It is not ‘woke’ to want to do better for our young people - Christa Ackroyd

The answer was yes they had been swimming in the sea. They had definitely been crabbing, in fact Margot the little one had been crowned Brancaster Crabbing Champion (aged six and under) and had the silver cup to prove it.

She caught 27 crabs in 30 minutes if anyone wants to know, but told me she had thrown them all back because they were too tiny to eat and anyway she didn’t like crab.

The best thing about their Norfolk holiday they said was the Gone Wild festival with Bear Grylls just down the road at Holkham Hall.

‘And guess what Nonna?’, said the eldest. ‘We played with Prince George and Princess Charlotte.’ I nearly fell off my chair.

After five minutes of ‘no you didn’t’ and several ‘yes we dids’ it turns out they really did. And I am thrilled.

Not for my granddaughters, although what I did in the holidays might be an interesting question on their return to school. I of course immediately checked with my daughter to see if it really had been so casual an encounter. It appears it was exactly that. Casual being the order of the day.

It seemingly started off as a perfectly normal afternoon in the festival enclosure which was pretty full except for one table marked reserved. Much speculation was going on as to who would be the VIP guests.

My son in law suggested the Royals, which the whole party dismissed as ridiculous, due to the fact it was such a relaxed but very public occasion. Well he was proved right when accompanied by a bunch of chums and with discreet security, the two Royal children appeared from nowhere.

Mum and dad had left them to it. It was their day to go exploring. And that was it.

My girls played frisby with them and George threw water balloons at his pal. Just a normal fun day out for them and for mine. And that, dear reader is just as it should be. And it is that which gladdens my heart.

I wasn’t going to tell you about it in this column. I sort of wanted it to remain as low key as it all was. Only this week in the newspapers it was reported that the children, this time with William and Catherine, had been enjoying other events at the festival.

My daughter said a couple of days before they had also had fun on the climbing wall. But there was one line in the piece in the paper which reported their presence that gladdened my heart even more.

Even though the Princess of Wales had been rolling around on the floor in the mud, and Louis had been his usual excitable self there were no photographs recording the event, the article said. And that is just as it should be.

Family time, unhindered by protocol, unburdened by a hundred photographers snapping their every move and being free to be just a normal family. And for the children the time to let off steam and be just that, children.

This year has been a tough year for the Royal family. But also for those three youngsters who as we know have had to be told that mummy isn’t very well, but she is getting help from the doctors to make her better. What is more grandpa too needed the same help.

And so normality is exactly what they needed this holiday. What better way to show everything is going to be alright and that life will continue than allowing them the freedom to forget about their titles and their future responsibilities and let them run around in the sun and be just children, with other children.

Would that the world be so innocent all of the time.

This week Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced a 10-year plan to help other children in Britain under a new £100m programme entitled Young Futures. She did so with the pronouncement that youngsters ‘have it much harder’ than previous generations.

What our young people are facing today can never be measured in monetary terms. Yes we could never have even imagined iPads and smart phones and the internet, and yes we were content to spend our summer holidays playing out with little more than a jam jar for fishing and some chalk to play hopscotch or create patterns on our spinning tops for whip and tops, but think what that implies.

It suggests a largely unsupervised sense of freedom and adventure that would see us spend hours away from our parents, exploring our neighbourhoods the only stipulation being come home for tea. And if that sounds too Enid Blyton, that’s exactly how it was. Without the lashings and lashings of ginger beer.

Not now. We live in an entirely different age. We could never and would never allow our children to wander off alone even with a bunch of pals without any means of communication.

Freedom now involves mummy or daddy or at least one responsible adult tagging along until we decide to take the risk of allowing them to experience a little more of the world. And what a dangerous world it now is.

Violent crime amongst young people is on the rise. The internet has provided a safe haven for paedophiles to become immersed in their sordid world and reach out to their unwitting victims.

Even drugs are no longer sold entirely on street corners in dodgy areas. And that which we took for granted is no more. Let us be honest when we were young we were told not to talk to strangers on our adventures and that was it.

Now those strangers can appear perfectly harmless and be whoever they claim to be on the world wide web and parents are none the wiser. And that is a frightening thing. It is frightening for parents but also for children when they have to be warned to trust no one. Yet that is the age we are living in.

And so I applaud Yvette Cooper for following through on Labour’s manifesto to try to change things. It is not ‘woke’ to want to do better for our young people. It protects all of our futures if we give them a safe environment to grow up in.

And as we saw in Southport last month if they feel they can’t even go to a dancing class without being in danger what kind of a world are they part of? Childhood is about being free to develop. It is about being free to spend time with our friends in a make believe world where nothing can harm us.

It is about having fun, simple healthy fun, running around and making up games and being who ever we want to be just for a moment.

It struck me as both funny and heartwarming that while most little girls dream of being Princesses a real life Princess was doing exactly that, enjoying a simple day out with her pals, alongside my grandchildren in Norfolk.

And that is wonderful. And just as it should be.