ABSTRACT
When he is only a little over a year old, you can see such a baby sitting on his mother’s lap – or on the lap of another adult – looking at a picture book (because this is a family that expects even babies to delight in books). As he looks at the picture, he leans against her body, feels her warmth, her softness and firmness, and traces with his own hands and his own eyes the arms protectively around him. He does this at first passively, with that inturnedness of a baby. Then he does it again deliberately, with awareness, choosing to experience and explore these arms that are round him. He strokes them and gravely stares at them. Then he looks back to the book – and he listens. Then he leans back and looks, upside down, at the face that is smiling at the book and at him, and the mouth that is saying these magic sounds. He reaches a hand upwards and backwards and tries to pick out between finger and thumb the words as they come from the lips. He puts his hand over the mouth to feel the sounds and the breath that comes with them. Then he looks at the book again. At this point, probably, his parent or whoever holds him quite instinctively puts him in the book. She says ‘Oh, there’s a mug like Sam’s. Is that Sam’s mug?’ ‘Look, there’s a cat like Sam’s. Is it Sam’s pussy-cat?’ And so this baby is in this book; this is this individual baby’s book. It is a book about him – no-one else.
