Mini collection 39

some celluloid friends

Mini collection 23

When I was a child almost everything I had was small. The smaller the better, as far as I was concerned. If my toys were on a miniature scale, then I could pack a whole world onto the kitchen rug. Five of the above little dolls are from my childhood. The second from the left is Miss Julia Locket, bought quite recently from a car boot sale, still in her plastic bubble -- she is a doll I wished for as a child. She has a serene and knowing face, like a fortune-teller. To her right is another new doll, bought to mark the changing times.
     All the others are about forty years old. The one with pink hair was prized as the most minuscule of all -- she also lived in some sort of plastic pod, now lost. Lucy and Angela, the two without clothes in the middle, were central to my life for far too long. Lucy (and several unnamed, unloved identical sisters) had an ever expanding wardrobe of clothes made from tiny rectangles of cloth with a cross cut in the middle as a head-hole and a fraying scrap of the same fabric for a belt. These outfits were haute couture in my mind and I never seemed to tire of taking them on and off again.
     Angela once had a pink duffel coat attached to that hood. What happened to it? I know what happened to Angela -- she got locked in the loft at my old house for about twenty years. Deeply traumatised, she was only freed from her prison when I crept into the loft a few years ago looking for my old school exercise books. I also found evidence of another crime that day: Muggins, my ancient red plastic mug, had also been incarcerated there for even longer, abandoned after being cruelly used by my father to bail out a roof leak. Muggins was my equivalent of a dummy and I used to chew it (disgusting, I know). My father unfortunately did a degree in Education and Child Psychology when I was a toddler and used me to practise on. I had been encouraged to throw my actual dummy on the fire as an act of 'empowerment'. I will do a blogpost on the study he did of me -- it's funny.
     The kid in the pink knitted dress is an interloper, the pathetic replacement for lost Angela but clearly lacking her empathy and quiet charisma.
     The last doll is Belinda, one of several such dolls bought from the Cambridge Toy Shop during holidays in the Fens at my great-aunt Winnie's house. I played with these girls a lot because they had cost me nearly all my holiday money, but they were no match for Lucy and Angela.

Dolls

This post is entirely inspired by Christine Shanks' fantastic photographs of dolls (which, incidentally, I got to via The Sketchbook Project, for which I have Barbara to thank -- the wonderful maze of the Internet).
     I don't want to abuse Christine's copyright by reproducing any of her photos here but they are really worth a look. Her photos are much much better than mine. I tried to get some of the soulfulness of her images into mine but it was really difficult.

Still, I enjoyed going round the house looking for strange little people.

I usually think of this trio as a family, although it's obvious that the child comes from an entirely different gene pool that did not suffer from anemia.

I think this Mexican dolly has just committed a crime, probably baby-snatching.

Miss Julia Locket is serene and her gaze suggests she knows what the future holds.

This chap is shocked at everything he sees going on in the world. "Oy! Shtop dat!"

Farewell, farewell...

So long, lady...

I hope you're not freaked out by heads. There are a lot of heads in our house (future post, no doubt), including this one. I feel a particular affinity with her as she reminds me of myself as a child. See what you think:

Dolly Darlings

It was the overwhelming nostalgia I feel for my lost Dolly Darlings that first led me to Kitsch and Curious Elaine's blog. In fact, until recently, I wasn't even aware that the dolls I loved as a child were even branded as Dolly Darlings. To me they were individuals with their own names: DeeDee, Katherine, Samantha, Belinda and, I think, Jennifer. Many of my dolls were called Samantha or Belinda in those days -- they didn't have strong enough personalities to reserve a name just for themselves. But DeeDee and Katherine, along with Lucy and Angela, had strong personalities.

Katherine: not really so maternal

       DeeDee was a Sixties chick, a go-getter and a bit of a radical. Katherine was, in my imagination, Scottish and rather disapproving -- she applied a motherly brake to DeeDee's overarching ambitions. Lucy and Angela were different sorts of dolls.

Lucy couture

      Lucy was a tiny rubber doll with a vast wardrobe of fraying frocks all made in the same way: a rectangle of fabric with a head hole and integral ties to fasten it at her back.

Angela

 Angela was also rubber, slightly bigger. She originally had a pink fleecy duffel coat. Now, shockingly, all that remains is the hood, which is slightly kinky. But she must be forgiven as she suffered years of trauma, having been abandoned in our loft, only to be found after about a decade, perhaps having had the rest of her duffel coat nibbled off by owls, who knows.

DeeDee and Katherine, post-guillotine

      But, worse still, all that remains of DeeDee and Katherine is their heads. And I can't even remember why.
           Recently I acquired Miss Julia Locket.

Miss Julia Locket: wise and intuitive

I never had a Julia Locket as a child, but, strangely, I actually find her more evocative than the dolls and toys that I have owned for around forty years. Her gaze is intense and she makes me think of a little plastic Sybil (of the Delphic kind, not Mrs Basil Fawlty).
      All these photos were part of a project I did in 2008 and they make up a larger piece:

Apart from Julia Locket, all the images show toys I've had since childhood. I wanted to see whether these long-owned toys had any particular aura of 'lovedness' but in all honesty I'm not sure they do, which is sad, I think. Perhaps it's because I've betrayed them by turning to Julia Locket.