“When I was One, I had just begun.
When I was Two,I was nearly new.
When I was Three, I was hardly me."
AA Milne said that beautifully. But when I was three I was determined to be me.
For Christmas the year I turned three (I was a January baby) my mother gave me a wonderful doll. She was made of some sort of squishy plastic and she had a series of tubes inside that you could fill with water so that she either cried or wet her nappy. I dealt with the latter so early on that I can’t remember ever changing a nappy. Perhaps I was given this doll because my mother had a new baby at the time and we had to love her.
As a matter of fact, I don’t remember my younger sister being a baby. Likely I was too absorbed in my doll. First she had a magical wonderful name. Rubber Doll. She was my only doll and my mother had spent night after secretive night making clothes for Rubber Doll’s Christmas debut.
Rubber Doll had knitted underpants and a singlet, a pretty crocheted dress, a knitted coat, a bib, a hat, and mittens all in white. She didn’t ever have nappies, which is lucky bearing in mind that I ripped out her leaky innards.
Until I went to school, she was my best friend, despite me having younger and older sisters. Later on, I learnt to make clothes for her on the sewing machine, one of those foot pedal things. She was the best-dressed doll on the block, but never fashionable because she was a baby doll. I don’t have a single photo of her, because in those days we didn’t have a camera. We barely had anything, as a matter of fact.
When I was barely me, my father deserted my mother for a younger woman and left his wife and three children in a two bedroom house, the lease of which he had paid for a year. The new baby meant that my mother couldn’t work, so in those early days, so that we could eat, we had a lodger who occupied the front room, which was the biggest in the house. We four females shared a tiny bedroom that had a double bed my mother and baby sister occupied and bunk bed for my big sister and me. You could barely move around the beds.
We had to be quiet because of the lodger and I don’t remember a thing about him/her. I think he/she left before the year was up but that can’t be right. It wasn’t until my little sister was about three that my sisters and I moved into that big room. I would have been six. My mother kept the small bedroom as hers.
We lived in that house until I was eleven and we shifted to Adelaide into a worse situation. My uncle’s wife had run away and left him with two small children. We lived with him in my grandmother's house so that my mother could take care of my little cousins as well. About a year later, their mother came back and took them. Not long after that my uncle remarried and moved out.
Now, for the first time without little children to care for, my beautiful and smart mother had a chance to find a good job. After that, she found a new rich husband, and she shifted out with my little sister, leaving my big sister, now seventeen and me, thirteen, to finish our education under the supervision of our grandmother who had recently retired as a teacher and returned to Adelaide too
.
Then my sister ran off and got married and I was alone with grandma and Rubber Doll, for whom I still made new clothes. Sad to say, she was by now crippled, Rubber Doll that is. One of her arms had worn out and broken off and the man in the doll shop didn’t have a match, so her left arm was smaller and darker than her right. I did worry, but she didn’t. She accepted her disability with charm and grace.
The time came that I married and had a lovely little daughter of my own. I couldn’t part with my old confidante, Rubber Doll, but my daughter was appalled by her. She would keep leaving her in strange places, like the incinerator or the back of the garden. Then one day Rubber Doll disappeared. If you don’t like sad stories do not read on.
Months later I had been shopping and as I was walking home, I spotted something in the gutter. I moved over and picked it up. It was Rubber Doll’s crippled arm. I took it home and cried. I’m crying as I am typing.
I think the dog next door must have found her and eaten the rest of her.
The moral of the story is ... no moral. Life happens. We all love something or someone and we can’t guard them forever. Eventually the equivalent of the dog next door will get them.
This is one of the reasons why I write romance – it keeps the dogs next door away.
"When I was Four,I was not much more.
When I was Five, I was just alive.
But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.”
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