Category Archives: Stories and Writing

Reflections on The Roly-Poly Pudding, by Beatrix Potter

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In a previous blog post, I mentioned The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, orThe Roly-Poly Pudding, by Beatrix Potter, and how it had left me afraid of giant rats at bedtime. (I incorrectly called it The Tale of Tom Kitten, which is a different story about the hapless Tom.)
I don’t regret having read The Roly-Poly Pudding when I did (third or fourth grade?). I knew perfectly well that our house had no rats and that I was much bigger than a rat in any case. Considering that I then went on to read collections of Strange But True and other explicitly scary stories, I can’t have been too upset about it.
I just reread The Roly-Poly Pudding, as I have done a number of times before, and it’s such a fun story that I decided to blog about it.
It starts like this:
Once upon a time, there was an old cat, called Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit, who was an anxious parent.
As a child, I never thought much about her name or about her being “an anxious parent.” Looking at the colored plates (illustrations) now, I can see that she is in fact a tabby (“Tabitha”) who probably has a tail that twitches a lot (“Twitchit”.) As for her being an anxious parent, it makes sense that a cat of that time period would have great concerns for the safety of her kittens. On top of that, we learn that her kittens are constantly getting away from her and getting into trouble. No wonder she’s worried. So she takes steps.
On baking day she determined to shut them up in a cupboard.
Why on baking day, particularly? Because she will be too busy to keep an eye on them? Because they will get their paws in the dough? (Turns out she has reason to worry about that.)
I notice that she isn’t the only mother in Beatrix Potter’s stories to have a mischievous child. Mrs. Rabbit has Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter. We all know what Peter is like. And while all Mrs. Twitchit’s kittens have tendency to get into trouble, on this baking day it is Tom Kitten who is missing.
So she pops Moppet and Mittens in the cupboard and goes in search of Tom.
It was an old, old house, full of cupboards and passages. Some of the walls were four feet thick, and there used to be queer noises inside them, as if there might be a little secret staircase. Certainly there were odd little jagged doorways in the wainscot, and things disappeared at night—especially cheese and bacon.
Spooky! Even now it gives me a little chill. And Mrs. Twitchit seems very worried indeed.
Naturally, now that her back is turned, Moppet and Mittens get themselves into mischief, sneaking out of the cupboard and getting into the bread dough.
They patted it with their soft little paws—“Shall we make dear little muffins?” said Mittens to Moppet.
Cats love to pat anything squishy, hence the term “kneading” and also the expression “making biscuits”. Or in this case, muffins.
Then Cousin Ribby shows up, a no-nonsense disciplinarian. When Mrs. Twitchit moans that Tom is missing and she is afraid the rats have got him, Cousin Ribby says
“I will help you find him; and whip him, too!”
Cousin Ribby isn’t afraid of rats. She’s also a sharp observer, more so than Mrs. Twitchit.
“What is all that soot in the fender?”
Mrs. Twitchit probably should have paid more attention.
At any rate, they find Moppet and Mittens and learn that a lump of dough has been stolen by a rat–along with a pat of butter and the rolling pin! Mrs. Twitchit wrings her paws, while Ribby remembers that they heard a roly-poly noise in the attic.
“This is serious, Cousin Tabitha,” said Ribby. “We must send for John Joiner at once, with a saw.”
Now that we’re properly worried, we are given Tom Kitten’s side of things.
…and it shows how very unwise it is to go up a chimney in a very old house, where a person does not know his way, and where there are enormous rats.
Yes, enormous rats. Certainly by comparison to a kitten.
The description of Tom’s journey through the system of interconnected chimneys/flues sounds unpleasantly dark and confined. He can’t go back the way he came, because the fire has been lit and it will be too hot and smoky. So he keeps on and finds a loose stone and very tight passage beyond, and then falls right through the floor.
…he found himself in a place that he had never seen before, although he had lived all his life in the house.
It’s that kind of house. Spooky!
Unfortunately, he’s in Samuel Whiskers’ bedroom and in no time he is tied up by Anna Maria “in very hard knots.” Then the rats argue about whether roly-poly pudding is properly made with butter and dough, or with bread crumbs, and off they go to get the ingredients. No one hears his muffled cries
Except a spider, which came out of a crack in the ceiling and examined the knots critically, from a safe distance.
The poor kitten is buttered and wrapped in dough, though Samuel Whiskers seems to be having doubts, both about the digestibility of the string and all the soot.
“I do not think it will be a good pudding. It smells sooty.”
Fortunately rescue is here—John Joiner with his saw! Samuel Whiskers knows when to leave.
“We are discovered and interrupted, Anna Maria; let us collect our property—and other people’s,–and depart at once.”
A happy yet practical ending ensues. The stolen dough is not wasted–it is peeled off and made into a pudding, with currants added to disguise the fact that it has bits of soot in it.  Meanwhile, Tom Kitten gets a hot bath—not the usual sort of bath for a cat—to wash the butter off him.
I said the ending is happy, but that isn’t entirely true. Tom Kitten has suffered a traumatic experience, and it has left its mark. While his siblings grow up into excellent ratters,
…Tom Kitten has always been afraid of a rat; he never durst face anything that is bigger than—a Mouse.
 Till next post.

Locked-room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes

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I just finished reading The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries: the Most Complete Collection of Impossible-crime Stories Ever Assembled, edited by Otto Penzler. Many of these short stories, many of which were published in magazines, are fairly old. According to a very interesting article on locked-room mysteries posted at Bodies From the Library, 1920-1940 was the Golden Age for this sort of mystery.

As a result, many of the stories have a dated feel to them, in some ways a bit similar to old science fiction stories. However, they are not as overweighted with male characters as old science-fiction, given that jealousy and infidelity make good murder motives and require wives and girlfriends (at least in this period’s writing). At the same time, the old mystery short stories seem heavier in unreflective prejudice against non-WASP characters and those of lower classes (and in the case of English writers, anyone not English.) Probably science-fiction simply left those characters out most of the time.

Still, it was a really fun read because I love a puzzle. I like stories where I can try to solve the mystery before the detective does. I loved the Ellery Queen television series for that reason—Ellery pauses at the crucial point to face the camera and say, “I know who did it. Do you? I’ll give you a hint. Remember—-.” (Or something very like that.) The mystery novels I like best are usually those where I find myself flipping back in the book to recheck the details of a scene or remind myself who said what.

And I really like a clever trick. There were a lot of clever tricks in these stories, though I found myself figuring some out as instances of a particular category of locked-room crime. Sometimes I recognized tricks that I had seen fairly recently on mystery TV shows or in novels, such as the murder that takes place upon discovery of the body, not at the earlier time supposed, and the murder that is mysterious because it starts out as a trick on the part of the victim. There was at least one story in the collection where I thought I had a solution, turned out to be wrong, and ended up liking my solution better. (Must keep it in mind.)

Reading so many stories in succession left me wondering how one could further categorize locked-room mysteries, and the article I mentioned earlier offers a couple of attempts at categorization.  What interests me about this, I guess, is the hope of finding a gap—a category that has been under-exploited or which can be further divided into subcategories that haven’t all been used before. I’m looking for a trick to use in my own writing, and so please the reader with its (relative) originality.

Here’s hoping.
Till next post.

Pottery, Paper, and Post–letters from the past and present

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Recently, I’ve been watching some video lecture series from Great Courses—one on ancient Mesopotamia (“Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization”) and one on ancient North America (“Ancient Civilizations of North America.”) Between the two of them, I’ve been wondering: if our current civilization were completely wiped out (without wiping out humanity), what would remain for future archaeologists to interpret?
You see, I am struck by the importance of pottery in these archaeological finds. In the North American case, pottery was something that endured (along with stone tools) and which could depict activities and important symbols of the time, in the absence of the written word. In the case of Mesopotamia, pottery was also the medium for the written word itself—cuneiform on clay tablets.
The interesting result of this is that quite a lot of very ordinary writing done in ancient Mesopotamia got preserved when clay tablets and clay seals on items got caught in fires and were… fired. A lot of these tablets recorded inventories, transactions, and contracts, but sometimes letters were also preserved. A particularly interesting lecture discussed king Zimri-lim of Mari, his queen Shiptu, and his various daughters, some of whose correspondence was preserved when the palace at Mari was burned down.
As I understand it, the letters between Zimri-lim and Shiptu concerned the management of the kingdom while he was away fighting, and requests that she consult the gods (via the priests) on various questions. Letters from his daughters, whose marriages were arranged for political reasons, included news from their region and sometimes requests. Two daughters told him how unhappy they were, how badly treated, and pleaded for help. Apparently at least one attempt to help was made and failed.
Nearly four thousand years later, I’m feeling sorry for the two daughters. I only know of them because their letters happened to be preserved.
More recent “old” correspondence is preserved on paper. Paper is a lot more perishable than baked clay, but much lighter and more space-efficient, not to mention easy to write on. From letters, we get a window into the lives of many famous people of the less-distant past–those who wrote the letters, and those mentioned in the letters. A nice book about this is For the Love of Letters, by John O’Connell.
A lot of today’s correspondence is via email, which is much easier to “send”, takes up almost no space, and is simultaneously potentially eternal and yet entirely perishable. It is potentially eternal in that it lasts so long as the encoded information remains encoded in some medium somewhere. There is no original to be preserved. Yet it is entirely perishable in that the data must be stored somewhere, and machines and media can degrade. Also, formats for files keep changing, so either the format must be updated as necessary or the old software must be maintained.
So if civilization as we currently know it were destroyed? The computers would no longer have power. Eventually, their parts would corrode. Even if future archaeologists could build a suitable device to read the old hard drives, the data would probably no longer be readable.
Some paper correspondence might last longer, if protected from moisture and pests in a vault. I assume paper would become exceedingly delicate over time, just as textiles in well-preserved ancient sites are delicate, and most of it would eventually decay.
And then there’s pottery. We think of pottery as fragile, so we make more use of other materials. Wood, metal, and plastic tend to be less breakable, and are usually lighter in weight as well. And yet… pottery endures. It doesn’t rot, it doesn’t rust, and it doesn’t degrade in strange and somewhat unpredictable ways as old plastics (which are less than a century old!) are now doing.
We don’t use pottery for many purposes, outside of the kitchen and the garden. So maybe those future archaeologists would conclude that our most important everyday thoughts were of  “Home Sweet Home”, “World’s Best Dad”, and “Flour,” “Sugar,” and “Tea.”
Till next post.