There was a house...

...in the borough we were raised in. An ordinary looking house we would have walked past many times when we were bunking off school - beyond the care of those in loco parentis. We walked and bunked blithely on, past the house and into adulthood and then our lives sped up and before we knew it we were organising a school reunion, looking back and counting our blessings, counting our lost.

Our lost and our missing. Some you never track down - perhaps they really don't want to be found. But some are still here. It's just that their childhoods have been lost, or have gone missing. You see something happened in that ordinary looking house while we were happily scorching through our childhoods. Something - some things - happened there that took that luxury away from others, made childhood summers dark and cast those lives from then on into shadow. Dark things happened when they were in the care of those in loco parentis. 

They will all come out soon - the details I can only allude to here. You will find out what we found out while we were trying to find our friends, to bring them back together to celebrate our childhood and our survival and that strangely enduring even though unbidden bond with those once so easily forgotten. For some, there is little to celebrate. They were in care but were not cared for. They were humiliated and abused by those to whom such wickedness seems to come so readily. These poor children saw beneath the bogus smiles of the politicians - Tory, Labour, Liberal, Sinn Fein; there, at least, some things cut across party lines. They saw the wretched narcissism beneath showbiz schtick. You will find out soon, at leisure, at several removes, what they were taught the hard way.

So spare a thought, when you do, for the victims. Think of what you and I had that they did not. Think about those words; duty of care. Think about those whose duty it is to care for us, all of us, and how they exercise it. Then we might have a better measure of the nature of the betrayal, the scale of the abuse.