The doll house’s tale

The doll house

The doll house was feeling bored. No one played with her any more. Minnie Doll sat where she had been left, in the bathroom on the mat. Grandpa Doll was downstairs on the settee. He hadn’t moved for a month. The baby was still in his high chair in the kitchen, but no one was feeding him. Berta Doll was on the floor staring at nothing. She’d been staring at nothing for weeks. “Oh, when is someone going to play with me again?” thought the doll house.

The doll house was special. Every room could be taken away and stood on its own. The rooms could be piled high like a block of flats, or stood on their own like posh mansions. But the children who played in the playroom seemed to have forgotten about the things she could do.

Suddenly the door of the playroom burst open and Jake and Leona rushed in.

“Bagsy play with the animals,” shouted Leona.

The doll house felt her floorboards creak and groan. The breeze blew through her windows and sighed like a ghost.

Jake must have heard, because he looked over at her and said, “Hey! That doll house comes apart, doesn’t it? Let’s make a row of houses and garages!”

And before she knew it, the doll house was in pieces on the floor. The square section that had been the bathroom was lined up first, the living room second, the kitchen third, the bedroom fourth, and the attic room last in the row. Jake had made a street of houses!

Jake pulled the furniture out of two sections. “These are the garages,” he said, and put the police car, the fire engine, and the ambulance in one, and a posh shiny car in the other. “The rest can be houses.”

Leona stood Grandpa Doll at the door of his new little house. Jake sat the baby in his pram outside a house further down the road. Grandpa waved to the baby and the baby coo-ed and grinned back.

Suddenly Berta Doll tripped over the carpet in her new house. “Ow!” she cried.

“Emergency!” shouted Jake. “Get the ambulance.”

Leona grabbed the ambulance from its garage and raced it down to Berta’s house.

“You’ll be okay,” she told Berta. “But you’ve broken your leg.”

She drove Berta in the ambulance to the hospital. Jake picked up the doctor’s and nurse’s equipment and started operating on the broken leg.

After a while, he said, “Now don’t walk on this leg for six days. You’ll have to hop on crutches.”

Leona made Berta some crutches from two pencils, and they laughed as she hopped and jumped to her new house.

The doll house was pleased she was being played with again, and was even more pleased when Leona planted trees and flowers round the row of houses. Jake put fences round the gardens.

Then Leona’s mum came in and said: “Time to go to bed, kids!”

“Bother, bother,” said Jake. “I was just going to change these houses into something else. Something even better!”

Something better? The doll house was so excited she didn’t think she would be able to sleep at all. But soon she was fast asleep, dreaming of being a skyscraper in New York, or a village of igloos in Iceland. She would never be a bored old doll house again!

The moral of this tale is that things don’t have to stay the way they are. They can be changed.