"Everyone should have a New Zealand childhood." These are the opening words of the memoir I published as I left British public life to return to New Zealand.
It was an attempt to express my perception that, having been born and brought up in New Zealand, I had a head start in life. My wife feels similarly about her early life in the UK.
She, however, was not quite so fortunate. She was born in London in the middle of World War II, to parents who had to grapple with the hardships of nightly German bombing raids. Her mother worked in a wartime munitions factory, and her father was a fireman who was kept busy as the bombs fell.
But she shared with me the great advantages of loving parents and a stable family life. Neither family was well-off by today's standards but we were well-fed, adequately clothed and warmly housed. And we both grew up in a world of family support, educational opportunity and expert health care.
These thoughts often come to mind for my wife and me as we watch the daily parade of human misery in international news bulletins on our television screens. So many of these heart-rending stories seem to involve small children, who are completely innocent of any responsibility for the calamities that have befallen them and their families. They are completely at the mercy of events.
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Sometimes they are the victims of war - civil war, as in the case of Syria, or international conflict, as with Turkey's attacks on the Kurds. In either event, the damage and victims are the same - the bombings and shellings, the fatalities and injuries, the disruption of families, the destruction of homes, the search for refuge. The small children who bear these burdens necessarily start life with enormous handicaps.