Poignant picture of homeless woman and child

From: John Street, Ilkeston Road, Heanor.

I WAS shaken to the core by your photo (The Yorkshire Post, December 20) of the homeless young woman and small child sitting by the roadside. The child is huddled under a coat or blanket. The old saying about a picture being worth a thousand words never seemed more apt. The child can be no more than two or three.

I am not naive; I know full well that many people find themselves in this desperate situation every year for all sorts of reasons. What has made it so poignant and relevant to me is probably that my own grandson has just turned three; the trainers and jeans worn by the child remind me so much of him. I simply cannot get my head round the fact that this child has no home; what sort of life is he, or she, having?

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What on earth has put this tragic young woman in this awful situation? How will they eat? How will they buy clothes? Where on earth will they go at night, particularly during cold weather?

The picture will haunt me for a long time to come. I just cannot imagine a two-year-old child with no home, living on the streets. I am going to have great difficulty in putting it into context; it is so powerful. I feel so pathetically inadequate as nothing I can do will change things.

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