Thursday 29 January 2009

Where's Patsy?


A love/ hate relationship with blue and orange 
was hard-wired very early in my life by this book.


'Where's Patsy?' by Marjorie Poppleton was published in 1946 by the O.U.P Toronto.
The book was dedicated to Margaret Fletcher, 
('who understands Patsy and her friends so well'), 
the Principal of the Nursery School Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto.


The reader walks around the empty house with the narrator,
looking at all Patsy's things,


with the repeated refrain that we can't see Patsy -
because she's GONE TO NURSERY SCHOOL.


 I believed that if I looked hard enough,
 or quickly enough as I turned the page,
I would see Patsy sitting at her little blue table,
 on her little orange chair,
or playing with her little black kitten,
or eating her scrambled eggs and drinking her milk.



So it was really quite disappointing that,
when she finally came home from NURSERY SCHOOL,

 I couldn't see her face.

(so Margaret Fletcher didn't understand me very well at all)

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