HOW WE BONDED OVER A BIZARRE MUTUAL LOATHING OF DOLLS!
THE only person I’ve met who shared my peculiar phobia about dolls was Princess Margaret.
She was the only one who understood: we agreed on the dangers, the terrors — and she was more endangered than I ever was.
When her daughter, Sarah, was a child, the Princess was often presented with a magnificent doll along with a bouquet of roses. Unable to touch it, she relied on one of her ladies-in-waiting to snatch it away.
My own doll phobia struck at age six, when my grandmother gave me a rigid, heavy china ‘baby’. Its painted eyelids were at half-mast. Its open rosebud mouth exposed two horrible little teeth.
Where its head was screwed to its body, there was a ridge like thick wire around its neck.
Stiff arms reached upwards. It was obscenely
dead. Nanny must have encouraged me one day to lift it. I remember the feeling of acute distaste as I laid it on my knee and watched the eyelids crank down from some mechanism in its head.
I must have taken off its clothes, for it was its horrific naked state that caused me to scream as I’d never screamed.
Since then I’ve always managed to avoid dolls that cry, have bottles of water pushed down their throats and need their nappies changed.
Perhaps worst of all are those dolls that walk by themselves. If ever a doll walked towards me, I would simply pass out.
On one occasion recently, in my 70th year, we went to a Sunday lunch party where, to avoid there being 13 of us, someone had put a Victorian doll in a high chair on our host’s right.
I told myself to be calm and make no fuss. But I was on our host’s left, just a yard from the doll.
Could I eat, think, talk normally with it staring at me? I couldn’t. Very apologetic, I asked for it to be moved, which it was, at once.
It so happened that our hostess was a friend of Princess Margaret: she was used to doll crises.
On another occasion, the Princess and I had gone together to a charity ball at the Pump Rooms in Bath. To get to the ballroom we had to walk along a passage between glass windows full of waxworks in period costume.
Princess Margaret was supposed to walk tranquilly beside whoever was the host. I was to follow a little behind. We were both terrified.
Before we set off, she turned to me, took my hand and said if we walked with our free hands sheltering our eyes, we would be able to make it. And somehow we did. Goodness knows what the officials thought, but we were in no state to care.