I hope you’ve read about Lydia Scott’s childhood in wartime Ukraine in the Dorseyland post “How my teacher got to kindergarten”. Here’s something a little different from “Our Miss Kizlyk”, an article she submitted to a story competition held by Good Old Days magazine, which claimed the prize.

My Last Doll

One late fall during the early 1950s, my mother came home from shopping in the city and very excitedly told me about the wonderful boy doll she had seen at a department store. As I listened, Mother described this beautiful toddler boy, dressed in red corduroy overalls, matching cap and stripped long sleeved shirt. On his feet were real size 0 baby shoes. He sounded so real to me and I remember wishing I could have him.
Times were hard. My father was very sick and only could do odd jobs when he felt a bit better. My brother had quit school to help out by working at construction jobs, and my mother took up cleaning other people’s houses to help pay the mortgage, dress us and put food on the table. I knew she couldn’t afford him, but I felt it wouldn’t hurt to ask if I could get the doll for Christmas.
Mother explained that he was very expensive and we couldn’t afford him, and besides, I was too big for dolls anyway, (I was 12, almost 13!). So I swallowed my disappointment and knew the subject was closed, but that didn’t stop me from asking her all kinds of questions about him in the weeks before Christmas. I found out he had a hard plastic head with eyes that closed, a soft rubber, moulded, one-piece body with separate fingers and he was the size of a one-year-old. How I dreamed about that doll.

Our house had a summer kitchen that wasn’t heated, and we used it as a cold-storage area for all our overflow. Each year my younger sister and I would brave that cold room shortly before Christmas to see if we could find what Mother had hidden in the way of gifts. That year I dearly hoped that in our search I might come across my dream doll. Without my sister in tow, I sneaked into the room one day after school to once again try my luck, and that’s when I found the big rectangular box, hidden in the folds of a summer coat – MY DOLL! I didn’t open the box, but studied the picture on the front, then carefully put it back where I found it. I was ecstatic and so delighted that I was sure anyone looking at me would know I had peeked.

We always opened our gifts after we returned from Midnight Mass, so it was pure torture for me to sit through the service, then walk the one mile home before I could finally open the box and hold my longed for doll. Unknown to my mother, I had canvassed any neighbours who had toddlers for outgrown baby clothes, which I kept hidden in the attic, so I would have something to dress this wonderful toddler in. When I finally did unwrap him, he was everything I was expecting, and to this day I can’t remember anything that anyone else in the family received.
At first I called him Willy, after a little Korean boy I saw on my friend’s TV, then changed the name to Tommy, after the boy I had a crush on but never spoke to, but finally settled on Robert, after my favourite cowboy star, Robert Livingston of “The Three Mesquiteers”. Robert he remained.
My friend Carolyn, two years younger, also got a boy doll she named Terry that Christmas. Hers was smaller and wasn’t as nice as my Robert, but we enjoyed them both very much. (The following Christmas, she got a doll the same as Robert, but hers was a girl called Wendy.)
Right after Christmas, we compared our dolls, brought out all the baby clothes and played house for hours. On nice days, we piled our boxes of clothes, dolls and anything else we needed on a sled and took the dolls for an airing. When warm weather came, we used wagons and took many trips to a horse pasture where we had picnics and enjoyed being “mommies” to our two boys. We made the dolls walk by holding them under their arms and swinging them from side to side, making their legs move. We also talked for them, using higher-pitched voices than our own.
No one in our class knew that we still played with dolls, and the summer I was 13, my parents switched me to a new separate school, and I would only see my friend Carolyn after school and on weekends and holidays. That was fine with me, but it wouldn’t be the same, as we often made plans at school as to what we would do with the two dolls when we got home. Now I was going to have new friends, and at 13 I felt too big to let the other girls know I still played with dolls, so I started to hide my playing.
My brother was working in a new subdivision helping put up houses, and met some people already living in a finished one. He never mentioned it to me, so I had no idea that he knew one of the girls m my class in the new school. When we introduced ourselves and she heard my name, she announced to everyone that my brother told her I was still playing with dolls. I could have died of shame! From that moment on, Robert only came out of the closet when no one was around, or I took him into the attic where I could make him walk and talked for him without anyone around.

Eventually, as I got older, Robert became relegated to the closet or attic, where his rubber body disintegrated and all I had left was his head. That too got lost over the years.

Many years later, I stopped at a second-hand store called “Junkeroo” and saw a doll’s head, almost like my Robert’s. This one had his mouth slightly opened, showing two teeth and the tip of a tongue, but it. was just like my Robert! At $20, I couldn’t refuse the doll’s head, so bought him with the hopes of somehow making a body for him. Again it took years, but I did give him a cloth body, and after dressing him, memories flooded back. Carolyn learned what I had done and told me that she wanted to see how Robert looked, because she wanted her two dolls fixed as well.
Sadly, Carolyn died before we could get this job done. I asked her relatives if I could have her old dolls, which were in bad disrepair. When I got them home, there was her “Terry” and her “Wendy” – only the heads as the bodies were long gone. I got busy, and now Robert, Terry and Wendy sit upstairs, dressed in fine clothes, and decorate my living room each Christmas, under the tree.

My last doll was my most beloved doll, and although the original is gone, the replacement looks and feels the same to me, bringing back happy memories of the carefree days of my youth. I know that Carolyn would be very pleased to see those three doll friends together once more, bodies repaired and dressed as they used to be when we played house and learned how to be mothers.

At right, the three dolls reunited, repaired and dressed in more up-to-date clothes, sit by Lydia’s tree last Christmas. Robert’s on the floor in blue, Wendy is sitting holding a rag Lulu doll, and Terry is in the highchair.