Consider the following comments on childhood.
The childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day.
John Milton
What is a childhood for, if not to be misremembered fondly when it is gone?
Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.
Charles Baudelaire
We spend our adult lives either escaping our childhoods or trying to return to them.
Children are not things to be moulded, but people to be unfolded.
Anonymous
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
Reflect on the gap between childhood as it was lived and childhood as it is remembered, and on how that remembered version shapes the adult. You might open with a specific sensory memory and the way it has quietly hardened into a story you tell about yourself. Develop a tension between nostalgia and the harder truths memory edits out. A third movement could ask whether we are formed by childhood or by our retellings of it. Caution: resist either gilding childhood as a lost paradise or reducing it to mere trauma, since most childhoods refuse such neat verdicts.