All the usual suspects - dolls, a pram - hated both much to my mother’s chagrin! I also had a second hand dolls house which my father refurbished with brick pattern dolls house paper and carpeted the inside (my dolls house had fitted carpets when our actual house didn’t!). Post office sets, miniature sweet shops with bottles of sweets and tiny scales. A junior sewing machine, and a BAKO building set which I loved. You would never get away with letting a child loose with all those little metal rods these days I don’t suppose. They come up for auction occasionally and I get very nostalgic! I always got a box of Reeves paints for my birthday. And one year my father bought me an electric train set, which I had been nagging him for. My mother didn’t approve, largely because it was “a boy’s toy”, but also because it took up so much room in our tiny house, but I loved it. It had a Royal Mail van which picked up sacks of mail from a gantry at the side of the track as it sped past. I had a bike in my early teens, then it was mostly clothes and books.
My own children’s toys were very gender specific, in line with their preferences. The only thing we gave our son that he absolutely hated was Meccano. He had a castle and knights, Action Men; a cowboy outfit and a rifle and a tent, which he loved. Later there was a microscope, a pair of binoculars, and the forerunner of computer games. My daughter had a pedal tractor, dolls of various kinds, the favourite being a rag doll, and Sindy and Barby and their various accoutrements. They both had bikes at various times, not always new. One thing that was always popular with both of them were Fisher Price toys, and later PlayMobil. There was also a dolls house and furniture which sat in our loft for years and was not brought out again until we were getting ready to give it away, and my grandson “discovered it” and it found a new life for a while, housing his regiments of plastic soldiers and PlayMobil people. I will not start on his toys - they are too numerous to mention and many of them are still cluttering up our loft, as well as that of his parents. I expect we are keeping them for his children?!