“It’s Christopher!” shouted my sister, as a huge bundle wrapped in plastic fell from the attic on to the hall floor. “Christopher!”
“Who in the name of God is Christopher?” my baffled sister-in-law called from the kitchen.
It was one of the hottest weekends of the summer, and several members of my family were assembled in the west, starting the task of clearing out our family home. We were sweating and crying and laughing and cursing, sometimes all at the same time. Nobody was cursing more than my brother, who was being sautéed in the roasting wooden attic, from where he was tossing down long-forgotten items gathered during the marriage of our parents that had lasted for 65 years, and produced four children.
Christopher was a giant blue cat. When I say giant, I mean he was three feet tall, with an enormous face of white whiskers, and wearing a pair of yellow shorts. His tail was fatter than a human arm, and twice as long. He was the most hideous soft toy any of us had ever seen. He had a feline companion, who also duly fell out of the attic: the same cat in pink, wearing a green skirt; equally huge and with all those disturbing white whiskers. She was Mrs Christopher. They were one more nightmarish a sight than the other.
It was decades since we had laid eyes on Christopher and Mrs Christopher, both of whom went straight into the skip after we had all had a good laugh. We were soon to discover that there was a lot more of our childhood up there where Christopher and Mrs Christopher had come from.
There was faded black Scottie, a Scottie dog, rubbed bald with long-ago love. There was Lucy the Lamb in a pink gingham dress. There was a rabbit called Susan. One by one, they all went into the skip
Next out of the attic was Breadboard. Breadboard was a stout bald panda, so heavy he almost flattened my niece, who was standing below when he arrived with a thud. In beautifully written novels such as Evelyn Waugh’s febrile Brideshead Revisited, teddy bears have aristocratic names. Sebastian Flyte’s teddy bear in that book was called, grandly, Aloysius.
Breadboard the panda with his decidedly non-U name had belonged to my brothers. He was the least-cuddly toy you could ever imagine. He was stuffed with either sawdust or horsehair — or possibly lead, given his immense weight — and was completely unyielding to the touch. Which is how he got to be named Breadboard, because he was as solid and stiff as a cutting board.
“Do you remember,” my sister asked my eldest brother, who has long since put childhood things behind him, and is now in fact a retired man, “how when we drove to Kerry in the summer, you would put Breadboard’s arm out the window, and make it wave, and pretend he was directing traffic? All the cars would honk as they passed.”
There was more. There was faded black Scottie, a Scottie dog, rubbed bald with long-ago love. There was Lucy the Lamb in a pink gingham dress. There was a rabbit called Susan. One by one, they all went into the skip. Christopher. Mrs Christopher. Breadboard. Scottie. Lucy. Susan.
And then Teddy came down.
Teddy belonged to me. My beloved late aunt Maine gave me Teddy when I was a very small girl. Teddy was a fluffy daffodil-yellow bear, who came with me on all my childhood adventures, and whom I cuddled up to every night for years. There is always one toy from childhood that you never forget, the random one that somehow becomes the special one. There might be fancier, flashier, more flibbertigibbet toys that come along, but, as children, we love what we love, and sometimes there is no reason for why we love one particular toy so very much.
There was no way Teddy was going in the skip. I put Teddy in the washing machine that weekend in the west, and he emerged glowing brightly as the sun; his fur fluffed out like a full-body halo. After my family and I had finished our sweating and crying and laughing and cursing, and dispersed to our various homes until the next communal clearing-out session, I put Teddy in my car and brought him back to Dublin.
A week later, my dear friend Ciara came to visit. It was the most moving of visits, because this time, she had her daughter with her. Chi, her beautiful four-year-old adopted daughter from Vietnam, whom she only brought home recently.
There are innumerable different ways people suffered globally because of the way the pandemic disrupted their lives. Ciara was matched — the process where a potential adoptive parent is matched with the child who will become their son or daughter — with Chi just before the pandemic shut down the world. Vietnam subsequently closed its borders, and they remained closed for two full years. Ciara and Chi will never get back that lost time. But they are finally together now: these two extraordinary, resilient souls.
I gave my Teddy of yore as a gift to Chi, who took the old bear up and hugged him right away. It wasn’t just a vintage toy I was giving to my friend’s daughter; it was a gift suffused with a lifetime of love. Teddy has a new home now, and a new child to love him. And Chi too has a new home, and all the mother’s love a child could ever have.
