Those are the haunting words of one of the entrants in this year’s BBC Radio 2 500 Words competition.
So many youngsters opted to write about the plight of refugees that Oxford University Press (OUP) have named “refugee” as the children’s word of 2016.
The trend emerged after OUP analysed entries to the annual short story competition for children aged 13 and under.
Youngsters were asked to write an original work of fiction using no more than 500 words. The competition attracted more than 123,000 entries and the winners were announced on Chris Evans’s Radio 2 breakfast show last month.
Despite their young age, the children who entered the competition showed “a sensitive and mature understanding” of issues such as the war in Syria, the journey across the Mediterranean, people smugglers and the camps in Calais.
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