The Doll Book of the Month Club: Little Kettle-Head

   The Doll Book of the Month Club entry for this month is one I didn't even think about posting before, because until I started thinking about it recently, I forgot it even had a doll connection. But I have been thinking about it recently, because of the fire. I've been wondering if it survived. It hasn't been found yet, but nobody has gone through all the books I had on the landing. A lot of them were fine, and some of them were soaked and damaged, but rescuable. Some of them weren't rescuable and were thrown away. I'm hoping this book was one I had the forethought to put in a plastic bag to keep it dust free, and that the bag didn't melt. 

**********************UPDATE! Ken found my Kettle Head!******************************

  Things melted in weird ways. Things you would have thought would have been fine, melted beyond help. Other things you would have thought would have been burnt to a crisp, or ruined by water, are perfectly fine. For example, there are still cloth and wooden things in Fuzzy's room that are fine, if smokey smelling. The accordion that was behind the door, (which was hacked off it's hinges. Why? It was open...), is still standing. But there were things on the landing that melted beyond recognition. The shower curtain in the bathroom melted! That was the opposite side of the landing!

  But I digress. The book I have been thinking of not only has a doll connection, but a connection to what happened to us two weeks ago. The book, published in 1904, is called "The Story of Little Kettle-Head, An Awful Warning to Bad Babas or The Story of Little Degchie-Head". 

Pretty weird title, but this is a pretty weird book. In fact, even though this book was written for children, don't read it to children! This book can be considered disturbing. I find it disturbing, but I also find it so bizarre that I find it hilarious. 

This is an easier to see version of the cover that I found on the internet.

  First I'll explain that a 'degchie' is a large, handle-less aluminum pot, often used in Indian cuisine. In other words, a kettle. (Not like a 'tea kettle'.) So. Why is the subject of the book a 'kettle-head'? Well, here's the story. Hang on to something.

  The story concerns a little British girl named Mary, who lives in India with her parents. Mary has a dangerous obsession: she likes poking fires. 

In fact, she LOVES poking fires. She does it all the time. She is told off for it, and dragged away from fires. But she is still compelled to poke them. 

   One day Mary finds her mother busy with the cook's accounts, and she takes the opportunity to wander into the cook house, where she sees all the pots cooking on the fires. She wants so badly to poke them. The problem is, the fires are high up, and she can't reach to poke them properly. 

Mary is resourceful, and she finds a large kettle used to boil water, and uses it to stand on. She's very pleased that she can then poke the fires better. But the pot is unsteady. It flips, and Mary falls head first into the fire, and her head is 'burned right off'. You read that right. The kid burned her head off.

  Does she die? Nah. The cook comes back and finds 'Missy Baba' in the floor with no head. 

                                             Just a puff of smoke where her head used to be.

  He's resourceful too. 

He grabs a kettle and plops it on her neck, ties her bonnet on to hold it, and draws a face on the kettle with a burnt stick, the very stick she had been poking the fire with. And what did he do then? He sent her to her mother! No, 'hey, your kid burned her head off. I have replaced it with a kettle.'  Nothing. He just sends her to her mother.

  Mary goes to her mother, but won't show her face when her mother speaks to her. The next morning she eats breakfast with her sunbonnet on, so her parents can't see her face. These parents are really hands on care givers. They don't notice their child has a kettle for a head, even when all she can say is "Clip Clap clapper apper apper.", as the only sound she can make is the rattling of the kettle lid on the kettle. Instead of thinking that's strange, and investigating, they get angry and tell her she's rude.

  Mary stays in a corner all day, crying, while pretending to play with her doll, and still making the 'clapper apper apper' sound. She refuses to go on a walk with her parents, instead hiding her face, and clapper appering.

  That night she's afraid to take her bonnet off when she goes to bed, in case 'the only head she has' falls off. But no fear! It's Christmas eve! Old Father Christmas shows up. He finds Mary in bed, and tries to think what he could possibly give a child with "no proper eyes to read a book with, no proper nose to smell a scent bottle, no ears to hear a drum and no mouth for sweets." He concludes that she also "couldn't kiss a doll with that mouth!" But he doesn't give up. He digs deep into his bag of gifts to find one fitting for Little Kettle Head...I mean, Mary. 

At the bottom of the bag he comes across a lone doll head, surrounded by the pieces of what was once her body. 

The doll had been cut to bits by a bunch of 'wild toy soldiers with their sharp swords'. Luckily Father Christmas stopped them before they chopped the doll's head to pieces too...BY GIVING THE SOLDIERS TO SOME BOYS! What?! These toy soldiers are so violent and destructive, and their swords are so sharp, that they destroyed a doll, so what's the best things to do with them? Why give them to some kids, of course! But they were 'wild boys', so obviously they were as bad as the soldiers. Maybe they would even be a threat to the soldiers. Great kids to give sharp stuff to. I think they were some cousins I had.

  But back to Mary. Old Father Christmas decides the head is 'the very thing' for Mary. So he puts a table next to her bed and sits the head on it. 

  In the morning Mary is 'delighted to find Father Christmas had brought her a new head', a 'beautiful doll's head with long golden hair and real eyelashes.'  

  She carefully glues it to her neck and sits very still until the glue dries, so the new head doesn't fall off. 

  Then Mary shakes her head to make sure it's secure, jumps for joy, and runs off to show her parents her new head. Her ever observant parents are very pleased with Mary's looks, because her hair has 'grown a yard long in one night, and we never saw you look so smiling before.'  This kid's parents are terrible!

  After that, Mary is so terrified of fires that her mother has to drag her past them. "And that is why her head has never been burned off again." Maybe she had a celluloid head. That would really be bad to get near a fire with, even if you didn't fall in head first. 

  See what I mean about this book? It's a weirdy! It was written by Helen Bannerman, who is more famous for being the author of the now controversial "Little Black Sambo". For the record, the Sambo of the story is an Indian boy, not a Black boy. Still, the title doesn't sound good, and the name became derogatory slang. The book is now generally banned, but other than the character's names, which all contain the word 'Black', there is nothing bad about the book. I loved it when I was little. Our copy had beautiful colour illustrations of the green jungle, the bright orange and black tigers, and Sambo's bright green umbrella and colourful clothes. I especially loved his curly toed purple shoes. I wanted those shoes! 

This is the version we had when I was a kid. It's a 1961 Whitman Tell-A-Tale book.

He was a clever little boy who saved himself from tigers by giving them his clothes and then watching as they fought over them, running around a tree until they turn into butter, which he scooped up and took home to his mother, who then used it on her delicious pancakes! Unfortunately, Helen Bannerman wrote a whole series of books about 'Little Black' such and such, and accompanied them with books about 'Little White' such and such. Why couldn't they have just been "Little Such and Such'? Worse yet, the name was latched onto, and the illustrations in some editions became more and more racist, changing the setting from the Tamil region of India to the Southern United States. It's a shame such an innocent story became such an ugly symbol of racism.

  Helen Bannerman was born in Scotland as Helen Watson in the 1860's. Her father was an Army chaplain, so the family moved often, to many parts of what was then the British Empire. When she was two she moved with her family to Madeira, and at ten was sent to Scotland to school. In 1889 Helen married William Bannerman, a British Army surgeon working for the Indian Medical Service. They moved to Tamil Nadu, on India's Southeast coast. For thirty years, Helen lived, and raised a family, in India, thus India being the setting of her books. She began writing illustrated stories on the trip from India to Scotland to visit her daughters at school there, in 1898. Friends convinced her to get the stories published, and a career was born. The books were published in miniature editions, because as a child Helen had always wanted 'a book she could hold in her own tiny hands'. "Little Kettle-Head" measures about 5 or 6 inches by about 3 inches. Helen passed away in 1946.

  You can read the whole "Little Kettle-Head" book HERE.

  Don't forget to check out today's other post for the doll of the day.