About the same time that I got rid of 40 plus bankers boxes of books, I found a Peggy Nesbitt doll of Elizabeth I in its original box. I didn't want to keep it but I also didn't want to donate it to Goodwill and I didn't want to have to figure out how to sell on eBay. So when one of my cousins and his wife adopted a baby girl, I fobbed it off on them. (What this generally means is that a box appears on a doorstep as a surprise and contains things for which no one has asked. I never ask what happens to anything I send to anyone.) My aunt sent an e-mail saying the box had been received and was there a story that went with the doll. (Yes, we're all pretty sure that there must be a story or I would not have had t send the thing.) So I sent the below.
Of course there is a story.
The doll was purchased the Monday after Thanksgiving in 1975 in Canterbury, England. In the afternoon. It was lightly raining.
I remember this because we had left Frankfort on Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving on an American Express tour. We were supposed to return Sunday evening but Heathrow shut down due to fog. The tour was responsible for getting us to Frankfort so they found a hotel for the tour Sunday night and then drove around southeast England on the way to Dover. The idea was that we would take the ferry out of Dover and then drive to Frankfort. (This was kind of a problem as the tour was full of Army guys whose leave papers (vacation permission) didn't specify any country other than the UK so taking a ferry across the Channel to Belgium might have been a problem. (Remember, this is 1975. I don't think the EU was even a gleam in anyone's eye.)
But it wasn't an issue because the worst storm in...decades came through Dover that evening and the waves were too high for anything to dock. We sat on the docks in buses for hours. When we walked back to the main building to get something to eat, the wind was so strong it lifted Philip, who was five and carried him a few feet. About 1 am, the tour gave up, we went back through passport control, because we'd had to go through passport control to sit on the docks in the bus, and we spent the rest of the night at a Holiday Inn outside of Dover. Tuesday we drove around until mid-afternoon and were taken to Heathrow where we were put on various planes back to Frankfort.
That was our first trip to England. (We had seen Westminster Abbey, St. Pauls, the Tower of England and the Crown jewels, went to Stratford-on-Avon, somewhere else... I don't remember that part of the trip as well as the extra piece and getting to see the cathedral in Canterbury as a bonus. Plus St. Margaret's ruins nearby. And the Dover docks in a major storm...
Peggy Nesbitt is often collected. I bought it because my mother and I were/are big fans of QEI. (Queen Elizabeth the first).
Normally I send things I can't get rid of to Howell and Lisa, but Lisa is a fan of Mary, Queen of Scots, so sending her a QEI doll would just be ...mean/tacky/petty...
I've been looking at the box since September trying to figure out what to do with it. I couldn't bring myself to put it in Goodwill, which sounds silly now that type it but I just couldn't do it.
And then Harper came. I then, when I saw the box, I thought...Harper...Drew...Michelle. I'll bet one of them could get rid of this.
So I sent it off.
The doll is older than Drew.
There have not been a lot of things that I have kept since 1975 but this was one. I also bought a Sherlock Holmes hat on the same trip but I sent that off to Brett since he likes hats. I do own an ivory butterfly that I was given when I was five in Alaska the first time. (I'm pretty sure it's elephant ivory, which was used by Alaskan natives for things to sell to tourists and the walrus ivory was kept for tribal things when it was still legal to import elephant ivory.)
I can be contacted for further questions if there are any.
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