A helping hand

Rose watched her son being pushed to the back of the queue for the zipwire yet again. It wasn’t only that Charlie seemed so much smaller than the boys and girls who looked to be about his age, which made the four-year-old easier to shunt to the rear of the wooden platform on which the children waited. It was also because the other children, in their crisp shorts and designer sundresses, seemed to expect it to always be their turn, even when it patently wasn’t.

Rose found herself staring, not for the first time, at the children’s mothers, none of whom ever deigned to talk to Rose, the lone, unglamorous mum in the faded jeans and scuffed boots, always sat by herself on the bench in the shade between the zipwire and swings.

The women, Rose decided, had something of a uniform: loose prairie dresses in geometric or floral prints and gleaming white trainers. Most of them were too concerned with their competitive chatter on kitchen extensions and the relative merits of the European summer destinations from which they’d all