Dolls

Cheryl wrote a lovely post about being five, and Doris followed it up with her experience of being five (which wasn't so pleasant), and mentioned her brother mangling her doll and the trouble it got her into.

I was given a doll when I was five, too, but I'm afraid the person who mangled it was me. I never did figure out what you were supposed to do with dolls. They couldn't climb trees, were useless on bicycles, and when it came to games they just sat there, staring spookily.

In fact I was given two dolls, one by an aunt and the other by a grandmother. (Neither of them knew me very well. OBVIOUSLY.) One doll I mangled in the chain of my bicycle when I took it for a ride and the silly thing just didn't hang on tight enough, and the other ... well, I cut its hair, expecting it to grow back, and then I poked its eyes trying to figure out how they closed when you lay the doll down, and managed to somehow (gag) poke them RIGHT INTO ITS OWN HEAD. I was puzzled and somewhat sickened. I'd only had the doll a couple of days and already it was bald and had holes for eyes, and its eyeballs rattled around in its skull. What kind of toy was that? Useless, creepy thing.

My mother was horrified when she saw what I'd done. She had wanted to take a photo of me holding it to send my grandmother, along with the thank you letter. She took the photo anyway, quickly, before I destroyed the doll completely. With a hat on the doll and from a distance you could hardly tell that it was just a doll corpse.

I gave the other one a haircut, too, in an effort to improve the way it looked, and then it also required a hat. Then I applied Savlon and bandaged its wounded arm and hand very carefully, but it never did heal, and neither of them grew back their hair, so I lost interest.