Pen Knives Of Pen Niff: The Early Years of Orson Dongle

I was casually flicking through my copies of Time Magazine the other day (whilst considering my entry for a Collapsible Ironing board-inspired fiction competition) when I encountered a familiar face from the past. Staring back at me from the June 1984 cover, with wild eyes, was the face of Orson Dongle. Accompanying the portrait was the caption ‘One Sharp Dongle To Go’ and the pull-quote “I am the Welsh Dream”. Indeed he was - for a while, anyway.

Orson Dongle was once the business mogul behind the biggest Swiss Army Knife empire in the South of Wales. It consisted of one shop in total - in the town of Pen Niff. The shop was called ‘Pen Knives of Pen Niff’. It was an unimaginatively convenient location for a pen knife shop one might think, and if I didn’t know that this story were true, I myself might doubt its veracity. But of course it is true - it’s just a remarkable and rather tidy coincidence.

Let’s begin our story again - at the beginning - where all good stories (and indeed all terrible stories) before it began. Young Orson grew up surrounded by the mines of South Wales and he would have worked in those very mines were it not for his parents cranium-bashing twerpery. The reasons for this stem from one man: a cruel travelling tinker named, with not a hint of originality, Marvin the Tinker - who had found a bed at the Dongle residence in early 1950s. Orson himself was, at the time, no more than a twinkle in Mr Dongle’s lazy eye; in fact, his mother and father had only just moved to the town of Pen Niff (like many before them, they had left Hollywood to make it big in South Wales). At the time, Mr Dongle had not yet looked for work, although he had expressed to Marvin a dream for working in ‘the mines of Pen Niff’ (which he had dreamt so much about when living in the Hollywood Hills). Alas, it was not to be. You see, Marvin the Tinker savoured the Welsh dog pie and imported beers the Dongles supplied him and he quickly decided that he’d rather like to stay with them in Pen Niff - forever. And so, one Tuesday night, he weaved a fanciful tale to help him achieve permanent residence in their household. That Wednesday, he delivered the yarn with theatrical intonations to the idiotic audience of Mr and Mrs Dongle - who barely a dozen IQ points between them (having pawned the others to buy ‘magic’ beans and Swedish retail furniture).

And what Marvin told them, with feigned regret, was that ‘the mines’ that Mr Dongle had dreamt of did not actually exist; they were no more than fables, urban myths. The real mines, he suggested, were evil things. He reported that not only had he read books about it but he also knew from reliable witnesses that, in the second world war, a German U-Boat had accidentally mistook South Wales for North France. Under the command of Adolph Hitler’s asinine cousin, Barry - commonly known as Barry “not the only black sheep of the family” Hitler - the army placed several thousand mines in the small village of Pen Niff, South Wales - the town where the Dongles now lived.

Mr and Mrs Dongle were chilled to the marrow. They thanked Marvin for the information, for his honesty and they told him that he must, of course, stay forever (after all, it was too dangerous to walk the hills outside). That night, after much deliberation they laid down the Golden House Rule: ‘No won Cannes leaf ze Howse’- which, in layman’s terms may be transliterated as: ‘No one can leave the house’ . So, 18 months later, when little Dongle Orson was born - the Golden House Rule applied to him as well.

Orson was damaged greatly by these sanctions on his freedom. Indeed, he had no brothers, sisters or pets and, what’s more, his parents were mental defectives. As for Marvin the Tinker - he stole from them and beat up Mr Dongle to the point of becoming obnoxious. The situation, Orson considered, was not ideal. However, he decided that if he were to get anything worthwhile at all out of his childhood years he would just have to improvise. So Orson scoured the flat with a fine tooth comb in search of something that he could befriend. His father - idiot that he was - had insisted on buying the ‘FINE! Tooth Comb’TM after seeing a late-night infomercial professing the virtues of combing one’s teeth. It was only afterwards - when he opened the parcel and excitedly read the instructions - that he realised not only that he had no hair on his teeth that he could comb, but that he had no teeth at all and the whole thing had been an elaborate con.

Anyway, Orson searched the whole house. He found nothing downstairs, apart from a fork and a table, and he found nothing upstairs apart from an empty bean can and a small cardboard cut-out of Dale Winton that his mother liked to talk to when she had been drinking dirt. This upset young Orson, and he fell to the floor of his bedroom in tears of sorrow. His sorrow turned to anger and he banged the floor. His parents told him to be quiet - he might set off the mines, they said. But this just made Orson bang harder. He thumped and he banged and he pounded the floor. Eventually, he struck the floorboards so hard that his hands crashed through the medium density fibreboard and into the space below. Orson, shocked by his own power, reached into the space and took out something which was nestled in a cloth there. He looked at it, amazed: it was a swiss army knife.

And the rest - as they say - is history.

Further reading: Pen Knives of Pen Niff: The Later part of the Early Years of Orson Dongle