ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with two of Philippa Pearce’s later stories, A Dog So Small and The Battle of Bubble and Squeak. The sublimation of incipiently sexual feelings in love of animals is more commonly a theme of stories about girls. The family is becoming more relaxed about the animals, and Amy disobeys Sid’s instructions and plays with them out of their cage one day before school. The animals for these children like Omri in The Indian in the Cupboard are a way of imagining life beyond the confines of their housing estate. Philippa Pearce shows the same intuitive understanding of the reasons for a boy’s loneliness in this story as she does in different ways in Tom’s Midnight Garden and The Battle of Bubble and Squeak. Philippa Pearce knows she is writing books for modern children who mostly live in cities.
