Children Always Give Us Hope

Catherine shows us what childhood needs. A family prepares to come home. And whatever the headlines say, the thing that matters most still fits inside a single word.

Today Catherine published a quiet, heartfelt essay on childhood; on connection, on love, on the curious, unguarded way small children meet the world.

It came after her solo trip to Reggio Emilia in northern Italy, where she went to study how the very young learn, and where the mayor and some three thousand locals turned out simply because she had come.

“Children always give me hope,” she wrote. And she meant it. She wrote of their openness, their wonder, their gift for connecting across any barrier; how the youngsters she met took in a complete stranger with nothing but confidence and joy. She warned, gently, that in a world tilting ever further into the digital, the young need real human warmth more than ever.

It is Catherine at her finest. No fanfare. No performance. It is future Queen saying something true, and letting it land.

Hold that thought, because another set of children is about to come “home.”

Next month, between 6 and 10 July, Prince Harry returns to Britain for a run of engagements: London, Birmingham, a one-year countdown to his beloved Invictus Games.

And this time, it seems, he will not come alone. The King has offered Harry and Meghan a royal residence for the stay, with security arrangements to match.

If it holds, Archie, now seven, and Lilibet, now five, will set foot on British soil for the first time in four years.

Yes, the noise is already building. The security battle, the lost court case, the money, the lawyers, the leaks, the less-than-forty-five-minutes Harry managed with his father last September. And yes - one senses the Sussexes are rather keen to get in on the act, with Catherine’s good grace filling every front page.

There is plenty here to argue about, and we will. All the usual cautions stand. The taxpayer should not be funding protection.

The family must, of course, be kept safe. On the money, I give no ground, and nor should anyone.

But step back from the din a moment and look at what is actually about to happen. A grandfather may get to hug his grandchildren.

That is the whole of it. And it is the one thing in this long, bruising saga that none of us, hand on heart, can really argue against.

Children need to know their grandparents.

These two will never know Diana. That door closed long before either was born, and it remains one of the quiet sorrows running beneath everything.

But they can know Charles. They can keep him - his voice, his face, an afternoon in a garden - somewhere safe in memory, for when they are grown and the world has moved on.

I loved my grandparents. They helped shape me; I feel their influence still, all these years on, in ways I am only now old enough to understand.

So forgive me if I cannot summon much cynicism about anything that makes the same possible for two small children who have been kept so far from it.

And I hope, sincerely, that the King takes real joy from it. Here is a man living with cancer, carrying on with a grace that shames his critics, doing, to my mind, a quietly magnificent job.

If a visit from two grandchildren brings him some happiness, then good. Because in the end, when the columns are filed and the lawyers have gone home, happiness is rather the point.

Catherine, The Princess of Wales, has just reminded us, in her soft, but assured way, what childhood asks for: openness, connection, love. Perhaps we might all listen. Perhaps everyone in this story might. Connection matters.

And then - because fairness has a wicked sense of humour - spare a thought for the other grandfather.

Thomas Markle has not met these children either.

He, too, has been unwell; he, too, has had his operations and his frights. He lives no great distance from his daughter, Meghan.

Yet no visit for him. Whatever you make of the man - and opinions vary - he would surely take a hug from Archie and Lilibet as gladly as any king.

Funny, isn’t it. One grandfather, loaded, gets a hug, another gets silence.

Children need their grandparents. I hope the King gets that hug.