In the words of the artist’s wife, Victoria Mary Clarke, “Shane was seven years old when the US entered the Vietnam war and he remembers getting up very early every morning as a child, to tune in to the BBC World Service (because he felt compelled to follow the events of the war from an unbiased source) and he didn’t trust the newspapers. He says that he was riveted and horrified by the graphic descriptions of indescribable crimes against humanity, and when he was in England, he could even watch it unfolding in colour on television. He was already very much immersed in the violence of Irish history, and he consumed vast amounts of information about the so-called ‘Great War’ in which many Irish people fought, and the Second World War, the effects of which were still very much in the consciousness of the people of Britain and Ireland in the late 1950’s. Because he felt that children were generally underestimated and patronised by ‘children’s books’, he scorned such authors as Enid Blyton with her ‘lashings of ginger beer and jolly good cheer’, knowing that they in no way represented the real, brutal world into which he had been born. He remembers dreaming about chopping up little girls on a butcher’s block and his childhood games generally involved fighting imaginary wars, and when his little sister got a teddy bear, Shane dismembered it and sexually violated it. ‘Teddy’s Been a Naughty Teddy’ has echoes of this scorn for ‘nice’ children’s toys."