mns  2005-01-04 21:10  Miscellaneous Pieces   

When I was four years old, I was given a dolls’ house, brightly painted in cream and red with two squat chimneys and a pointed roof. In the eaves was a large battery, which my father had positioned and off which ran an electric circuit, so that when I pressed the little blue buttons in the front garden, tiny light bulbs were switched on in the house. My mother had stuck a broad red velvet ribbon on the stairs as a carpet, and pieces of felt in the different rooms on the floor. The walls were covered in pastel shades of marbled paper, and the furniture varied greatly in both quality and design from blue plastic beds, to a mahogany table, chairs, and piano. The painted fire blazed in the downstairs grates, and the kitchen dresser was stacked with tiny plates.
The dolls’ house people lived there – they consisted of two sets of twins, Bert and Nan, Freddie and Flossie, and their three uncles. The uncles resembled pale pink snowmen with legs, and blank featureless faces, kindly chaps who ran the show for the four tiny dolls whose clothes distinguished boy from girl. All the dolls were made from rubber and while the twins all looked like they had come from similar moulds and were of a similar texture – Nan was different in that she could not swim. In their house I ran them up and down the stairs, I made them a tray from an empty packet of Sweet Afton, and they used this as a toboggan in their front garden on the days I deemed that it was snowing. If it was raining they slid down the stairs on it when the uncles were busy elsewhere. Nan practised daily on the piano, and the others went fishing in an imaginary stream while sitting on the garden wall. At night they slept safely in their blue plastic beds, while the uncles sat guard downstairs.

Housebound they were not. I took them out. A favourite place was Stanley Falls in deepest darkest Africa and while their uncles went looking for Dr Livingstone in the jungle, my four twins stood at the side of the bath while I put in the plug and turned on the taps. They plunged from on high into the down flow of water where they twirled and spiralled until they resurfaced further down the bath. Except of course poor Nan who invariably had to be rescued either by her siblings or by one of the uncles who had fortuitously happened to return early to check on proceedings. Mouth to mouth resuscitation and the pummelling of her little rubber back, and Nan’s breathing returned to normal and she lived to try to swim another day.
Over a period of years, she lost a foot, possibly bitten off by a lion on the loose, or trampled on by a herd of elephants. Or, indeed, as my mother
said, maybe I had been responsible when I had the measles and couldn’t think of anything better to do. And of course Freddie and Flossie never looked quite the same after I put their heads in my pencil sharpener and pared them.
Thirty years later I definitely saw them on Star Trek, multiples of them in fact, with elongated heads and benign but intelligent expressions on their now grown up faces, their adventurous natures having brought them beyond the final frontier to a braver newer world.