Jean Stevens, a Christchurch resident, talks about the day her favourite doll suffered a horrific head transplant.
Jean, aged 84, can still remember the day she got her very first doll’s pram for her 3rd birthday. She smiles in the afternoon sunshine as she tells me about it. “It was brown, and of course very old fashioned, as they were in those days” she laughs.
Although she had many dolls, Jean explained that it was her favourite one that got the most rides in the beautiful new pram.
Unfortunately, tragedy struck one day when the doll’s china face broke. “Luckily in those days we had doll menders,” Jean tells me, “So my mother and I took it to be repaired”.
The next two weeks were an anxious wait, but when the time finally came to collect her favourite doll, there was a horrible surprise in store for Jean.
The doll maker had not been able to replace the china face, and had done so instead with a paper-mache type material. “I cried and cried when I saw it” Jean recounts, but told me she eventually warmed to the doll again.
She still took her doll for many walks in the beautiful new pram. “We walked a lot in those days” Jean added. “Most people didn’t have cars.”
Jean, who worked in London as a Private Secretary for 40 years, moved to Christchurch with her second husband, James Stevens. She is now sadly widowed, but enjoys her afternoons sitting in the sunshine in Bournemouth.
