Sindy and Donny: Days of Innocence

Today is the birthday of an old friend from primary school, Maxine.

She was the child who owned the first fashion doll I ever saw - and it was Tressy, whose selling point was that her hair grew. It is only now as I type this that I have realised where her name came from - the tresses that supposedly emanated from her plastic head. I wanted Tressy with a deep desire only an eight year old girl can understand.

Only to be disappointed when I saw the actual doll itself. Instead of the expected tresses sprouting from the whole head, there was a key in the doll's back which operated a mechanism by which you could pull out a tiny section of hair on the crown of her head. It was only this little bit of hair that could grow to almost waist length, and the only way it could be made to seem that the doll had long hair was by very careful arrangement of the section.

I suppose in retrospect it was good training for those girls who in later years would sport extensions, but the fact that most of Tressy's hair remained not only resolutely short but also styled in a definitive sixties bob reminiscent of the hairstyles favoured by our mums meant she was a distinct disappointment. It was only in later years that dolls were marketed especially to be made up and to have their hair done, and they tended to be disembodied plastic heads which - although I had grown past the age for these dolls by this time anyway - I always found rather macabre.

So I ended up with Sindy. Not as she is now, not much different from a Barbie - who was of course a brash American. No, the sixties' Sindy did not have the jutting boobs which frankly would have made it extremely difficult for her to remain standing if she were real - she would have been continually falling forwards under their sheer weight! Instead, Sindy had a trim, willowy figure and - in the case of mine anyway - came dressed in a patriotic red white and blue striped top and jeans, anlthough my favourite outfit was her sober brown tweed skirt and blouse.

She had, I remember, a dog she could take out for walks and the brown brogues on her plastic feet were far more suitable for tramping through muddy fields than dancing the night away at the disco. By the time she acquired a boyfriend called Paul, a younger sister, a range of clothes and furniture and a racier image, I had passed her on to my younger sister, because my interests - and those of my compatriots, including Maxine - had moved on to real make up applied to real faces - ours - and boys. Ah, the make up: Miners lipsticks, heavy blue Rimmel eye shadows and block mascara which you were supposed to mix with water but we used to spit on to make a paste which we then brushed on to our eyelashes with mini toothbrushes - and shared with our friends, long before we had heard of a little thing called hygiene!

But while the make up was real, the boys we fantasised about weren't - at least, they were real people but were far removed from our little Norfolk village and we only knew of them via our TV screens and - even more importantly - the pages of the teen magazines we assiduously bought and pored over every week. David Cassidy and Donny Osmond were the main focus - Maxine adored David and I loved Donny. So much so that we papered our bedrooms with their images.

I envied Maxine because I was only allowed a limited number of posters on my walls, while she literally covered every inch of the walls and ceiling of her room with pictures of David. Her paricular favourite was positioned carefully right above her bed so David was the first thing she saw when she awoke each morning. The best I could do, in the face of my mother's fear that a poster on my ceiling might fall down in the middle of the night and suffocate me - was to stick a poster of Donny compiled from three separate double page spreads from Jackie magazine on the wall at the head of my bed so I could kiss Donny goodnight.

Looking back, those were innocent days: we wished for nothing more from our heroes than a chaste kiss on the cheek and to walk hand in hand through a leafy meadow or sunwashed beach. Perhaps it's just as well that we never attained our dream of going to a Top of the Pops recording and meeting them in person - the reality, as we now know, may have been somewhat different from our expectations....although I am sure that to this day I would be perfectly safe in Donny's arms!