Comical characters

YOU KNOW what, the brain is an extraordinary organ, it really is. Its storage capacity never ceases to amaze me.
Mine is like a large, rather untidy filing cabinet, with a number of drawers, and in each draw are all these different files with my life’s memories, whether the memory be a particular sunset, the way back to Vryheid from Dundee, my daughters’ names or the fact the the chemical symbol for mercury is Hg.
Everything is filed away somewhere in these files. These memories define me; they are who I am.
True, it’s not always easy to access certain information. Something that I have not had to think of for a while, years perhaps, decades maybe, that information tends to get shuffled to the back of the drawer, and finding it requires some thought. But it’s there, and when I find it and open up that file it’s extraordinary how familiar the contents are, however long ago I last thought about it.

That happened to me last week when I saw something that I hadn’t seen for, I dunno, more than 50 years, say 55 years. This takes us back to the mid 1950s when I was an impressionable youth in short pants, and what took me back to that time was a picture of Little Lulu.
Who?
Ag, my child, Little Lulu.
Oupa, who is Little Lulu?
My girl, back in the good ol’ days… actually, I say it was the good ol’ days but it was just about 10 years from the end of World War II, the war that killed more people than any other war, and not content with that we’d had the Korean War for dessert, and were sharpening our knives for Vietnam, but back then when I was about your age, we used to get things called “comics”.
Yes, my boy, “comics”, and stop picking your nose.

Now, comics were soft-covered booklets, A4 size more or less, with picture stories in them, you know, drawn, not photographs, and in colour, and they featured child-friendly characters with bubbles of words coming out of their heads, except when the character was thinking and then the big bubble of words was attached to the person by a row of smaller bubbles, and the comics were published by Dell and Harvey and what was the other one…? umm, Marvel!
We used to buy them at tearooms… what’s a tearoom? My boy, tearooms were… ag, I’ll tell you another time.
Anyway, my mum, your granny, my girl, didn’t approve of comics; they were American, and relatively expensive in our dorp’s tearoom, and I think she thought they were too easy to read and would make us lazy. She’d rather we read Enid Blyton’s books, who at least had the advantage of being English, although in the austerity of the post-war years all the pictures in Enid Blyton’s books were black and white line drawings and pretty boring.
Anyway, my girl, that’s who Little Lulu was, she was a character in the comics we used to read back then, and she, ol’ Little Lulu, was as familiar to us as our best friends.
Oupa?
Yes, my boy?
Is Little Lulu the same Lulu as in that song?
What song, my boy?
“Oh liewe Lulu,
“Sal jy vanaand by my kom dudu?”?
No, definitely not! Little Lulu wasn’t a slut. She did not sleep around. She had a boy friend (as opposed to a boyfriend) called Tubby and their antics were innocent in today’s terms, although it was clear that spanking naughty children was an acceptable punishment back in the 1950s.
In fact, there was a whole cast of supporting characters in a Little Lulu comic – her mom and dad, Tubby’s family, friends and neighbours, teachers.
As I said, they were child-friendly characters, Little Lulu, Little Dot (who had a fixation with dots), Little Lotta (who wasn’t little), Ritchie Rich, the poor little rich boy (who I wanted to punch on the nose), Little Audrey and Wendy, the good little witch, and the stories, as I recollect, had a moral to them, and I seem to think that they all had a happy ending.

Even the comics about ghosts were benign, totally harmless and bereft of evil, like Casper, the friendly ghost. He was about as scary as a marshmallow. It never occurred to me to ask why he was a ghost, or whose ghost he was, and apparently when asked if Casper was the ghost of a little boy who’s died, his creators dodged the question by explaining that since Casper’s parents were ghosts, he was simply born a ghost.
But back in the 1950s, we didn’t question his origins, nor the origins of Spooky, the tough little ghost, who also was a comic character.
Spooky was “scarier” than Casper, had a nose like a dalmatian, freckles (or was that acne scars?) and wore a hat. I wonder now if my generation’s attitude to the possibilities of ghosts was tempered by our familiarity with Casper and Spooky?
And that, my boy, my girl, was comics.
And tearooms, Oupa?
Ah, yes, tearooms, also called cafes. Well, once upon a time…