Coming home to memories of a time long gone

A photograph taken in the 1960s of the London childhood home where the writer was born during the war. PHOTO: COURTESY OF MEIRA CHAND
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We all yearn for happier, simpler times and most of us look back upon our childhood nostalgically. Yet how happier or simpler were those times actually?

Is it that, as children, we live more in the present without formed concepts of past or future, and so experience the essential vitality of each moment, accepting without question the conditions around us, whatever they may be?

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