captain heard these words that he crumpled to the ground, suddenly puny and powerless, but not before he had tossed to Tiny Enid the keys to the manacles which chained his prisoners. Before setting them free, the heroic infant questioned each one closely about their crimes, learning that they were all but simple peasants who had stolen a potato or a lettuce, or defaced a big portrait of Prince Fulgencio with boot polish, or just had a general air of rural besmirchment about them. And when all their chains were loosed, she set them the task of tearing down the slovenly gallows, up on the grim horrible hill, and she watched a while, her big black booted club foot resting on the neck of the captain, before kicking him once in the head and skipping in her ungainly manner back to her cabin, and her kitchen, and her breakfast of milk slops.