Parenting & Family Quote by Helen Dunmore

Memory here isn’t a scrapbook; it’s a camera angle. Dunmore begins with an almost defiantly ordinary detail - the pram - then tightens the focus until the scene becomes a small theatre of power and separation. “A big bouncy pram” sounds cosy, even comic, but she immediately seeds unease: “metal clips that could trap your fingers.” The world of early childhood isn’t curated for innocence; it’s full of blunt objects and minor threats. That quick turn is a poet’s move: tenderness without sentimentality.

The subtext lives in posture and viewpoint. The speaker is below, “looking up,” while the sister sits in the “pram seat” with “her back to me.” In a handful of words, Dunmore sketches hierarchy, longing, and exclusion. The sister is close enough to see, far enough to be unreachable; intimacy and estrangement share the same carriage. The back turned reads as accidental - children sit where they’re placed - yet it lands like the first lesson in how relationships can be asymmetrical, how attention doesn’t automatically flow toward you.

Context matters: Dunmore often writes where domestic life and psychic weather meet. The reference to “then” versus “now” isn’t nostalgia so much as an ethical contrast, a reminder that childhood is historically contingent, shaped by objects, habits, and unspoken family structures. The specificity is the point. By naming the pram’s materials and hazards, she makes memory credible; by ending on that turned back, she makes it consequential.