"14/5/22 In Ukraine children don't start school until they are six so Oleksii's first ever day in class is in a foreign country where he can't understand his teacher or his classmates. He can count to 10 in English, knows some animals and the words to "Rain, rain, go away, come back again another day". "Oleskii is nervous," Nataliia says. "He is scared." We teach him how to ask to go to the toilet and how to pronounce his teacher's name before we arrive at the school gate. It seems fear of separation has become entrenched since the war started, for Nataliia too. "I am scared because I won't be near him," she tells me. At lunchtime we go to get Oleksii and Nataliia finds out he has been crying. He wanted to ask if his mother would ever return to get him? It's an important question but he didn't have the words to say it. I ask him if school has been good: "Dobre?" "Ni," he says. No. All this with his father inhabiting his son's life through video calls, from inside a country at war. He can't be there for his son's first day at school."

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