Buys and dolls

UPFRONT:WHEN I SIT down to write about it, about the teeny-weeny doll's house bath mat that I purchased by mistake on eBay instead of a full-size one and which I then jokily offer as a gift to readers, I don't actually expect anyone to write in. It turns out, however, that several correspondents, in these bleak times, are not about to look a gift bath mat, however miniature, in the mouth. And who can blame them?

Some of them write with moving urgency. Ciara, aged 12, knows of a hapless doll who keeps slipping every time she finishes having a bath, “so,” she pleads, “I really need your bath mat”. Others are in altruistic mode. Emily, for example, swears she has a friend called Fred who just got the sack from his job and has to move into a much smaller flat. “Can I give him your bath mat to cheer him and his new flat up?” she asks.

It’s a tricky one. A doll who keeps having life- and limb-threatening bathroom accidents or poor, possibly imaginary, Fred, who has just been fired and is in need of a laugh. And that’s before I tell you about Ann, for whom the image of a tiny bath mat brought up all sorts of childhood memories of her own doll’s house from the 1960s. She is, she writes, in “dire need” of a doll’s house bath mat. She has me at “dire”, it has to be said.

Fifteen years ago, when her mother went into a nursing home, Ann went back to her childhood home to clear out the house. Thinking of her then very young children, she took some of her old toys away with her, including the doll’s house. The plan was to refurbish it completely. An extension possibly. A patio? Definitely a good spring clean anyway and the completion of all those elusive domestic jobs she never got around to doing when she was a child.

A DIY enthusiast, Ann had been busy with the house in those days. It seems the young Ann was greatly inspired by Blue Peter's stickyback plastic demonstrations. On reclaiming the house she was delighted to see that, still in situ, all those years later, were the pink and white striped curtains she'd made for the bay windows – "always a problem area for curtain rails", she notes.

She got around the thorny bay window issue using K shapes cut from pink and white striped Winston's paper carrier bags – the K shapes made it look as though the curtains were permanently tied back. Ann said I wouldn't remember the South Great George's Street branch of Winston's, but that my mother might. And when I ask her, she says she does, however vaguely. It brings to her mind an Are You Being Served? style shop where you would get everything from stockings to spools of thread, carefully deposited in pink and white striped bags.

Ann says she was a solitary child. She spent hours and hours working on the doll’s house. Her favourite game was based on an emergency booklet issued by the government back then, kind of like an older version of former Fianna Fáil junior minister Joe Jacob’s infamous iodine tablets interview with Marian Finucane. Highlight: “You’ll be told when we are in an emergency. We’re not in an emergency.” And while we are on the subject, where is the redoubtable Joe Jacob when we really need him? We should be told.

At the time, Ann’s biggest doll’s house worry came courtesy of the government’s booklet urging precautionary measures in difficult times. But how to construct a nuclear shelter under the stairs of her doll’s house when there were no stairs to speak of? It was a doll’s bungalow, after all. Ever inventive, she solved the dilemma using a hard plastic fireside mat, covered in cushions, which she says made a “cosy shelter for the doll’s family”.

She never did get around to refurbishing the house fully, though. She put the task on hold and let her children play away with the 1960s house that reflected many more styles and eras than that one alone. Some of it is cracked and chipped, much like her own childhood home at the time. And the doll family who inhabited the house always looked, she says, “more scary than cute” in the light of the 1990s.

One can only imagine how they must look now, blinking out from the twitching Winston’s curtains into the economic apocalypse of the noughties.

Why does she need my bath mat? Well, despite all her previous updates and improvements, “all the splendour and nuclear shelters”, as Ann puts it, the dolls never had a bath mat in their bathroom. “The gift of your unwanted purchase might be the incentive to finally refurbish this bijou residence,” she writes.

If my throwaway remark last week has turned into a competition and if the doll's mat is the prize, I'm inclined to declare Ann the winner. Still, I can't help thinking about Ciara and Emily. As we near the end of the financial world as we knew it, dolls' houses are the only way some people can afford to indulge their inner interior designer – and who am I to stand in their path? As Ibsen wrote in A Doll's House: "There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt." So I go back to eBay, this time purposely searching for doll's house bath mats, and discover a world of miniature scales to monitor any mini-fairy cake overindulgence and curved toilet rugs to catch any stray dolly drips.

And now Clare, Emily and Ann, I’ve got a bit of a miniature bathroom mat collection assembled. All your names are on them. Because these days, small really is beautiful.