Let me read for you. Skip introduction 3:40
The Godfather, When Harry Met Sally, and Toy Story are my top three favourite films of all time. Toy Story would be crowned the longest favourite. Godfather is a masterpiece, but not one I could appreciate whilst I was young enough to still get excited about the free toy in the cereal box. Woody, Buzz and Jessie, however, I have been in love with since childhood.
I was hooked from the opening sequence. It’s of Andy playing with Woody as Randy Newman sings ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me’. I had never related to a film more than I did when I first saw it because, like Andy, I also had a favourite toy.
He arrived in the middle of the night. I was pretending to be asleep when Dad came into my room after returning home from a boozy ski trip in Switzerland. As soon as I heard my door close, I opened my eyes and saw a plump brown rabbit staring at me.
‘Um, hello, I seem to be at the end of your bed…’ the rabbit said, in a very British accent, which was strange considering he was from Switzerland. ‘S-shall we be friends?’ he asked.
He wasn’t an accurately shaped, fancy, or particularly cuddly rabbit, but there was something about the bog-standard gift shop teddy that made me very much want to be his friend.
I named him after my favourite PC game, Jazz Rabbit. Or at least I tried to. I had gunky ears at the time, so I thought everyone was saying “Jack Rabbit,” so Jack Rabbit he became.
Maybe I have obsessive attachment issues, but from day one, Jack Rabbit became a part of me, like another limb. I managed to do most things with him squeezed under my armpit. He’d stand on the table next to my plate during mealtimes and sit on the laundry basket when I was having my baths. I squeezed him into the wires of my bike and went on missions to save the world.
‘Quick, Mary, we must get to the explosive device before the bad men do!’ And we cycled round and round and round and round in the driveway for hours.
Like Woody, Jack Rabbit had his own community. I had watched the musical Annie and was OBSESSED with adoption, so he was the adopted son of my Mum’s ragged old Lion, named Gladly the Cross-Eyed Lion (Catholic family) and a white cat called Puffacrisp (because it was puffy and four-year-old Mum got it for Christmas). Jack Rabbit was married to Marie, the cat from The Aristocats. Jack and Marie were in charge and ruled my bedroom with an iron fist. (Joking, I quite liked the idea that he was pretty liberal and very much liked).
I would always bring Jack Rabbit on holiday. (If the plane goes down, we will go down together).
The catch was that I had to leave him at the hotel during the day. I felt terrible for leaving him all by himself when I was having so much fun. But this problem was solved the year I was allowed to pack my own bag. When we got to the hotel, Mum opened a suitcase to find it was stuffed full of teddy bears.
‘Where are all your clothes, Mary?’ she gasped.
But I was out on the balcony showing Puffacrisp the sea view.
‘Can you believe how blue the sea is, Puffacrisp?’
As Jack Rabbit was the most important thing in my life, he naturally became a target for my brothers. After an exhausting game of piggy in the middle… (me, being the piggy, Jack Rabbit being the ball) …he ended up on the roof of the town’s public swimming pool, exotically named The Didcot Wave.
On a couple of traumatising occasions, Jack Rabbit would actually get lost. I left him in McDonald’s, and when I came back to collect him, one of the adolescent workers had cello-taped a sign to his belly: HELP! I’M A LOST BUNNY!
And once, at a motel in California, he got mixed up with the bedding and had to be rescued from the laundry room.
The worst time was the Christmas Street fair. Dark and crowded, it was the first time I really felt like he was gone forever. I was beside myself.
‘I told you not to bring him,’ Mum yelled over the choir singing ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’. The extent to which this stuffed rabbit has dominated her 40s was something she had never anticipated.
The search party commenced; we walked up and down Broadway, going back to the pick-a-duck stand and the ladybug ride. Frantically asking, ‘Have you seen this rabbit?’ ‘Have you seen this rabbit?’ After an hour of trailing through the crowds in the cold, the hunt was about to be called off, but then, like a Christmas miracle, I looked to my right and saw him standing on the candy floss stand.
‘Mary, have you seen this? They’re like clouds on sticks!’
I wondered how we were going to live our lives together because, from what I could tell, no adults were carrying their teddy bears. I could only assume that we were going to be an exception, because how could I possibly take my driving test, go to university or get married without Jack Rabbit under my arm? ‘Marry me, and have to marry the rabbit too.’ I was told I would grow out of him, but that was a devastating thought. I would have nightmares of him, alone in a box in the attic, covered with gigantic spiders, with only memories to keep him warm.
‘You’ve…got…a…friend…in…me…’
I noticed people’s reaction to Jack Rabbit had changed over the years; rather than an ‘aww’, it was more of an ‘Eurgh?!!’
Yes, my love for him had taken its toll.
One of his ears fell off, and then the other. A beanie, made out of a Virgin Atlantic aeroplane sock, was attached to his head with his ears stitched on, but that didn’t last long, and soon he was left with grey cotton wool spilling out from his head, like his brain was falling out. Concerned that he was carrying around diseases, Mum insisted that Jack Rabbit have ‘freezer-time’, where he lay in the freezer with the fish fingers for thirty minutes, in the hope of killing off any bacteria.
‘Just think of it like a spa,’ Mum tried to reassure me.
His fur withered away, his nose and eye were replaced with buttons. His arm had to be stitched back on, and his tail had lost its fluff.
I could only apologise.
‘It’s okay,’ he wheezed.
It was my first lesson in love. No matter how much you love someone, you can’t hold on to them forever… unless you want their skin to fall off.
As you may have noticed, I don’t carry a teddy around with me anymore. It was a gradual detachment; I couldn’t take him to school; I didn’t want to bring him to sleepovers (because Natalie would make fun of me), and eventually he wasn’t in my bed (because Josh would make fun of me).
So, now Jack Rabbit lives in Cornwall on the bookshelf in Mum’s office, watching her lose her shit over the printer and listening to her late-night Zoom calls with her sister.
‘Julia, Julia, you’re on mute. You’re on…never mind.’
Yes, just like Andy, I moved on from my favourite toy.
Last weekend, I was in the cinema watching the new release of Toy Story 5. Even after thirty years, Woody, Buzz and Jessie were still making me smile. I guess there are some things you never grow out of.
THE QUACK 