It’s good to be inquisitive. When looking under stones, for instance, you might come across tiny holes in the earth where a whole, busy insect world is teeming and seething with purpose, and it could make you wonder just how many tunnels and chambers and secret spaces there were under your feet; it might make you consider whether everything is exactly as it seems.

Finding herself unexpectedly in a new place was just another challenge to Doll Splinter. She sat in the pocket of Someone’s jacket that was now hanging over the back of a chair and listened to Someone Else clattering about in the kitchen.Then she heard the Someones move into the garden. It was time to look around the room.  

There were the usual things she’d seen before in places like this. Towering above her were four long wooden posts holding up a  flat, wooden wasteland but down below there were soft, patterned fields. Of course these were tables and rugs but Doll Splinter didn’t know that!

What she didn’t expect to see was a house on a hill, a normal sized house, painted red, with white window frames and a white front door. She knew it was the sort of place that someone like her might live. But was anyone in?

Doll Splinter had no intention of knocking on the front door knocker. When she had been living, all that time ago, on a book shelf, a Word Thief with a long narrow bag hanging over his shoulder, used to come creeping along in the dead dark of night; he would make a deep hole in the spines of books and slip through to steal words, cutting them out with sharp scissors and sliding them into his bag. When she asked him why he did this he explained that he sold them to writers who were lost for words, and he gave her this piece of advice: if you ever take up burglary, never use the front door! 

She remembered that now as she climbed the hill .Seeing some steps going up the side of the house she began, without a moments hesitation, to climb them, very determinedly.

She is, as we know, a doll who knows her own mind.