A friend once said to me “Some people hear voices and they are locked up and called insane. Other people hear voices and write them down and are called authors.”
I guess that’s true: I certainly lived in the world of my imagination as a child. I was lonely and cut off for much of my childhood, first living in a house with my grandmother and great aunts and then in a big drafty Victorian in an acre of garden and away from the rest of the village. So I always had to amuse myself. As a small child I had imaginary friends. They were called The Gott Family. (and no, I didn’t know any German) They were four sisters: Gorna Gott, Leure Gott, Googoo Gott and Perambulator Gott. You.’ll see from that that I was a rather strange child. But my excuse is that I didn’t know any real children so I wasn’t up on names.
The Gott family had to come everywhere with us—shopping, to the park. Places had to be laid for them at table. When I wasn’t playing with the Gott family I played with my grandmother’s buttons. She had a huge box of discarded buttons and these became members of a family, a school, a hospital (the buttons with chips in them were the patients in match boxes and the white buttons were the doctors and nurses).
Later when we moved to our big house I played at being Patsy of the circus on a trapeze I built in our orchard. Oh, and I pretended (or thought) that I was Queen of Swanley (the nearest village). I’d ride around on my bike nodding graciously to people I passed. They must have thought I was batty. (and it turns out my dear friend Louise Penny also thought she was really royal and had been left with peasants!)
In past times in upper class England it was normal for a child to grow up alone in a nursery. I don't think this was healthy in many ways, but it did produce some wonderful imaginations. Just think what we would have missed if Christopher Robin had been sent to pres-school!
So I’m curious about the rest of the Reds. Did you do a lot of pretending when you were small? Did you have an imaginary friend?
HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: SO funny. My go-to threat to my parents was that if they persisted in doing whatever onerous and unacceptable thing they were doing, like, say, making me go to bed at a "reasonable" time, they would be SO SORRY when my REAL parents, the King and Queen of..somewhere...came to retrieve their long-lost princess daughter. Hey. It could still happen.
We did lots of "shows" wearing crinolines (where did we get those? Sometimes on our heads so we had long flowing hair. We made up songs and dances, and really practiced. We were amazingly skilled Olympic ice skaters (in socks) on our slick wood hallway. And we were fabulous Olympic gymnasts on the pommel horse (back of the couch) until Mom yelled. We were big on cowboys, I remember, and...detectives.
I had too many siblings to need imaginary friends. I was more likely to imagine that my siblings disappeared. Just saying.
LUCY BURDETTE: I played nonstop with my older sister (by eleven months, can you imagine?) We had stuffed animals more than dolls. Her favorite was a Dalmatian named Roland, who must have come from the original 101 Dalmatians movie. I sewed her a miniature version of that dog, about 3 inches high and flat, with spots painted on by a magic marker. She called him "Little Rol." And his best friends were my stuffed cats (covered in colored rabbit fur) called Fuzzy Wuzzy, Wuzzy Fuzzy, Queenie, Tangerine, and Licorice. (I know, showing a lack of imagination in a major way!) When we grew older, she might send me Little Rol for company if I was up against something especially challenging. And then I'd send him back. Today we exchange photos of our gray cats, who provide comfort in a similar way. I would show you the original cats, but sadly roaches in Florida ate away all the fur and I finally had to throw them out!
HALLIE EPHRON: Roberta, why am I not surprised that you played with stuffed animals?!?
I did not have imaginary friends. A failure of imagination, I suppose. Not big into dolls or stuffed toys, either. But I liked to play "school" -- my parents got me a chalk board and a little desk, but my younger sister only played along under duress. I had a dear friend, a boy who used to put on plays (I played Wendy to his Peter Pan, Cinderella to his Prince…) and invite the neighborhood. My parents were working still at 20th Century Fox so I got a 'ball gown' from the costume department for Cinderella. I've often wondered how excruciating we must have been to watch.
I loved watching my daughter design elaborate cityscapes on her bedroom floor. No matter how many blocks we bought there were never enough. She's an architect, of course.
JENN MCKINLAY: Rhys, I have not stopped laughing at the name Perambulator Gott. That absolutely made my day! Lucy, like you, I played non-stop with my brother who, again like you and your sister, is eleven months older than me. Irish twins! I was determined to do everything he did and between the two of us, we were cops and robbers, soldiers, veterinarians, archeologists, and then there was an unfortunate Tarzan episode where I was cast as the friendly ape. We did have Tonka trucks, and GI Joe dolls, and I had one girl doll, but I cut off all of her hair so she could keep up with GI Joe. The best part of childhood was making up adventures with my brother. I am ever grateful that I had such a cool sidekick.
INGRID THOFT: I don’t recall any imaginary friends, probably because I had three siblings so I didn’t have to look far for a playmate. Hallie, your theatrical endeavors reminded me of the shows I use to put on with one of my sisters. We dressed up as Donny and Marie Osmond and would perform their greatest hits for our parents and grandmother. My sister was Donny, and I remember wearing a nightgown in my attempt to approximate an evening gown! It was probably painful and hilarious to watch, but I’m grateful that my parents and Nanny (that’s what we called my grandmother) were such an attentive audience. We also use to stack encyclopedias (remember those?) in the hallway to make jumps for horses. The same sister was usually the horse and would carry me on her back. You might think she got the short end of the stick, but I clearly remember her dressing me up as various things—kind of like Gertie does to E.T.—including one memorable turn as a flight attendant with an ample sock bosom. Ahhh, siblings!
DEBORAH CROMBIE: Rhys, I was quite isolated, too. My brother is ten years older, and up until I was about six we were in the country with no close neighbors (the suburbs grew around us after that.) I had imaginary friends (sort of), little gnome-like people who lived in a cave in a creek bank near our house. They would invite me to tea. Very Narnia-esque, but of course I wouldn't read those books until a good many years later. I played with stuffed animals, too, for hours on end. And I played with my grandmother's buttons! So funny. How many kids these days get to play with buttons? (Although I have a whole tub of them which I'm sure will come in useful in a year or two around here.)
After I started school, my best friend and I spent days roaming the creek, playing spies and army and Indian trackers. Not very girly girls, I guess, and we never put on plays or musicals, much to my disappointment now, but we did eat a lot of Vienna sausage and Triscuits on our adventures.
I'm going to be laughing over the Gotts for the rest of the day. No wonder you have such fun with the names in the Georgie books.
RHYS: Yay, Debs. I knew we were kindred spirits. You played with buttons too!
So who else had a pretend-friend and lived in a world of make-believe? These days with all the stress going on in the real world I think a make-believe world to escape to might be rather nice, don't you?
