The cupboards that I have been clearing out have been a rich source of memories. I found a large biscuit tin full of marbles.  Some of the contents go back to my childhood and my sons added to them when they were small.

Children don’t play with marbles these days. However, I don’t do “Things were better in my days”.

Things were different, but largely worse for children when I grew up. Children were abused, legally, by the very people who should have been protecting them.

School was horrible. From the age of six we sat all day at our desks in silence. The first school I attended was in a Victorian red brick building. I just remember the Infants section as dark. Outside was a tiny playground, which was an uneven stretch of tarmac devoid of any play apparatus. The toilets were across the yard, and we called one of the cubicles the ‘fever toilet’ because it was filthy with broken pipes.

The building was completely inadequate. One day we arrived at school to be told we were moving to a new Infants school. We walked in a crocodile to the new site. Unfortunately our parents (schools didn’t work with parents at all in those days) had not been informed so apparently turned up at the old school to pick us up at the end of the day.

The new school was a revelation. We had a substantial playground with a grassy area and a climbing frame. The classrooms had floor to ceiling windows, which was a huge improvement on the Victorian model where windows were deliberately placed up high to stop pupils from looking out. But someone hadn’t really thought it through, because the rooms became unbearably hot in summer.

Although the building was better I still have painful memories of my time there, which gave me nightmares for many years. I can clearly recall children being identified in assembly and beaten in front of the whole school for some misdemeanour. Such abusive practices were not only hugely damaging to the victims but created anxiety in all of us.

One day I found something in my pocket when I got ready for bed. We had been cutting out shapes from coloured paper in school and I had put some of the leftover scraps in my pocket by mistake. I became very upset, thinking I would be in big trouble the next day at school for stealing the paper. I can still remember the fear, and my parents trying to console me.

Now my father was a bit of a writer in his spare time – he wrote children’s stories, with some success, and also articles. After he died I came across a piece he had published in a magazine about parenting, in which he recalled this incident. His take on it was that I had developed a strong moral sense and was confessing to something that I (misguidedly) thought I had done wrong. I’m sure he wasn’t aware of the threatening atmosphere in the beautiful new plate glass school.

Today children are protected, listened to, respected and encouraged to explore their creativity, with or without marbles.

I don’t do “Things were better in my days”. In return, please don’t tell me “It’s all the fault of you Boomers”.

Please note

We have been in full self-isolation since 16th March to protect my husband whose immune system is compromised.

If you are in self-isolation then join the Lib Dems in self-isolation Facebook group.

You can find my previous Isolation diaries here.

* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.