Jacky Daydream Read online

  I’d go and whisper to her at every opportunity, imagining her so fiercely she seemed to wriggle out of her wrapping paper, slide out from the pile of Biddy’s scarves and hats, and climb all the way down her quilted dressing gown to play with me. My imagination embellished her a little too extravagantly. When I opened her up at long last on Christmas Day, her bland sewn face with dot eyes and a red crescent-moon smile seemed crude and ordinary. How could she be my amazing teenage friend?

  Another Christmas I had a more sophisticated teenage doll, a very glamorous Italian doll with long brown hair and big brown eyes with fluttering eyelashes. She wore a stylish suedette jacket and little denim jeans and tiny strappy sandals with heels. When I undressed her, I was tremendously impressed to see she had real bosoms. This was a world before Barbie. She must have been one of the first properly modelled teenage dolls. I was totally in awe of her.

  I had been reading in Biddy’s Sunday Mirror about Princess Ira, a fifteen-year-old precociously beautiful Italian girl who was involved with a much older man. I called my doll Ira and she flaunted herself all round my bedroom, posing and wiggling and chatting up imaginary unsuitable boyfriends. I shuffled after her, changing her outfits like a devoted handmaid.

  I had one real china doll from Biddy. She saved up ten shillings (fifty pence, but a fortune to us in those days) and bought her from an antique shop in Kingston. She wasn’t quite a Mabel. She had limp mousy hair and had clearly knocked around a little. She was missing a few fingers and she had a chip on her nose but she still had a very sweet expression. I loved her, and her Victorian clothes fascinated me – all those layers of petticoats and then frilly drawers, but she was difficult to play with. She was large and unwieldy and yet terrifyingly fragile. I could move her arms and legs but they creaked ominously. I brushed her real hair but it came out in alarming handfuls, and soon I could see her white cloth scalp through her thinning hair.

  I wish Biddy had been fiercer with me and made me keep her in pristine condition. She’d be happy living in my Victorian house. I’d never let some silly little girl undress her down to her drawers and comb her soft hair. She never really came alive for me. I can’t even remember her name.

  The best Christmas dolls ever were my Old Cottage twins. Old Cottage dolls were very special. I’d mist up the special glass display case peeping at them in Hamleys. They were quite small but wondrously detailed: hand-made little dolls with soft felt skin, somehow wired inside so they could stand and stride and sit down. One Old Cottage doll in little jodhpurs and black leather boots could even leap up on her toy horse and gallop. The dolls were dressed in a variety of costumes. You could choose an old-fashioned crinoline doll, an Easter bonnet girl, even a fairy in a silver dress and wings. I preferred the Old Cottage girls in ordinary everyday clothes – gingham dresses with little white socks and felt shoes. Every doll had a slightly different face and they all had different hairstyles. Some were dark, some were fair; some had curls, but most had little plaits, carefully tied.

  Biddy knew which I’d like best. She chose a blonde girl with plaits and a dark girl with plaits, one in a blue flowery dress, one in red checks. Then she handed them over to Ga. She must have been stitching in secret for weeks and weeks. When I opened my box on Christmas morning, it was a wondrous treasure chest. I unwrapped my Old Cottage twins and fell passionately in love with them at first sight. Then I opened a large wicker basket and discovered their clothes. Ga had made them little camel winter coats trimmed with fur, pink party dresses, soft little white nighties and tiny tartan dressing gowns, and a school uniform each – a navy blazer with an embroidered badge, a white shirt with a proper little tie, a pleated tunic, even two small felt school satchels.

  I was in a daze of delight all Christmas Day. I could hardly bear to put my girls down so that I could eat up my turkey and Christmas pudding. I’d give anything to have those little dolls now with their lovingly stitched extensive wardrobe.

  * * *

  There’s a Christmas scene at the start and end of one of my books. Which do you think it is?

  * * *

  It’s Clean Break.

  I was getting too big to believe in Santa but he still wanted to please me. I found a little orange journal with its own key; a tiny red heart soap; a purple gel pen; cherry bobbles for my hair; a tiny tin of violet sweets; a Jenna Williams bookmark; and a small pot of silver glitter nail varnish.

  But Em thinks it’s going to be the best Christmas ever, especially when her stepdad gives her a real emerald ring – but it all goes horribly wrong. She has a tough time throughout the next year, but it’s Christmas Eve again in the last chapter. Someone comes knocking at the door and it looks as if this really will be a wonderful Christmas.

  21

  Books

  WHENEVER I READ writers’ autobiographies, I always love that early chapter when they write about their favourite children’s books. I was a total book-a-day girl, the most frequent borrower from Kingston Public Library. I think I spent half my childhood in the library. It meant so much to me to borrow books every week. It gives me such joy now to know that I’m currently the most borrowed author in British libraries.

  In those other autobiographies people mention maybe six favourites, or select their top ten fiction characters. I can’t choose! I feel as if I’m juggling my way through thousands of books, standing in a stadium jam-packed with fiction characters. They’re all waving at me and mouthing, Pick me! Pick me!

  I’ll pick Enid Blyton first. She wasn’t ever my favourite author but she got me reading. I pored over Pookie the white rabbit and the Shelf Animal books, but I couldn’t work out what each word said. Then I went to school in Lewisham and learned that the c-a-t sat on the m-a-t, but I didn’t really call that reading because it was so slow and laborious and there wasn’t a real story.

  I can’t remember the magic moment when it all came together and I stopped stabbing the words with my finger and muttering each sound. I could suddenly just do it. Harry had read me all three Faraway Tree books and now I read them too. I spent months and months reading all the Enid Blytons I could find in the library. I didn’t have to think about it. I didn’t have to struggle with a single word. I didn’t have to strain to understand what was going on. I could just let my eyes glide over the comfortably big print and experience all her different worlds.

  Unlike most children, I didn’t care for the Blyton mystery stories. I found the Secret Sevens and the Famous Fives boring. None of the children seemed to have much personality apart from George. I always like to read about fierce tomboy girls, though I was mostly a meek girly-girl myself.

  I did rather enjoy some of the Adventure books. I owned a second-hand copy of The Mountain of Adventure. Somewhere in this book – presumably up the mountain – the children discovered a cave behind a waterfall and set up some sort of camp there. It seemed an incredibly romantic concept to me. I’d crawl under the living-room table with a doll or two and pretend the checked tablecloth was the waterfall. There was another underground cave in the book, filled with medieval religious figurines studded with jewels. I found this an awe-inspiring chapter too. We weren’t a religious family and I’d certainly never been in a Catholic church, but somehow I’d seen a statue of a Madonna holding baby Jesus. I thought she was beautiful. The idea of a whole heavenly host of Madonnas cradling a nursery of Holy Infants was captivating. I imagined them taller than me, with real sapphires for eyes and solid gold haloes on their heads like celestial hats.

  Even so, I preferred Blyton in more everyday mode. She wrote a book I particularly liked called Hollow Tree House about two children who run away and hide in – where else? – a hollow tree. I longed passionately for my own tree house, and planned, down to the finest detail, the things I would keep there (my favourite books, my Woolworths notebooks, my drawing book and tin of crayons, my Mandy photos), as if I thought I could conjure a sturdy tree growing out of our concrete balcony. There were plenty in the wilderness behind the flats,