What does Peepo!, a popular picture book from the 1980s, have in common with Virginia Woolf’s unfinished wartime memoir? More than a little, as it turns out.
Sketch of the Past is Woolf’s memoir of her childhood, written during the beginning of the second world war as a holiday from her work on a biography of the art critic Roger Fry. In a section dated June 8 1940, Woolf writes that “the battle is at its crisis; every night the Germans fly over England; it comes closer to this house daily”.
In Peepo! by Janet and Allan Ahlberg (1981), the battle has arrived in the home. The father wears an army uniform, a gas mask dangles from a bedpost and a framed picture of Winston Churchill hangs on the wall.
