A Lone Little Girl
by Polly S. Buck
I used to hear grown people telling of comical experiences they had had, and wonder sadly what in the world I should do for something to talk about when I became grown, for nothing ever happened to me. There was always the chance, of course, that it might yet, and I was hopeful, but days and months went by, and nothing ever did. Years passed, and still nothing. How could I know that, grown up at last, it would be the “nothing” that I would tell about? Perhaps a dull and uneventful youth, but a happy one.
Since both my brothers were older, they naturally considered a kid sister a bore and a drag, so I had to look elsewhere for companionship. Before schoolmates came into the picture, I found it in dolls. They were sometimes my children, sometimes my confidential friends.
The earliest of all, when I was just a toddler, was Emma, sent to me by my Aunt Emma in Atlanta; a rag doll stuffed with cotton. She had been for several years an inseparable companion, carried indiscriminately by an arm or leg or a bunch of her hair. “And Emma, too?” was always my query when I was told or invited to go anywhere, and the answer had better be in the affirmative, or I wouldn’t budge.
At one time or another, both of her arms and both of her legs had to be replaced with new ones; her kind, staring features re-embroidered several times, and her yellow wool hair added to as it became thinner. At all of these operations, Mother was very skillful and Emma remained still “the prettiest doll in the world, dears,” to quote a poem by Charles Kingsley in the second reader. She was like the Vermonter’s axe that he bragged he had used for twenty years. It had had helve and head replaced several times, but was still the same axe!
Then the inevitable time came: Emma met complete dissolution, and in a terrible way. Happening on one unguarded day, Harry’s puppy pounced on her and frisked proudly off across the yard with his victim dangling from his murderous little jaws. In spite of my frantic cries and attempts to drag her away from him, this monster literally shook her to pieces, and then lay down with the poor mutilated corpse under his paws and chewed to shreds what was left of it.
Harry feeling responsible as, of course, he should have, helped me collect the remnants and give them a decent funeral in the garden. I sobbed myself to sleep every night for a long while, with my empty arms aching for Emma’s lumpy comfort. Everyone was sympathetic, but they all said that I must remember that Emma had a good long life, and that I was getting too big for a rag doll, anyway. Perhaps I was.
The most beloved next doll was Tudie, who came when I was about seven. The beginning of her life was almost like the goopy Christmas stories you read in magazines, where a poor little girl presses her nose against the shop window where the doll glitters like a princess in frosty, spangly clothes, and on Christmas morning, humbly expecting nothing, lo, she finds it beside her bed!
Mother had gone to Covington to buy a Christmas present for each of us, and had taken Harry and me with her on the mule car (there was no charge for children, if accompanied by adults) to look at the store windows as a treat. In almost the first one we came to, among the conglomeration of all sorts of toys and hardware, was a lovely china doll about eighteen inches high, with blonde curls, the adorable expressionless doll face, and a filmy, ruffled pink dress and bonnet. I was entranced! It never occurred to me to presume to want to own it; just looking at her was heaven enough. It was as beautiful as a fairy, and to stand and gaze at it the whole time would have made my Covington trip perfect, but while Mother went to make her purchases, she told Harry to walk me all around the square and let me look in all the windows. I didn’t want to go, but he dragged me away by promising that after once around, we would come back to that lovely pink princess. But when we did return, she was no longer there! In that brief half-hour, some horrible person had come in and bought her and carried her away. I should never see the darling again!
I sobbed all the way home. Harry’s generous suggestion that I think of how happy some little girl was going to be on Christmas morning only turned the knife in the wound.
Of course, the end of the story is obvious. Mother was the one who had bought it, and it was all she could do to keep from opening the package on the car ride back to Oxford and healing my little broken heart. Dear old Aunt Tudie had given Mother money for a doll for me, so I named my new child after her. (She returned the compliment in the spring by naming her new calf for me).
How I adored that doll! I sewed for her, dressed and undressed her, brushed her hair until there was none left to brush, fed her by forcing between her teeth spoonfuls of flour-and-water-mixed milk, and finally pushed one spoonful a little too hard, and in went her lovely pearly teeth too, to rattle around somewhere down inside her for the rest of her life.
I made the most beautiful little dressing table for her from two paste-board A & P Coates thread boxes. One stood upright for the base, with the other fitted across the top. Around it I pinned a ruffle of flowered cloth from Mother’s scrap bag, and standing up on the top was an oval pocket mirror with the words, “Drink Coca-Cola” on the back in its famous cursive script. But the glory of the whole creation was the tiny hand mirror lying on the dressing table top. It was a bit of glass about an inch square, enclosed in two pieces of bright pink stiff paper, shaped with a handle, and had come in a Cracker Jack box.
Dolls were very well in their place, and vastly preferable to brothers, as a usual thing, but the little girls I met when I began school overtopped dolls as playmates, and I would walk alone anywhere in the village to their homes. I was an independent child, as brave as a lion -- as long as the daylight lasted. But once the shadows began to lengthen, I made cowardly tracks for home, and as soon as I reached our porch I would bawl, “M-o-t-h-e-r!” If she answered, all was well, and I could either go in or monkey around outside, just as I preferred.
A cat had an honorable place in a home as a mouse-killer, and as such was a part of the household equipment, like flypaper. They were loved and petted, especially by a little girl in the family, and if they would stand for it, often dressed up in doll clothes and pushed around in the doll carriage.
Since a conversation carried on with a cat usually consisted of only “kitty, kitty, kitty” and “scat,” they sometimes had no other name than Kitty – we had one called that for eleven years – but a dog, although not blessed with the rite of baptism, always had a baptismal name. Some popular ones were Rover, Barker, Spot, Blackie, Trixy, and the dog of Buster Brown, a funny-paper character whose adventures were the reading of the very young set, popularized the name Tige. The main object of a dog’s life, as we saw it, was to be a companion to a little boy. They trotted at their young masters’ heels all day, following them all over town and, unless shut up beforehand, tagged along to school at a discreet distance. Sometimes when discovered, they obeyed the gruff “Go home, sir!” and sometimes only made a feint of starting off in that direction, then came back and hung around the school yard, amicably exchanging sniffs with their other dog friends who came on the same errand, and frolicking with them until recess.
Neither master nor dog knew the meaning of the word “leash.” There was no “walking a dog;” a dog had all outdoors whenever he wanted it and got all the exercise he needed. In Oxford, the expression, “to lead a dog’s life” meant to lead a merry one; being a dog, or owning one, was an unmitigated pleasure, and being a child in Oxford during the first years of the twentieth century fulfilled Wordsworth’s lines: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young, was very heaven.”
Since both my brothers were older, they naturally considered a kid sister a bore and a drag, so I had to look elsewhere for companionship. Before schoolmates came into the picture, I found it in dolls. They were sometimes my children, sometimes my confidential friends.
The earliest of all, when I was just a toddler, was Emma, sent to me by my Aunt Emma in Atlanta; a rag doll stuffed with cotton. She had been for several years an inseparable companion, carried indiscriminately by an arm or leg or a bunch of her hair. “And Emma, too?” was always my query when I was told or invited to go anywhere, and the answer had better be in the affirmative, or I wouldn’t budge.
At one time or another, both of her arms and both of her legs had to be replaced with new ones; her kind, staring features re-embroidered several times, and her yellow wool hair added to as it became thinner. At all of these operations, Mother was very skillful and Emma remained still “the prettiest doll in the world, dears,” to quote a poem by Charles Kingsley in the second reader. She was like the Vermonter’s axe that he bragged he had used for twenty years. It had had helve and head replaced several times, but was still the same axe!
Then the inevitable time came: Emma met complete dissolution, and in a terrible way. Happening on one unguarded day, Harry’s puppy pounced on her and frisked proudly off across the yard with his victim dangling from his murderous little jaws. In spite of my frantic cries and attempts to drag her away from him, this monster literally shook her to pieces, and then lay down with the poor mutilated corpse under his paws and chewed to shreds what was left of it.
Harry feeling responsible as, of course, he should have, helped me collect the remnants and give them a decent funeral in the garden. I sobbed myself to sleep every night for a long while, with my empty arms aching for Emma’s lumpy comfort. Everyone was sympathetic, but they all said that I must remember that Emma had a good long life, and that I was getting too big for a rag doll, anyway. Perhaps I was.
The most beloved next doll was Tudie, who came when I was about seven. The beginning of her life was almost like the goopy Christmas stories you read in magazines, where a poor little girl presses her nose against the shop window where the doll glitters like a princess in frosty, spangly clothes, and on Christmas morning, humbly expecting nothing, lo, she finds it beside her bed!
Mother had gone to Covington to buy a Christmas present for each of us, and had taken Harry and me with her on the mule car (there was no charge for children, if accompanied by adults) to look at the store windows as a treat. In almost the first one we came to, among the conglomeration of all sorts of toys and hardware, was a lovely china doll about eighteen inches high, with blonde curls, the adorable expressionless doll face, and a filmy, ruffled pink dress and bonnet. I was entranced! It never occurred to me to presume to want to own it; just looking at her was heaven enough. It was as beautiful as a fairy, and to stand and gaze at it the whole time would have made my Covington trip perfect, but while Mother went to make her purchases, she told Harry to walk me all around the square and let me look in all the windows. I didn’t want to go, but he dragged me away by promising that after once around, we would come back to that lovely pink princess. But when we did return, she was no longer there! In that brief half-hour, some horrible person had come in and bought her and carried her away. I should never see the darling again!
I sobbed all the way home. Harry’s generous suggestion that I think of how happy some little girl was going to be on Christmas morning only turned the knife in the wound.
Of course, the end of the story is obvious. Mother was the one who had bought it, and it was all she could do to keep from opening the package on the car ride back to Oxford and healing my little broken heart. Dear old Aunt Tudie had given Mother money for a doll for me, so I named my new child after her. (She returned the compliment in the spring by naming her new calf for me).
How I adored that doll! I sewed for her, dressed and undressed her, brushed her hair until there was none left to brush, fed her by forcing between her teeth spoonfuls of flour-and-water-mixed milk, and finally pushed one spoonful a little too hard, and in went her lovely pearly teeth too, to rattle around somewhere down inside her for the rest of her life.
I made the most beautiful little dressing table for her from two paste-board A & P Coates thread boxes. One stood upright for the base, with the other fitted across the top. Around it I pinned a ruffle of flowered cloth from Mother’s scrap bag, and standing up on the top was an oval pocket mirror with the words, “Drink Coca-Cola” on the back in its famous cursive script. But the glory of the whole creation was the tiny hand mirror lying on the dressing table top. It was a bit of glass about an inch square, enclosed in two pieces of bright pink stiff paper, shaped with a handle, and had come in a Cracker Jack box.
Dolls were very well in their place, and vastly preferable to brothers, as a usual thing, but the little girls I met when I began school overtopped dolls as playmates, and I would walk alone anywhere in the village to their homes. I was an independent child, as brave as a lion -- as long as the daylight lasted. But once the shadows began to lengthen, I made cowardly tracks for home, and as soon as I reached our porch I would bawl, “M-o-t-h-e-r!” If she answered, all was well, and I could either go in or monkey around outside, just as I preferred.
A cat had an honorable place in a home as a mouse-killer, and as such was a part of the household equipment, like flypaper. They were loved and petted, especially by a little girl in the family, and if they would stand for it, often dressed up in doll clothes and pushed around in the doll carriage.
Since a conversation carried on with a cat usually consisted of only “kitty, kitty, kitty” and “scat,” they sometimes had no other name than Kitty – we had one called that for eleven years – but a dog, although not blessed with the rite of baptism, always had a baptismal name. Some popular ones were Rover, Barker, Spot, Blackie, Trixy, and the dog of Buster Brown, a funny-paper character whose adventures were the reading of the very young set, popularized the name Tige. The main object of a dog’s life, as we saw it, was to be a companion to a little boy. They trotted at their young masters’ heels all day, following them all over town and, unless shut up beforehand, tagged along to school at a discreet distance. Sometimes when discovered, they obeyed the gruff “Go home, sir!” and sometimes only made a feint of starting off in that direction, then came back and hung around the school yard, amicably exchanging sniffs with their other dog friends who came on the same errand, and frolicking with them until recess.
Neither master nor dog knew the meaning of the word “leash.” There was no “walking a dog;” a dog had all outdoors whenever he wanted it and got all the exercise he needed. In Oxford, the expression, “to lead a dog’s life” meant to lead a merry one; being a dog, or owning one, was an unmitigated pleasure, and being a child in Oxford during the first years of the twentieth century fulfilled Wordsworth’s lines: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young, was very heaven.”