Some things stick in the mind of a young child. When I was a young lad at elementary school, we often noticed a young female teenager walking past the school. Then she disappeared for some months, only to reappear later to a background of whispered talk among my parents and elder sister. I later found out that the young 17-year-old had given birth to a child out of wedlock.
The whispering had to do with the perceived shame of the girl’s actions. She was never seen with her child, for, as the practice was in those days, the infant was given to the care of an “orphanage.”
