Unloving parents

I FEEL great compassion for those whose lives have been blighted by unloving parents (Mail). I experienced such a childhood and felt indifference when my parents died. Yet, in later life, I began to wonder what kind of childhood they had.

I discovered my mother had been placed in an orphanage at the age of five and she saw her mother only once a year. My father faced naval discipline from the age of 12.

If parents have never been loved in childhood, how can they give love to their own children? Let’s view their failures with compassion and forgive them, so easing the pain we call indifference. SYLVIA HARTIGAN,

Plymouth, Devon.