Jane Devereux remembers the moment as if it were yesterday – she had just turned four and was told she was about to meet her daddy for the very first time.
Having finally arrived home in 1945 after being held as a Japanese prisoner of war, her father gently took a blonde, blue-eyed doll from his kit bag and gave it to his young daughter.
Jane, now 80, recalled: “I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life. I’d never had a doll before.”
The precious toy eventually became weather-beaten and battered after a little boy Jane knew strapped her to his bicycle and left her out in the rain.
But Jane’s doll has always held a special connection to her father, and in emotional scenes to be shown on The Repair Shop, experts manage to restore her to her former glory, taking Jane straight back to her childhood.
Jane’s father John Vincent Bowen was from Birmingham and joined the South Staffordshire regiment before being made a second lieutenant with the Northumberland fusiliers.
He saw Jane the day she was born in October 1941, then sailed to Singapore the next day but was soon captured by the Japanese.
Jane explains: “Prisoners were treated like slaves as they built the Burma railway. Eventually he was rescued by Russian troops and sent to Canada. That’s when he bought a doll for the daughter he’d only ever seen once.
“He came back to England on the Queen Elizabeth in November 1945. I was told, ‘You’re going to meet your daddy’, but I hadn’t even seen a photo. I didn’t know what a daddy was.
“I remember being dressed in a pink sweater, pleated skirt, socks and shoes, walking into a bedroom and seeing my father for the first time. He pulled the doll out of his knapsack and gave her to me. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
Seeing the brand name ‘Marilyn doll’ on the back of the doll’s head, Jane called her Mary-Lynn.
But as Jane and her 10-year-old granddaughter Millie Thompson take her into The Repair Shop, Mary-Lynn is worse for wear.
Doll restorers Amanda Middleditch and Julie Tatchell have their work cut out to repair the chipped and scratched face, hands and feet, matted hair and ripped dress.
Jane says: “Nobody had toys when I was a child. It was post-war, there was no money. Mary-Lynn was always with me in a little pram. She had this blonde hair and lacy knickers. None of my friends had seen anything like her.
“There was a little boy in my street who thought she was rather nice and tied her to the front of his bicycle and rode off home with her. But he left her out in the rain. I remember getting her back and thinking, ‘She’s ruined!’”
Millie fell in love with the doll and its wartime story so much that she took her on The Repair Shop. Millie says: “She has an amazing story and Granny said she used to be beautiful.”
Jane, of Woodford, Essex, has “lots of memories” of her father, who died aged 94 in 2007. She says: “When I saw the new Mary-Lynn, I was amazed. I was straight back to being a four-year-old.
“Millie held her all the way home, then tucked her up in bed and read her a story. Mary-Lynn is like a birth certificate for my life with my father. Now the story will stay in our family forever.”
The Repair Shop, starts Monday, continues weekdays BBC One, 3.45pm
