It Happened To Me | Denise O'Hagan

Louisa and the Seven Toys

We all remember our first friend and I bring to mind Louisa clearly. She was a year older than me, with brown eyes and a fringe, always beautifully dressed. She lived in the apartment with the peeling cream paint over the road from us. Rome in the 1960s was as busy and chaotic as it is now, just poorer. How we met I have no idea; perhaps our mothers knew each other.

Her mother would bring Louisa over to our apartment. We usually played there, because our apartment was bigger than hers. It has been demolished now, but it was a tall building, and from the balcony around it, which spanned the whole of the top floor, the city seemed to stretch out around us like an unending canopy of terracotta-coloured rooftops, punctuated by pine trees and spires. Louisa and I would play together regularly, the whole time my family lived in that apartment. We would play the games that little girls play the world over: make-believe, dress-up, making concoctions in the flower pots. Sometimes my mother would take us to the gardens, and we would run around the paths, skip on the grass and trail our fingers in the fountains.

One day I went to Louisa’s apartment. It was very small and bright, with a handkerchief of a balcony. In her room, Louisa had a cupboard, and on the top were kept her toys. Her mother reached up and passed us two animals and a doll. After a while, I asked if we could have another toy. Louisa said that we couldn’t.

“Why not?” I asked.

Her mother overheard and smiled. “Louisa has seven toys,” she explained. “So that she doesn’t get bored, she plays with three at a time. If she takes a fourth one down, another goes back.”

I accepted that, like children do, and Louisa and I continued playing quite happily, that day and other days, until my mother came to collect me. I didn’t think about it and the sentence hung unquestioned in my consciousness until one day many years later and half a world away. I was going through our books and opening up my old edition of Pinocchio, which the Signora had given me for my sixth birthday. Inside, her ornate handwritten inscription stared back at me, transporting me back to a warm autumn over 40 years ago. It was then that her words came back to me and it was as if I heard them for the first time: Louisa has seven toys…

I thought about children today, and our toys and games and videos that would have astounded a child like Louisa by their sheer quantity and technical sophistication. I also thought of the many affluent, well-educated parents I meet every day, weary at their children’s attachment to their computers; the desperate search to provide them with something new, the consequent unease that many admit to feeling as if, despite everything, they are in some way lacking.

Louisa didn’t change my life, but the experience of knowing her added a valuable little piece to the mosaic of my mind as I grew up. Perhaps, knowing Louisa taught me that it is not so much what we have that counts, but what we make of what we have.