...aged three to five years old...
       ...in the beginning all was not calm...

I feel terror struck. It is one of those mornings yet again. They seem to come around so often, too often; it does not matter how scared I feel and how much I cry, they always take me there. I am being transported to that place, the vast place where the screams, voices, the bangs, the footsteps combine to make this painfully deafening confusing mush of sound. Although as we walk in the tears run down my face, nobody seems to notice my terror as the noise consumes me and the multicoloured blurs rush past me screaming, shouting and sometimes knocking me. The only reassuring safe reference point in all this chaos is fast moving towards the door. Why does my mother insist on leaving me here? Once she has gone I will be isolated in this confusion for what will seem like an eternity. Although one or two of my friends are here in this bedlam, it is very hard to distinguish anything, let alone find one of them in amongst all these moving blurs. If I can be with one of them this gives me a minute sense of security, which is better than nothing. My friends and family call this place Play School, I think of it more in terms of 'Terror' School.
        After a while I normally manage to compose myself in the knowledge that I will eventually be allowed out of this prison. The doors are locked so that we cannot escape and the bottoms of the windows are way above my head. Today it is my turn to do the painting. We are given this large sheet of glaring white paper on which to paint. I know that to remove this painful glare all I have to do is to paint the whole sheet of paper black. For some reason nobody, including my mother, ever seems enamored with my completely black paintings. Strangely, they try to make me use a confusion of dazzling bright colours.
       Normally towards the end of the morning we all have to sit down quietly and have a drink. At last these blurs of colour stay in one place and the volume of sound subsides to a mumbling. In the comparative stillness and reduced noise I begin to feel a sense of calm coming over me. Finally we sit in a circle. We must be quiet and only one person speaks, a lady who, I think, tells a story, but it is hard for me to understand the strange sounds in this voice, which is foreign to me. It works both ways, because the grown-ups do not understand me when I speak. I know that soon for one more awful moment the blurs will start rushing around again and causing that terrible confusion, but at least at this point my mother will be coming to take me back to the comparable safety of our home. Relative peace at last..............