This blog post started with one of the motifs I noticed once or twice, while researching miniature worlds and people: that of little people in the fridge – either as a permanent feature and an aetiology of the workings of a fridge, or as raiders and disruptors. The fridge, of course, is not that different to a number of other domestic spaces little people often find themselves in, but it has its particular challenges and presents its own opportunities for adventures, new characters, and a reversal of scale for everyday objects (food stuff, in this case!).
The books that first got me thinking about this are The Amazing Adventures of Chilly Billy (1980), written by Peter Mayle and illustrated by Arthur Robins, and its sequel, Footprints in the Butter: The Further Adventures of Chilly Billy (1988); as well as the first book of the Pocket Pirates series, The Great Cheese Robbery (2015), written and illustrated by Chris Mould.
Let’s start with Chilly Billy, the “little tiny man… who lives inside your fridge”. As is often the case with books about tiny people, we are never given Billy’s exact dimensions, but we’re left to infer them from the way he interacts with objects of our own materiality. Only later on in the story are we told about another fridge character, the Mad Jumper, who is uncharacteristically tall: “nearly three quarters of an inch tall… And that, for a tiny man, is very, very big”. So can we infer that Billy is perhaps a third of an inch tall, or so? But, in my experience, when we start measuring these things properly, there is always slippage – can we really expect a realistic and consistent scale for a text like this? (Something I am thinking about further).
But, regardless of size, Chilly Billy has important jobs to do: he turns on the light just as you’re about to open the fridge door, and switches it off again when you close it. He can hear you coming (he’s got remarkable ears and hearing capacity!) but he’s too quick – you will never see him! Still, you’d better not make fun of him, because he’ll hear and “he’ll get cross”: “And he’ll let the ice cream melt, or knock over your chocolate drink, or stamp around in the butter” (aetiologies for all sorts of in-fridge mishaps). But, of course, our story narrator has managed to catch Chilly Billy napping, so that’s how he knows and can now tell us all about him and the big secret inside our fridges. When Chilly Billy introduces himself to the narrator he explains his job:
“Billy’s the name”, he said. “Chilly Billy. I take care of your fridge – cleaning, defrosting, that kind of thing. And I specialise in turning the light on and off… I repaired a leak in the yoghurt carton. I tidied up the freezer compartment, which you left in a dreadful mess. I polished all the ice cubes. I put the top back on the milk bottle. I cleaned all the shelves.”
Chilly Billy does sound like a very useful kind of fellow! I wish someone could clean my fridge shelves! (Though, what exactly is the utility of polishing ice cubes?) Billy leaves in the freezer compartment, in a private space reached via a secret door in the back. Billy wears “suction boots” so that he can walk around the fridge, “up walls, over lemonade bottles… even… upside down, hanging from the ceiling”. (The idea of suction boots is not new, of course: Roald Dahl’s own tiny people, the Minpins, who live on trees, also wear suction boots. I think this links such creatures with the natural suction cups/mechanisms used by many small organisms in nature: frogs, bats, geckos, insects, arachnids, etc. But that’s a blog post for another day!)
After the “aetiology” part of the narrative (Billy’s role in something we take for granted as mechanical/automatic), we hear more of Billy’s adventures. and the other creatures he meets and interacts with. These include Stripy Norman, the caterpillar, who’s found his way into the fridge accidentally inside a lettuce, who ends up being rescued, wearing one of Billy’s scarves (which leads to another potential aetiology – see if you can spot a caterpillar with a scarf on in your garden!).
We also hear of Lily the nurse, who is sent in to help Billy when he feels unwell and he contacts the “I.C.E. (In Case of Emergencies) wavelentgh” on his walkie talkie. Lily diagnoses Billy with a “a nasty Warm” (because, of course he can’t have a Cold!) and dispenses medicines and advice. She ends up staying with him as they become romantically involved.
And we read about the “Fridge Olympics and Frozen Sports”, which bring many more fridge people into Billy’s fridge to compete in ski-runs in the freezer compartment, ski-jump, Tossing the Carrot, and, of course, the “Great Cross-Refrigerator Race” (the sign for the contestants to be off is popping a Rice Krispie!) At the end of the book, we are offered a scene of multiple characters reunited for Billy’s birthday party (the table is a peanut butter lid, covered with a cloth, and the company sit on a large carrot, chopped up), and there is even an appendix with Billy’s favourite foods, complete with recipes! (e.g. coconut snow, chocolate chip yoghurt, etc.)
The sequel book, Footprints in the Butter: The Further Adventures of Chilly Billy, begins with the eponymous footprints all over the butter, and is more tightly focused on one adventure: saving a ladybird who’s frozen all over. Some of the characters from the previous book reoccur (Lily, Norman, the Big Jumper), but we also have Orville the Very Fat Beetle, who is instrumental in de-frosting Spotty the old ladybird. Again, as per usual with stories involving tiny people, other creatures of comparative size tend to accumulate around them: insects, often mice, etc. Two more common “little people” motifs that this second book includes, are:
- The danger of falling down the sink or drains (Spotty manages to avoid this, but we see it in the adventures of Stuart Little, or the Borrowers)
- the desire to fly: Billy and Lily are given a ride and taste flight on Spotty’s back, something very common in such stories (for some examples see one of my previous blog posts here)
The idea of “footprints on the butter” seems to be particularly attractive, as this is an incident we also see in The Great Cheese Robbery, the first Pocket Pirates adventure. The Pocket Pirates are not fridge people – they are just miniature people that live inside a pirate ship in a bottle. We don’t get much of an explanation of their existence – there is no aetiology here, just the fun of seeing very small people surviving a human environment. In this first adventure, the Pocket Pirates, Button, Lily, the Captain, and Uncle Noggin, have to venture into “the frozen land of Fridge” to obtain some cheese for the mice, as a ransom for their miniature cat, which the (life-sized) mice have captured. In the event, Button and Lily manage to get inside a margarine tub to gain entry into the fridge.
Inside the fridge, we are offered, again, the pleasure of everyday foodstuffs used in different ways by people of a different scale. Celery is particularly useful: Button lies “in the curl of a celery stick”, the Pocket Pirates use celery leaves to wipe themselves from all the substances they had to immerse themselves in, and a “huge stick of celery” is what they end up using as a wedge into the seal of the fridge door, in order to open it and escape. There is much more to the plot of this story, of course – I am only isolating the fridge incident as a comparative to Chilly Billy above – but towards the end of The Great Cheese Robbery, the human owner of the fridge sees something strange in the margarine:
But when he got the tub of margarine, right there in the middle were the imprints of two tiny people. Arms and legs and heads.
Mr. Tooey blinked hard in disbelief and headed to the room at the back for a lie down. Maybe he was going crazy after all…
Now, the idea of little people inside the fridge, got me thinking about the wider motif (or “topos”, as Erkki Huhtamo has called it) of little people living inside different machines, and making them work – or not! Huhtamo mentions the “well-recorded popular beliefs in tiny people inside radios and TV sets” (27-8), which, evidently, goes back at least to advertising about phonographs in the 1800s, such as the examples below, which show children looking inside phonographs for the (evidently miniature) “band” inside the machine:
Similarly, in his Listening to the Radio, 1920-1950, Ray Barfield shows that “[w]hen they first encountered radio in the early 1930s, some listeners had difficulty understanding its precise nature”, and mentions examples of people believing that there were tiny musicians living inside the radio, or little people doing all the talking (16-17). Radio artist Anna Friz based her “solo piece for radio transmitter and receivers, walkie-talkies, static, and voice” The Clandestine Transmissions of Pirate Jenny (you can listen to an extract here), on similar childhood beliefs and memories:
When I was young, like many children, I half-believed the voices emanating from the radio were the voices of little people who lived inside. Turn on the radio, the little people begin to talk; change the station, and they change their voices. I imagined the radio to contain a miniature theater in which the people performed whenever I wanted. (Friz 2008: 141)
In addition, the website “I Used to Believe: The Childhood Beliefs Site” lists numerous such examples, including “People on TV shows live inside the television” and “Traffic lights are operated by creatures who live inside them“.
All of these motifs of little people inside phonographs, radios, TV sets, or traffic lights, are largely aetiological narratives (or myths – if we want to go down that route). They offer a supernatural explanation about why and how machines work, by using creatures that may well spring out of older and more traditional beliefs. Huhtamo reminds us how fairies became entangled with early photography and cameras (see the example of an advertisement for a “Fairy Camera” on the left, which of course brings to mind immediately the Cottingley Fairies incident), but also microscopes (Laura Forsberg has discussed Fitz-James O’Brien’s short story “The Diamond Lens”, among a wider exploration of fairies and microscopy). However, in both these examples, the camera or microscope are more about the ability to see fairies, rather than fairies making them work. In most of the children’s fantasy examples I’ve found, when little people live inside machines, they are not fairies (in the traditional sense), only reduced versions of humanity, with technological accoutrements (such as suction boots) to help them navigate their environment.
One last example I wanted to mention briefly, is another interesting aetiology, in which the little people live inside machines not to make them work indefinitely, but for a limited amount of time: The Little Warranty People, by Eduard Uspenski is a 1989 book, originally written in Russian. As per the blurb on the inside flap of the book’s dustjacket:
It’s true – the factory sends out tiny people to keep new appliances running smoothly for as long as they’re under warranty. But sometimes the little warranty people find adventures that have nothing to do with their appliances.
There is something both funny and pessimistic in this adaptation of the earlier idea/belief/folklore of little people inside machines, customised for a world in which machines and appliances are just not built well enough to last! The moment the warranty expires, the cast of little people we meet, Coldman (the fridge man), News-of-the-Day (the stereo man), Dustboy (the vacuum cleaner man), Carcare (the car motor man), etc. stop maintaining the machine/appliance they look after, and – we assume – the downwards spiral of wear and degradation is allowed to begin. The one (ironic) exception, is Ivan Ivanovich Burée, who lives and maintains a large antique clock, and is not going anywhere:
“…How about you? [asked Coldman] How long are you staying here?”
“For life, I’m afraid.”
“For life? Your clock has such a long warranty?” asked the surprised guest.
“No, it’s your usual warranty. It’s just that the factory where this closk was made doesn’t exist anymore. There is nowhere for me to go. I have lived here almost sixty years now. And the clock, if I say so myself, is like new. It keeps time to the second.” (p. 7).
An allegory for the much-repeated aphorism that older things used to last, while new things are made to be disposable? Perhaps, but the Kirkus Review is also pointing to this book as a “tongue-in-cheek poke at Russian politics” more specifically, so I need to think about this more!
REFERENCES
Barfield, Ray. 1996. Listening to Radio, 1920-1950. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Friz, Anna. 2008. “Re-Enchanting Radio“, Cinema Journal, 48:1, pp. 138-146.
Forsberg, Laura. 2015. “Nature’s Invisibilia: The Victorian Microscope and the Miniature Fairy”, Victorian Studies, 57:4, pp. 638-666.
Huhtamo, Erkki. “Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in: Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 27-47.
*Many thanks to @DrBeachcombing for alerting me to this image!