What an old slowcoach I was! – so busy rooting around in my haversack that I did not use my eyes. Mopsa was right. I followed her pointing finger and saw a tremendous brickish portal, ornamented with lozenged carvings of quicklime, bilberry and glunt. I had reached my destination. Somewhere behind those gates lurked Burble, and I was coming for him. Mopsa’s wheelchair was soon knocked back into shape, and she rattled off towards the outskirts of Hoon. Before she left, and despite my protestations, she insisted that I take half of her biscuits. As soon as her back was turned, I ground them into the muck beneath my boot. I could not bear the distractions of shortbread: my mush-bags would suffice.
Author Archives: Frank Key
Hooting Yard : By Aerostat to Hooting Yard – Part 1
It had been two years since one of Dobson’s communiques had uprooted me from my rut and catapulted me into frantic adventure; three years before that I had been sent on a mission, ranging over four continents; the year before that embroiled in a world-shattering plot; and there had been at least half a dozen earlier escapades. No doubt these Dobson-inspired excitements were meant to be wild and life-enhancing, yet I yearned for tedium and futility. Trudging out of the boiler room, I began to sob. It would be weeks, perhaps months, before I could once again wallow in monotony and ennui.
Hooting Yard : The Blötzmann Technique
Trawling through the various biographical documents which survive, I have found no indication that Tiny Enid ever professed any religious impulses whatsoever, nor, for that matter, any more broadly spiritual leanings. Indeed, all accounts agree that she was a severely practical type of heroic infant, never more essentially herself than when solving very concrete problems, usually involving the rescue of persons imperilled. One thinks, for example, of Tiny Enid abseiling down a crevasse to deliver a life-saving polythene bag of nutritious bread pudding to the half-starved, half-frozen polar explorer Sir Blinky Cheeselip, or digging a tunnel under the Vindervandersee to reach a trio of extras from a Werner Herzog film trapped in a subterranean pool rife with blind albino aquatic tentacled beings each with thousands of razor sharp fangs and unassuageable appetites. One pictures Tiny Enid kicking a git in the head with her big black boot.
Hooting Yard : Unaccustomed Competence
Rags, pumps, the sea, and crime. Those are my areas of hard-earned expertise. I learned what little I know in the school of rags and pumps and the sea and crime, that is to say, in everyday, unlettered learning, in the town square of a foul and vinegary seaside resort, under torrential rain, listening, rapt, to shorebound submariners who had polished many a periscope with many a rag in their time. Their testimony is often overlooked in our universities and think-tanks, more’s the pity.
Hooting Yard : The Helmet of a Conquistador
Munching a whelk, I turned my attentions to the diagrams themselves. They were fearfully complicated. I am no architect, and at first all I could make out were miriad lines meeting at angles and criss-crossing each other seemingly at random. Most of the diagrams had been subjected to revision, and there was much evidence of erasure, overprinting and churlish emendation. My studies were interrupted by a sudden and ferocious thunderstorm.
Hooting Yard : Factorum et Dictorum Memorabilium
I have never been a fan of comic books, nor have I developed a taste for graphic novels. I can admire the skill and inventiveness, but somehow I can’t drum up genuine enthusiasm.
Hooting Yard : Dutch Kleptomaniac Stamp Collector
At the end of 1967 I met my penfriend Doris, who I had been writing to for three years. We fell in love, and were engaged on November 1st. Eight days later, from a bus in her home town of Blackburn, Doris saw a silvery UFO.
Hooting Yard : Frizzy-haired Minstrel
“Fear not, nipper!†she cried, “I am Tiny Enid and I have alerted the Air Sea Rescue Station at St Bibblybibdib to your sorry plight by attaching a message to the leg of a cumulet. The bird is flying its little heart out even as we speak, and soon a lovely big lifeboat will scud across the waves to rescue you. Preserve your energy, and stop trying to prise that last whelk from the rock, for soon you will be sitting at my kitchen table wolfing down a slap-up hot dinner of non-seafood items!â€
Hooting Yard : Joie De Bogs
Regular readers know that my grasp of matters ornithological is second to none, so it is only fitting that I have been asked to compile an anthology of fictional works with the word “owl†in the title.
Hooting Yard : Snackbar Hooligans
This was not the first time I had been given a pancake hint at a seaside resort, and as I headed off towards the steep steps up to a lawn and a crazy golf facility, I cast my mind back to an earlier occasion.