I just love it. I just love these beautiful children.

They wanted 10 children. They just had a heart for the love of children that no one else wanted, the ones that no one else would have taken.

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day-
A sunny day with the leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play
Your first game of fotball, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
with the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.

I had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show-
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love proved in the letting go.

This required a lot of different things to fall together. Not only do the children have to be bright. They had to be ambitious. Not one of them went off the tracks during their childhood and adolescence. They could be bright and ambitious, but still, for a period of 20 to 25 years, both parents had to make enormous sacrifices. These are parents who truly believed that the future is in their children.

one blow in anger [would] kill, probably, a child from aged two to eight. Those over eight would take two blows to kill.

I am fond of children - except boys