Author: Bethany Layne, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, De Montfort University

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…