OK, so I have two. One involving my Mum, the other my Dad.
The first one was when I was probably, I’m guessing around 4 years old. I was out on the backstairs at our house at Westmead, with my younger sister Laura. I don’t remember there being an Aimee or if there was she would have just been born.
I remember distinctly being at the garage end of the back stairs as we were trying to play shops and this end could come up to our waist so that we could turn the individual steps into the supermarket shelves and at the end we had the ‘check out’ area.
We must have played this game day in and day out.
One day Mum came out and she said she had a surprise for us. She went in and packaged up in boxes were; all the empty (and washed out) food containers with the labels still on. What we would put in the recycling bin today (but ‘recycling’ didn’t exist back then). There must have been 50 different items that she’d saved up from the last few weeks of what we’d eaten. Breakfast cereals, egg cartons, cleaned out cans, you name it.
Everything to set up our own ‘shop’.
My second memory involves my Dad, I am guessing I was around the same age, perhaps even younger. It was a Saturday and we had spent the morning at the church fete, where I am assuming my Dad was working or helping. It would have been at St Andrew’s Church in Parramatta. (Now the Bavarian Beer Cafe).
Mum had taken me home to have a sleep after lunch. Later in the afternoon Dad came home and had bought me a doll that nobody had bought at the Fete and thought that I would like. To my Dad, the doll looked something like this:
To me, however, it looked something like this:
I cried and cried and cried until he took the “Golliwog” back to the fete. (Or maybe just out to the bin – may he/she rest in peace).
But I was also crying, because my Dad did this really nice thing for me and I completely panicked and didn’t want it. See – the “don’t be nice to me” kicked in early with me.
By the way: I understand that these dolls and the term “golliwog” is not the correct term and is a little racist and may cause offence, I mean no offence, but that is what the dolls were actually called back in the 70’s/early 80’s. I apologise for any offence.
