BUNTY CARDBOARD CUT-OUT DOLL

In the old days, before my-little-pony and cabbage patch dolls you could buy the most amazing presents for little girls. Sometimes they came free with a copy of Bunty or Trixie or whatever the girl's comic was called or sometimes they were available in soft-cover booklet form. It consisted of cartoon drawing of a little girl. Semi realistic on a card page. There were already some cuts around her shape so it was easy to pop her out of the page and with the aid of some specially additional bits of cardboard under her feet you could stand her up. She was naked apart from a very sensible pair of pink knickers and maybe some socks. But more, much more than this, there was pages and pages of different clothes. All in the same pop-out style but with little tabs attached, so you could put the clothes on the little doll by bending back the little tabs hence securing said item to said mannequin.

I can't remember Hester ever dressing a little doll with little costumes such as I have just described. But if you look at the above pictures you will see that she is more than making up for her lost child-hood now. At last, at last in the grand fullness of time she can now give vent to all those passions those desires those creative exuberances.........she now has the little doll maybe she always craved for.....she can now dress her in the most fabulously personal idiosyncratic style, restrained only by the limits of her own uninhibited imagination.

As a father I feel the guilt. It was after all my job to allow all this stuff freedom of expression in Hester's child-hood. I obviously got the dolls and the clothes all wrong. The role-play was never played out. Patsy and I never dressed her up as a halloween witch or a santa claus. We just wanted her to be herself. Poor Hester. Instead of releasing all these fantasies in infancy, they are all there now. She now as a full-grown adult now with her card-board cut-out Moo-Moo and me here now bashing my head on this desk and trying to think what should I have done different. Where did I go wrong?????????