Free Jacky Daydream by Jacqueline Wilson Page A

children going through hard times. I already knew I wanted to write that sort of story myself one day. I cared passionately about dresses and treasured my own rainbow party dress with smocking from C & A. I didn’t have any jewellery at all at that age but read the page where the necklaces are described over and over again. I never dreamed that one day I might have a
ring
for – well, not every day, but at least every week of the year.
    I had my little books in the right-hand drawer. I kept my crayons and paints and pens and pencils in the left. I didn’t have proper
sets
, though in my teens I’d buy myself a beautiful Derwent coloured pencil every week with my pocket money until I had the entire range in every single shade. Meanwhile I kept my mix of crayons in a biscuit tin with a picture of a little girl called Janet on the top.
    Janet was a very popular child model in those days, her photo in all the women’s magazines. She had wispy hair, big eyes and a soulful expression. She was wearing a seersucker frock on my tin and peering slightly cross-eyed through several branches of apple blossom. I’d have Janet on her tin beside me as I drew and crayoned, and so long as I was out of earshot of my parents, I’d chat to her companionably.
    I also had a small Reeves paintbox, though I was never entirely successful when it came to watercolour painting. I could control my crayons and get the colours to stay in the lines, but the paint ran away with me. I’d try to create a fairy princess with hair as black as coal, but the black would run into her pale pink face and she’d end up looking like a coal
miner
. I’d start a beautiful mermaid with long golden curls and a shining tail but the blue sea would splash right over her and dye her hair bright green.
    I kept my doll’s house and my toy farm on the top of my chest of drawers. I was never really a country girl and didn’t play with my farm very much. Maybe this was just as well, as the little cows and sheep and chickens and turkey were all made of lead, and I was exactly the sort of silly child who might have licked them. The farm stayed undisturbed most days, the cows not milked, the sheep not shorn, the eggs uncollected. I was busy next door, playing with my doll’s house.
    It wasn’t especially elaborate, a two-up, two-down 1930s little number with a scarlet roof and green latticed windows, but it was fully furnished. I especially loved my three-piece suite in jade-green plastic. It gave me great pleasure just holding the little armchair and running my thumb up underneath, feeling the strange insides.
    I had a proper family of doll’s house dolls, dear little creatures with woollen hair and tiny clothes, but they were made like pipe cleaners, and if you tried to bend them to sit on the sofa or climb up the stairs, a leg might snap off suddenly in an alarming fashion. Sometimes I just played that it was
my
house. I’d stand with the front swinging open, my face almost inside the rooms, and I’d act like Alice and shrink myself small.
    I didn’t have a proper edition of
Alice in Wonderland
with the Tenniel illustrations. My
Alice
had sugar-sweet coloured pictures that didn’t fit the story at all. I also had an abridged
Peter Pan
with Mabel Lucie Attwell illustrations. Both stories confused me, and because I read them consecutively when I was about six, they amalgamated oddly in my head, so that Peter flew round Wonderland and Tinkerbell shook pepper at the Duchess and Alice joined up with Wendy to make a little house for the Lost Boys.
    I’d have been perfectly happy left to my own devices playing alone all day in my new bedroom – but I had to go to school.
----
    Who had a very small bedroom at her dad’s house, with a chest of drawers half painted silver?
----
     
    It’s Floss in my book
Candyfloss
.
    It was not much bigger than a cupboard. There was just room for the bed and an old chest of drawers. Dad had started to paint it with some special silver