The voices of children

What would it have been like to grow up in the Medieval world, or during the English Civil War? Or, perhaps, during the Victorian era or World War II? The experience of childhood is one that has altered beyond recognition over the centuries as children's roles in the world have shifted with the times.

First heard on Radio 4, The Voices of Children is Michael Morpurgo's thought-provoking new play illuminating the ways in which the concept of childhood has changed over the past 1000 years. As the author says of writing the play: '…I found myself on a journey of discovery as intense as childhood itself.

Here was an aspect of childhood I had known very little about, the history of it, the invention of it.

It is a story I have found often disturbing, and always enlightening. And it's a universal story, for each of us in their own way has lived and invented their own childhood.

Childhoods I have discovered, may have changed, been reinvented through the ages, but children have not'.