“The big doll’s name is Annabel, and the little doll’s name is Jane.” It was Christmas 1984. The miners’ strike had been going for nine months. Money was tight; they couldn’t afford food, and relied on food parcels. Christmas presents were out of the question this year. But a little girl in Russia had taken the time to send two dolls to a little girl in England, and to tell her what their names were. “This person didn’t know me at all, but they cared enough to make this stranger happy. It meant so much to me. I kept those dolls for years.”
Samantha McMillen was nine and living in St Helens, Merseyside, when she received this package from a stranger. Her father was “a coal miner – local pit”. And she remembers “that we had no money. I remember that there was a lot of conflict. You had people putting windows through, there was a lot of shouting. But more than anything it was a tense situation because there was no money. I remember shopping for food, depressed because my parent just didn’t have the money”. If we were thinking how to help that small, hungry child, food would be surely be uppermost. People need food, they need water, they need housing. Samantha and her family did get that help – without the food parcels they received to keep them going through the cold, bleak winter, they could not have survived. And yet, for Samantha, it was the small, personal, perhaps seemingly superfluous gesture of a doll that has stayed with her. “It made me want to do something for other people. It’s had the biggest impact of anything on my life.”
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