She grew slowly more aware of others. But most of the time it was I who was alone with her as the hours passed in the quiet house. It was an environment devoid of events unless I generated them — especially in the long, enclosed Northern winters when few small children can stay outside for long, least of all Elly, who unassisted would throw no snowball, climb into no swing, slide on no sled. Yet though Elly was content to do nothing, she was glad to be occupied. She could not play herself, but she welcomed someone who would play for her.
Most of our play has been described already. But there was one kind of activity which I have not described because it was not a matter of specific skills: our play with toy animals and with dolls. I hoped that doll play might promise a way to bring Elly into the social world of which she seemed unconscious.
The nursery of a fourth child contains quantities of substitute people, some soft, some fluffy, some rubbery, some realistic with nylon hair and eyes that shut. Over the years they have acquired personalities and names. Elly had her own as well as the castoffs of her sisters and brother; she had been a tiny baby when she first smiled at her blue teddy, new then, and ‘teddy’ had been her first word. The single picture she had recognized in three and a half years had been of a blue teddy. She would play with her teddy, freely and often, jumping with him in her crib, throwing him on the floor, cheerfully, casually, with no more sign of feeling for him as a surrogate human (or, indeed, animal) than she had for the real humans (and animals) who surrounded her. I could elicit a friendly laugh by adapting the hand-animal game to doll or teddy — Teddy would walk-walk-walk-go-see-the-baby, and ‘walk’, abstracted from this game, was one of her earliest words. But the initiative was all mine. Moreover I could find nothing better for the teddy to do than walk. It seemed she could understand only the crudest actions attributable to a teddy, and ones that directly approached her. She did not dress or undress him, or put him into situations mimicking those observed in the family, or respond when I did so. Not surprising, certainly; since she herself imitated nothing that anyone said or did, one would hardly expect her to imitate at one remove. It was the more remarkable, then, the day (she was not quite two and a half) that decisively she took her teddy, set him in a chair next to a row of other dolls, and looked up at me and smiled the way any small child does when it has done some-thing clever. It was one of those swallows that we became familiar with — the kind that do not make a summer. ‘Unprecedented,’ my diary notes. Unprecedented, it set no precedent. Like the single time she swept up after me, the single time she fed her doll, it led nowhere.
Where all progress was slow, progress with dolls was almost imperceptible. Elly was almost three when I succeeded in interesting her in a small baby doll. ‘Interest’ is perhaps too strong a word; she would look on while I dressed it and she would condescend herself to pull the clothes off (still too weak to unsnap the snaps) and choose another costume. It was a step beyond ‘walk-walk’, and time for one; just recently she had considerably diluted the social relevance I had hoped for in that game by taking some new and delightful coloured shapes and making them walk towards her.
The dressing game proceeded mechanically, the clothes chosen at random, put on, taken off. That was all there was to it. This was not surprising; in spite of her exact colour discrimination, Elly took no interest whatever in her own clothes. Two months passed and we were still playing the game every night at bedtime. Even Elly could get bored — she was now cutting short the number of costumes — but my attempts to vary the game or to extend it to mimic social situations met with no success. Yet there appeared to be some small carry-over; it was at this time that she understood when I played ‘this little piggy’ with another doll’s toes. She took a liking to two tiny teddies, small enough to fit in the chairs of our dollhouse. She enjoyed it when I put them at the doll table, and when I set out tiny plates and silver for them, Elly clearly recognized the situation; she took the half-inch doll-knife and attempted to cut their food. Very encouraging, but another dead end. A person trained to it might have seen further ways to connect with the social world so closed to Elly. Or perhaps even a trained person would have found no more to be done with it than that.
Another month passed. We dressed and undressed the doll at bedtime, but attempts to interest Elly in putting the doll to bed met with complete failure. A trained person might be surprised at how slowly an untrained one thinks: it was not until I saw a doll’s crib at a friend’s house that it occurred to me that crib-centred Elly might recognize its function better than that of the conventional beds our dolls slept in.
I borrowed the crib and took it home. The effect on Elly was immediate. She caught sight of it while being diapered for bed; as soon as she was dressed she climbed down, went over to it, and put her own foot in. We sat down by it and were dressing dolls as usual when Elly got up, went over to her own crib, in which she had already placed a book — a normal part of her nighttime preparations — removed the book and brought it over to the doll crib. She tried to put it in — unsuccessfully, since it was twice as big as the crib. I got her a miniature book but she laid it aside. The crib was no toy to Elly. It was not a representation of the business of life, but part of it. She played a little more with the doll clothes, then once more put her foot into the little crib. It is difficult for a three-year-old child to climb into a crib nine inches long, but Elly tried; holding out her hand for support she actually stood in it.
Little interest as Elly had shown before in toy representations of reality, she had never before confused them with reality itself. She had not tried to sit in the doll chairs or try on the doll costumes or eat the doll food. The crib was different, though I did not understand why, and do not. Perhaps it spoke to that deepest part of Elly — the whatever-it-was that craved enclosure. At any rate, it seemed to me that we were in a sensitive area and that I should go slow. I kept on dressing the baby doll — the game was into its fourth month — but I let two weeks go by before I put the doll into the crib.
Elly paid no, apparent attention. She had made no further attempts to get in the crib herself and seemed now to take it for granted. But a readiness was silently building. Four days passed, each of which I ended by putting the doll in the crib. The fifth evening Elly decisively went and got the old doll bed from the cupboard where it was kept. Ignoring the crib, which was in plain sight, she crouched over the bed, attempting to get in it. The crib, perhaps, had brought it to her attention, but I suppose she had always known what it was for. Accident plays a large part in progress; it happened that the wooden frame of the bed was old and partly broken, and I took it away for repair without objection from Elly. The mattress remained. Idly, I placed the doll pillow on it, and the small quilt. To my surprise, Elly at once took another quilt and carefully put it in position on the first one, adjusting it to perfect congruence and smoothing it down with satisfaction. Encouraged, I put the baby doll on the pallet she had prepared, only to find to my astonishment a small teddy already hidden under the quilt. This time there was real comprehension and admitted pleasure. Elly laughed, patted the quilt, and even said ‘ni-ni.’ — her twenty-first word. We put her into her crib in triumph.