A couple of weeks ago I watched a TV programme about bright children. It was very unsettling. We lived in Oxford for thirteen years. The girls were at prep school in North Oxford. We were surrounded by children of all kinds, average, clever, not-so and extremely, worryingly clever. The latter were always the ones who seemed disadvantaged whereas three we knew who had learning difficulties and handicaps of different kinds, fitted in perfectly, albeit sometimes on their own terms. Oxford being Oxford, of course, it was the parents who were more the problem and those with the ultra-bright children most of all. I wonder more harm was not - is not - done by these high-achieving, pushy, desperate people to whom the word 'average', let alone 'failure,' did not feature in any dictionary. They pushed, they pushed, they pushed. They also talked to their children like fellow Nobel prizewinners and heads of college which they themselves often were. It was a kind and accepting school with a warm, loving atmosphere, so the very bright, like those of with handicaps, were for the most part simply absorbed by children and staff into the general throng. But at the school gates, the mothers of the bright ones were the complainers, mainly about the time wasted on putting on plays and having sports days. They wanted extra maths and they wanted Latin and Greek at four and they wanted competitive testing. They wanted what our lovely school did not intend to provide.

I felt then as I did when watching the programme, that very bright children are not only socially disadvantaged, they are quite often doomed. Oxford is full of the walking wounded in this regard, burned-out geniuses who were hothoused in childhood, and cannot fit into the real world. If their brilliance fades, as it so often seems to do, they are seriously handicapped.  Of course we need clever people. I am not arguing for  mediocrity. But nurturing a very clever child is as tough as nurturing a handicapped one because the two are the same. They need to be made to feel that they are part of the normal everyday world of their peers, who are so often put off by their precocious conversation and behaviour. I watched the clever children on television, being spoken to like professors, being deferred to, being pushed ever upwards, treated with such earnestness and I wanted to take them all off to a forest and let them riot, without lessons and learning and achievement targets and conversations with them about their own brightness, their own special personalities.  It is perfectly possible to be clever, to do well, to have a satisfactory career, to find happiness, without being on the genius side, intellectually. If you never have to work at anything, if it all comes so easily, where is your sense of pride and achievement when you have worked very hard for something and got/done it even though it was a tough road ?

Such children find adolescence doubly difficult. They find ordinary friendships impossible to fathom. They find themselves  very hard to live with. People often spurn and reject the very clever as they used to reject - less so now, thank goodness- those with, say, Downs syndrome.  It is a heavy burden to bear, that of extreme cleverness and I watched the children in the film and feared for them. When I had my first book accepted for publication I was 16 and doing A levels. The subsequent publicity and its aftermath while I was at university, set me back a long way. I am still recovering. I wasn`t ultra clever, just a too- early achiever with a lot of catching up to do in every other area. Two things saved me. My parents were the reverse of pushy. And I had the special grit formed in the oyster of  those born and bred in Yorkshire, where, if you do anything to make you stand out, you get taken down a peg or two.  When I went up to Scarborough for the first night of The Woman in Black, all the chairs that would fill the studio theatre, had to be moved from another hall. A man handed me a stack. 'Here you are, Susan Hill,' he said. 'Shift these. You needn`t think you`re owt special.'

It was not meant as an unpleasant put-down. It never is. Yorkshire people are kind under that sort of abrasiveness. But I often think how a bit more of it should be dealt out to pop stars, film stars, hothoused children, politicians and anyone who thinks that, compared to the rest of humanity, they are owt special.

Yet another reason for being a Republican of course.