Iona and Peter Opie were enjoying a country walk one fine autumn day in 1944 when a ladybird caught their eye. In jest they recited the traditional rhyme: “Ladybird, ladybird,/ Fly away home,/ Your house is on fire/ And your children all gone.” The mysteriousness of the verse stuck in Iona’s mind and when next they were in London she visited a public library in Kensington, where she examined James Halliwell-Phillipps’s Nursery Rhymes of England (1842). “We learnt something about the ladybird and we learnt something about nursery rhymes,” she recalled.
Before long the couple were amassing a remarkable collection of nursery-rhyme books, children’s literature and other ephemera relating to childhood and play. “We began to buy nursery-rhyme books because we were having to decide