What a picture book from the 1980s has in common with Virginia Woolf’s unfinished wartime memoir

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.

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: “I am the Peepo! baby”. Peepo! therefore combines Sketch’s form – a piece of life-writing – with its wartime context, in a way that has never, to my knowledge, been explored.

For Woolf, a modernist writer concerned with interior perspectives and subjective viewpoints, describing her childhood was both an opportunity and a challenge. Her memories are of “many bright colours; many distinct...

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