{"id":18422,"date":"2025-02-05T09:40:47","date_gmt":"2025-02-05T08:40:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/?page_id=18422"},"modified":"2025-02-19T09:54:01","modified_gmt":"2025-02-19T08:54:01","slug":"bethany-layne-on-woolf-and-the-memories-war-conjures","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/?page_id=18422","title":{"rendered":"Bethany Layne: on Woolf and the memories war conjures"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This article was first published on December 27, 2024 in The Conversation<\/a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Virginia Woolf has in common with the Peepo! baby<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Bethany Layne<\/a>, De Montfort University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does Peepo!<\/a>, a popular picture book from the 1980s, have in common with Virginia Woolf\u2019s unfinished wartime memoir? More than a little, as it turns out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sketch of the Past is Woolf\u2019s 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<\/a> that \u201cthe battle is at its crisis; every night the Germans fly over England; it comes closer to this house daily\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside, an air raid warden passes, while planes and barrage balloons fly overhead. According to Allan Ahlberg, born in 1938, the book is also a memoir: \u201cI am the Peepo! baby\u201d<\/a>. Peepo! therefore combines Sketch\u2019s form \u2013 a piece of life-writing \u2013 with its wartime context, in a way that has never, to my knowledge, been explored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For Woolf, a modernist writer concerned with interior perspectives and subjective viewpoints, describing her childhood was both an opportunity and a challenge. Her memories<\/a> are of \u201cmany bright colours; many distinct sounds; some human beings, caricatures; comic; several violent moments of being, always including a circle of the scene which they cut out\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This describes, with startling accuracy, the physical structure of Peepo! Alternate spreads depict the baby on the left page and a circle containing what he sees on the right. When the circles are lifted, Janet Ahlberg\u2019s full-page illustrations show, in Woolf\u2019s words \u201cthe scene which they cut out\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The construction of Peepo!, which has charmed generations of children, also provides startling insights into the child\u2019s-eye perspective as Woolf saw it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trying to describe Kensington Gardens, Woolf found that<\/a>, \u201cI cannot recover, save by fits and starts \u2026 the proportions of the external world\u201d. These gaps and absences led her to conclude that \u201ca child must have a curious focus; it sees an air-ball or a shell with extreme distinctness \u2026 but these points are enclosed in vast empty spaces\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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