Higgledy Piggledy

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views of
Canada, 1880-1914.

For sheer imaginative brilliance it is hard to surpass Robin Skelton.
Every story in this collection is a creative tour de force, leading the
reader to unexpected conclusions or offering unanticipated pleasures.
“Higgledy Piggledy,” for example, with its innocent nursery-rhyme
allusion, takes us through a very funny, yet oddly discomforting,
encounter with the supernatural. In “The Activists,” we are offered
a hilarious sendup of modern collective causes—in this case the
banning of jelly-babies, those seemingly innocuous candies. It all
started when Joyce Tregeseal saw Maud Bathurst’s 8-year-old son
innocently eating them headfirst: she gave “a sudden cry of shock and
horror, and pointing at the child with a trembling finger, hissed
‘Babies! And he’s biting off their heads!’” The subsequent
movement to ban jelly-babies is both funny and frightening.

What impresses one most about Skelton’s storytelling technique is his
seeming casualness, his offhandedness. “Oh, but you know, of
course”; “well, you would if you had been there.” The reader is
entrapped, involved, driven to turn to the back of the book to look at
Robin Skelton’s picture to see who is spinning these beguiling yarns.
You laugh because he is so witty; you nod conspiratorially because you
know it is all so true; and you gasp often because the outcomes are so
well concealed. You are, in other words, in the presence of a master
storyteller.