Last Toy
Why did I give you a toy like the last toy of mine, we who were about to leave school? Why that gift, which was the double of the toy I carried in my pocket? As though I would give you an icon for what you were losing – the last of your childhood – or was it that I would give you your childhood again, that it was innocence I would give, but a second innocence, one which would restore innocence to itself?
Then the gift was one of childhood. Or was it that I gave what retreats as childhood in childhood – the secret which is known only in its withdrawal?
Too Young For You
As a child, I smarted at the idea that some toys were too young for me, even as my toys gradually disappeared to the loft, uplayed with. Even as the stuffed toys sat in plastic bags alongside the suitcase of lego in the loft of my parents’ house.
Too young for you – I did not like the phrase, although I never really heard it, because it already pointed to what was already lost by childhood and lost by my own childhood. Toys in the loft: keepers of the heart of childhood – the heart buried outside you like those of ogres in fairy tales. The child is getting older – toys, one by one, disappear to jumble sales and to the loft. But they are in the loft nonetheless, icons of loss, waiting – but for what?
Transitional Objects
The open arms of a teddy bear. The family of woollen sausage dogs my grandmother knitted. The soft-toy puppies made by Andrex. And the holy of holies: that box in which I kept Christmas cracker gifts. Worthless items, but sacred for that worthlessness. A pink plastic angel fish in a finger puppet inside a box: the holy of holies. Worthless, and up there beside the old cot, mine and then my sister’s, and the framed pictures of a stork flying through the blue night with a swaddled baby suspended from its beak.
Winnicott calls them transitional objects, these toys. Transitional objects: as if one should pass from one to another, and then away from childhood altogether. But it is us who are in transit, and the toys which keep place what is already lost.
Double Loss
As I grew older, I knew what was lost by age. But did I know, too, the irredeemable loss at the heart of childhood? Did I know the secret that lay buried in childhood?
Loss redoubled: what happened when they were accidentally lost, the toys? The youngest of the family of sausage dogs lost on a plane, his older brother lost on the roof. Then the bean bag dog whose felt eyebrows were ripped off by a friend of my sister (my outrage, my mourning). Now a part of my childhood was scattered and unprotected. Childhood evacuated, living outside of itself, outside the loft, which is the archive of childhood. Loss must not be lost, but kept.
Toy, Witness
A parent will watch as toys go unplayed with. And the child? Does the child know what has been abandoned when a toy is abandoned? Does the child know the childhood never lived, but concentrates itself in the absolute past?
Childhood mourns because it is too late for childhood. Innocence is too late for itself; that’s why it mourns. And is that why I gave you the toy? Is that why I gave what cannot be given: the gift that would give innocence back to itself? I thought: last toy, guard my friend and guard me. Toy, witness, might it be that our childhood has yet to happen?
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