Angela Patten

When we were young, my sisters and I were awash with dolls. Every Christmas and birthday there was another one and Mammy always seemed to suggest just the right name for her. Of Anita, Ann, Eileen, Roisín, Rose, Sunny and more, Eileen is the only remaining doll, thanks to my sister who rescued her from the old house after both our parents were gone.

Every now and then, I take her down from the shelf in the closet and turn her upside down to hear her plaintive cry of “Maaaaaa...” She has blue eyes with thick lashes and her eyelids close when she is placed in a supine position. Her little rosebud mouth looks lipsticked and her tiny fingernails are rosy-red. Her hair is only painted on her hard plastic head but her dimpled elbows and knees give her a babylike appearance.

There was nothing anatomically correct about her. Mammy made it clear she did not approve of “teenage” dolls with their pert, nippleless breasts and their feet which were molded to fit high-heels. Dolls were either babies or madonnas with nothing in-between.

Eileen reminds me of playing “house” with my sisters and their dolls, and “school” when we acted out our fears by terrorizing the dolls with wooden rulers. She also reminds me of our ignorance of so much that was repressed in that isolationist world of Irish Catholicism. But the 1960s were just around the corner, waiting to banish our collective ignorance (they called it innocence) forever.