Feelings

I suppose we take it for granted that kids feel things with great intensity, but why is this so? And what happens to the mechanisms that create those feelings? Do they atrophy? Go rusty? Get locked away?

I started school when I was five, at St Mary's in Denton. My Auntie Norah took me for the first day. When she walked away from the classroom - I saw her leaving through a panel in the classroom door - I felt utterly abandoned. It's almost an understatement to say I felt desolate. I didn't cry, being a brave boy, but I was on the edge of tears, hollow inside.

And then when I was six or seven there was a period in which Mum was working shifts alternate weeks, which I meant I didn't see her for a whole week when I came back from school as she was at work until ten each day. Maureen took me home from school, on the bus to Haughton Green, and Dad was there, but it wasn't the same. Desolation on a daily basis.

The funny thing is that I am entirely sure that my childhood was a happy one - secure and well-looked after. So what must it be like for kids who don't have the good luck to be born into a loving family? It doesn't bear think about; which means that we should think about it.