A Tiny Tears Christmas: a Tale Like No Other
I nearly made an audio of this as homework set by my therapist
This is a Tiny Tears doll which was manufactured by The American Doll Company and first produced in the USA in 1950.
Describing this toy, which in the UK was produced by Leicester-based manufacturing company Palitoy, the V & A states it comprises:
“Card with a window, printed in colours to show the title, maker's details and the sun and sky design; base white card, lining blue card. Contains one baby doll, all vinyl with blond rooted saran hair and blue sleeping eyes; its mouth is open to take a feeding bottle and it will wet and cry; dressed in white cotton printed in blue around the collar, sleeves and hem; flannelette nappy. (The one in the box below has clearly been removed and redressed in the kind of thing my nanna used to knit to dress my own dolls in). It is boxed with an extra dress printed in red, a booklet and certificate and bottle and dummy.”
I’ve been trying to find the Tiny Tears jingle which included the incredibly saccharin lyrics: “Tiny Tears, Tiny Tears, you’re my very own baby… Tiny Tears, Tiny Tears da dee dum dee dum dee daaaahhhh… etc” and accompanied the TV advert during the lead up to whichever Christmas I’d placed her at the top of my wish list to Santa which would be any year from 1965 onwards. But I can’t find it and so, before I get sucked into a black hole bedecked with fairy lights I’m going to leave that particular avenue and pick the year my story takes place. Let’s go for 1970 when I’d have been 7 years old. Because 7 feels about the kind of age I might have desperately needed one of these plastic aberrations; although my desire would’ve been entirely due to peer pressure from girls in my class because I was never interested in babies; solidified or actual flesh ones. Including the younger brother I had, who’d’ve been 4 at the time of our particular Christmas. Aww bless him. Also, seven is a lucky number, right? Well, sssshhh: *Spoiler alert:* not for some little girls it’s not.
As the sugary song on the telly went, and as the description on it’s packaging implies, the Tiny Tears doll was just like a real baby - she drinks, cries and wets her nappy. And the pink bubble states she’s SO cuddly and her arms and legs pose naturally - which is a contradiction in terms for me because surely if something is posed then this makes it un-natural - am I right? Anyway, aside from an actual life-like facsimile of the good Baby Jesus, this was the only thing a 7-year old girl-child could possibly want for Christmas at the dawn of the two-tone flared jeans and poncho-wearing seventies.
I might have mentioned before about the frugality of the Cooper household, which is largely due to my parents having been children themselves during the Second World War. Rationing, make-do-and-mend, and tightening belts were things they’d grown up surrounded by every day until even ten years after the war had ended because rationing had needed to continue due to shortages of virtually everything during the war. God, Hitler has so much to answer for.
So my parents were conditioned to makes things stretch so ends could meet. Nothing was bought new from a shop if a member of the family could make it cheaper. Today we call these home-made things ‘authentic’; they’re charming, even, and we applaud the artistry which goes into crafting such things. But back then, making things at home was more a necessity than something which might lead you to hosting a workshop in the village hall teaching others how to do it. Back then having your home-made creations noticed was something a child—that 7-year-old-child, at any rate—didn’t want to happen under any circumstances, because if your peers noticed you were wearing something that clearly hadn’t come from a shop but had been whipped up cheaply at home, then you’d get bullied relentlessly for it. To this day I can’t even think the phrase ‘crimplene 7-gore-skirt’ without my eczema threatening to resurface.
As my mum had been an accounts clerk before becoming a housewife and mother, and her idea of relaxing was by timing herself doing long division sums in her head, she controlled the finances. In fact the very first calculators were programmed using my mother’s actual brain patterns. It’s true: ask any of the original Texas Instruments Sinclair Executive pocket calculators (£79 in 1970) to add one ounce of compassion with a fraction of a hug and both responses will be identical: E: error E: error E: E: But, I digress. Let’s not do that, I’ve already waffled. Apologies if you’ve nodded off. Lets get in the DeLorean and head back to Christmas 1970.
I loved Christmas as a child. Which is to say I was totally sold on the whole Father Christmas thing. We all were, right? Christmas is for kids although when you become a parent yourself you realise it’s actually an excellent trick perpetuated in order to get a child to behave in the lead-up to the big day; if they’re naughty then Father Christmas will know of their indiscretions and cross their name off his list. I’d say you can start this at any time from the end of September. It’s terrifying really, if you think about it: that Santa is as all-powerful and omnipotent as God. But let’s not get distracted by Him, it’s all about His son right now.
When I tugged out the largest present from my sack on that chilly December 25th 1970 morning I knew. I just KNEW by the shape of the box, that beneath the Christmas wrapping paper which bore a remarkable similarity to paper I was certain I’d seen before—and which I’d later learn mother had retained from Christmases past to iron out and use for Christmases future, the way she’d do for decades hence—was the dream doll every girl in my class craved. Finally, finally, I would have something in common with my peers and I might get to join in a conversation for once instead of fielding jeers and jokes at my expense.
Only… the name of the doll on this box didn’t spell Tiny Tears. It spelled something other than the two words branded into my psyche. And—because that 7-year old still treads my steps albeit having been consumed by 54-year-old Me—I know I would have swallowed. Hard. My pulse would’ve picked up speed. I’d have felt my bladder ping and a warmth would be creeping through my chest towards my throat. My cheeks would soon be flaming with the heat of confusion, panic and fear that Something is Not Right.
And, as if enduring this tumult of emotions wasn’t enough, there’d also be a camera pointed my way to capture my delight. My mother enjoyed capturing moments of delight even if they were posed unnaturally and on demand. Or perhaps especially so. Because that way the resulting photographs could be pored over in albums, where moments like these could be mis-remembered as authentic happiness; proof that we’d definitely had fun because “see here! we’re smiling!”. For me, however, this tradition is as perverse as Bedfordshire County Council retaining the beautiful façade of the glorious Granada cinema when everyone knows they built a Lidl behind it. I do love a good analogy. I just hope that is one.
After Dad had untwisted all the wires retaining the contents of this unfamiliar box and straightened them out so he could store them in a specially-labelled Brylcreem tub on a shelf in his shed, this SuperSaver Equivalent of the much-advertised, much needed, much hinted-at Tiny Tears was revealed.
The doll was dressed at least. It had a nappy. A spare nappy even. It also had a bottle. It looked like a decent replica. But, once I laid it in the crook of my arm the way mothers did, its eyes didn’t close. They stared back at me. Panic surfaced again. How would it sleep if its eyes didn’t shut? Wait, though…. maybe it just wasn’t tired; maybe her eyes closed once she’d had a feed, a wee and a change of nappy. Maybe it said precisely that on the instructions, only I’d been much too excited/petrified to read them in case they said something about everything in this box being a complete lie and the end of Christmas as I knew it. Perhaps the end of everything as I’d known it. I had a strange sensation today might bring about my first 7-year itch. And, knowing me, I would scratch until I bled.
I was at least 8 years away from puberty. I couldn’t even blame PMT for the way I felt.
When Nanna and Grandad arrived, I rushed this SupaSava Baby into my nan’s arms because I knew I could ask her anything without fearing Linda Blair’s fate. It wasn’t what I’d asked Father Christmas for, I told her; I’d spelled it correctly on my list, and this didn’t spell Tiny Tears. Knowing Nan, she’d probably have flapped this worry away, assuring me that as the doll was very similar, it would also do similar things.
She’s meant to drink her bottle and wet her nappy, I explained. So Nanna filled up the doll’s bottle with water. When she returned, she put the doll in the crook of her arm and the bottle to the doll’s mouth. We stared expectantly at it, the doll staring back at us, wide-eyed; the teat of the bottle as sealed as the doll’s pursed lips.
There, she’s having a drink Nanna white-lied. See? Just like a real baby.
I knew when I was being fobbed-off. Kids aren’t stupid. So I pointed out that she wasn’t having a drink at all; No, see? there’s still the same amount of water in the bottle.
Nanna said something about pretending and make-believe and never mind, and had a sip of Emva Cream, readying herself to go and help mum in the kitchen and escape a potential existential crisis in the living room, but I wasn’t happy. I’d wanted a Tiny Tears because it was going to DO things. This one did nothing. What was I meant to do with it? Watch it stay awake all night? The idea of it being anywhere near my bed with its staring eyes made me feel light-headed.
I explained that Tiny Tears was meant to wet its nappy, so Nanna removed the bottle’s teat, lifted the doll’s dress and dribbled some water onto her nappy, smiling cheerfully. At which I must’ve frowned really, really deeply… because EVEN 7-YEAR-OLDS KNOW THIS ISN’T HOW BABIES WET THEIR NAPPIES! What do you take me for, Nanna?!
I have always tended to lose the power of speech when I am most upset; I suppose it’s where being “absolutely speechless” comes from. It’s also an autistic trait; not that we’d have known that in 1970, or even been bothered to take an interest had anyone heard of it. I was generally labelled ‘attention-seeking’, ‘dramatic’ and ‘touchy.’ I could feel myself teetering on the borders of a town called Sanity.
Once I realised Nanna had escaped to the kitchen, I took my defective doll and followed her to the room which was usually out of limits on Christmas Day. Mainly due, I believe, to potential suffocation from the amount of steam created by every pan we owned boiling the contents of an entire allotment; the Christmas pudding hammering away in a bid for freedom on a back burner. Everything was green-tinged and sprout-scented and rivers of water ran down the kitchen windows, dewy drifts edging towards the open back door in much the same way our dog was attempting. It was the kind of smog I imagine Jack the Ripper must have been delighted to encounter.
Once I’d been spotted, I was shooed off for being bothersome, and began to choke out plaintive sobs while Nanna explained to my parents how I was upset that the doll didn’t do what a real Tiny Tears did. My mother would’ve sighed irritably and my father would have rolled his eyes and huffed loudly. He snatched the doll from me, and, after staring at it from different angles, grabbed a tea towel and marched out of the house with one thing in each hand. From the back porch, I saw the shed light come on, then heard ‘shed-related’ noises: a drawer opening, a clatter of metal, squeaking as the vice was unwound then a whirr of the hand-drill. As Dad walked back up the garden path I saw him blow swiftly between the dolls legs and give it a shake before handing it to me, and when Nanna joined me back in the front room she gave me the doll’s bottle, which I noticed now had a hole cut in its teat to allow water to enter the doll’s newly-opened mouth.
Not the only lips now boasting an entrance if you know what I mean.
I was thrilled. Or at least as thrilled as I was ever likely to get over a second-rate Tiny Tears doll who—judging by dents in both sides of its head, had just been clamped in the vice on dad’s work bench whilst having carefully-positioned holes created. I was much too excited to dwell on any indignities that might have been suffered by this inanimate object, how ever much it was meant to resemble a small human being; or to wonder how many traumas this now added up to in my already short life, and instead set about wrapping the nappy about my baby’s so-freshly-opened-peeing area there were still little whorls of drilled-out plastic attached which I expertly ignored and covered up, intent on finally feeding this baby properly. As nature had intended. As mothers immemorial had done for millennia, and would for millennia hereafter… as my own mother and her own mother, my beloved Nanna, had, and as I would… well, might…
…which was as far as my reverie allowed me to drift, because whilst we three sat—a virtual recreation of the Nativity scene: my Nan like Joseph, watching an actual virgin mother feed her baby Jesus—I became aware of a dampness, thrilled that a nappy was being duly filled. As I bent over my charge to give it a little “coo” of encouragement, I realised to my horror that my new-born was actually leaking from its neck, and once I leaned in curiously to check my concerns, saw it was also leaking from its arm sockets. The leg sockets followed shortly thereafter but by then of course I was on the ceiling.
In fact the piercing shriek that left my mouth that morning was so loud that Renee from next door rushed round in her apron and slippers, a fug of green steam trailing behind her as she breathlessly enquired if anyone had been murdered.
“Yes, Renee, Christmas has been murdered.”
Reader, from that day I never again asked for a toy which might resemble a small human in any way, and remain so traumatised by this Christmas gift that I am still suspicious of anything presented to me concealed in wrapping paper. It makes me a difficult person to buy gifts for due to the complexities surrounding this event, and if anyone I ever worked with is reading this, now they finally know why I never wanted to join in with the office Secret Santa.
What a lovely post and trip down memory lane. 👏👏👏
I don’t mean to boast, but I did have a Tiny Tears, albeit with a big chunk of her nose missing where my hamster had bitten her. 😂😂
Fantastic work 💕👌🏽😎