Fierce Bad Rabbits by Clare Pollard

Author:Clare Pollard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241354803
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

5. My Little Eye

On families lost and found

‘What can he see?’ the Ahlbergs ask of the little baby standing in his cot at the beginning of Peepo! (or Peek-A-Boo! in the US version). The hole in the facing page is almost the circle of his little eye, through which we can spy. Seeing and being seen is one of the great, profound subjects of toddler literature. Hiding and seeking; absence and presence.

Small children are notoriously terrible at knowing when they are hidden. ‘Can you see me?’ they ask, covering their eyes with their hands, while parents contemplate whether their children are absolute idiots. For a long time psychologists thought this was because they were egocentric, unable to imagine anyone else’s perspective. More recently, though, experiments have suggested otherwise – Henrike Moll at the University of Southern California has observed that: ‘young children consider mutual eye contact a requirement for one person to be able to see another.’ (This is why they deem their little sister putting a tea towel over their head an effective strategy in a game of hide and seek.)

Sigmund Freud also famously observed how his grandson liked to play a game of making a cotton reel disappear and then reappear, throwing it out of his cot and forcing his mother to return it. Freud interpreted his babbles of ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ as an attempt to say the German words fort (gone) and da (there). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud suggested that his grandson was re-enacting a scenario over which he had no control – his parent leaving him and then coming back – creating a sort of vengeful game in which he was now in charge. Compulsively repeating it was comforting; a way to reassure himself of object permanence.

It is notable that the most beloved toy book mechanisms in picture books, the pop-up and the flap, allow a disappearance and then appearance to be acted out, over and over (and over and over and over) again. Fort-da. Fort-da.

In Peepo!, the father kissing the baby goodnight at the end is wearing his soldier’s uniform, about to leave his child for months, or at the risk of forever.

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