The English writer and illustrator Jill Murphy is well known internationally, but if I am not mistaken, this is his first job in Basque. This work, published in 1986, is also part of the best-known collection of this author: The Large Family.

As indicated in the title Five Minutes of Peace of Mind itself, that is the key to this album. Mrs. Itzel wants five minutes for her alone, to rest, to be quiet... and from that desire is what Murphy tells us in a humorous way.

On the cover of the book and as the reader can see nothing else in this book, we have as protagonist a family of personified elephants. And before I enter the story there are several clues about the behavior of these protagonists: the children following their mother, the little one emptying the bowl of head… And it is precisely that, naughty and playful children, tireless, that the mother sees in the kitchen. “The children were having breakfast. That wasn’t a nice show.” With these words the author addresses the narrative, while in the images we have complementary information, the desperate mother, the children in the travesuras, the disorder and the dirt in the kitchen.

Mrs. Itzel, this is what her mother is called her elephant, takes her breakfast and newspaper stuff on the tray and wants to leave the kitchen quietly, “little by little”. He has to interrupt these guys for a moment and decides to go to the bathroom: “For I need five minutes of tranquillity, without you.”

But children have a special meaning, the one we don't want, to do the opposite of what we've asked for. And that's what's going to happen to her mother, Mrs. Itzel. First the older one, playing the music, then the middle one, reading the story, and the last one, the smaller one, offering toys, all three appear to the mother in this five-minute relaxation.

As the reader can foresee, the peace of mind of the mother will not last long, much less when the three children decide to enter the bathtub.

In a humorous way, Jill Murphy, placing a great deal of force on the illustrations, offers us the image of the incessant work that mothers usually suffer; and I say, Mom, because my father's image does not appear in the book.

Mrs. Itzel is outraged when the three children play the toilet, when he leaves, and gets angry when she tells them: “Because I need five minutes of tranquillity, without you,” said Mrs Itzel. That’s why.”

In the end we see our mother in the kitchen, calmly, but not for five minutes of calm: “He went down and there he was quiet for three minutes and forty-five seconds, before the children returned to him.”

Actually, sometimes three minutes and forty-five seconds are almost five minutes.