Sarah Slade
Instructional Designer
London

Favourite thing: Dog on Wheels

Dog On Wheels was a Christmas present for my mum in about 1948. My Mum rode him to death and then he got presented to me when I was a baby. We didn’t have very much. We were functionally homeless until I was about 4 years old. We used to lodge around various grandparents’ houses and move around. But Dog on Wheels followed us everywhere we went. He’s been around my whole life, most of my mum’s as well.

“He’s been ridden by every single child who’s ever been into our house”

He hasn’t actually got very much fur left – poor thing. One of the reasons is because he’s been ridden by every single child who’s ever been into our house. You can see where he’s been broken and we’ve had to sew him up.

He was really brilliant to ride on. Me and my cousin Ulita, when we were 8 years old – we were enormous by then – we used to race around our house which had lots of very tight corners. Ulita’s quite a good driver now.

“He’s only hanging around until the next child comes along – if he survives that long”

Now he’s my daughter’s. She knows that it’s only a loan; he’s only hanging around until the next child comes along – if he survives that long.

I don’t know why I’ve kept him. He just never got thrown out. Whenever we moved he just either went into storage or he went into a safe place.

There was a time when my mum was moving out of our house in Crystal Palace. And my Godmother Sue came round to help her pack up. Sue said: “Oh you don’t want this tatty old thing any more, I’ll just chuck it out, leave it outside”. And mum went: “If you do that, Sarah will never talk to you ever again.”

I like Dog because Dog’s on wheels and he’s useful. You can put things on him. You can stick your Barbie dolls on him and they can pretend he’s an elephant and have adventures. He was very useful for taking the other toys on journeys and doing stuff like that.