Children do not leave bullying behind just because they grow up. That’s the sentence Babushka is built around, and it’s the one I most want this Project to make people sit with.

We tend to talk about bullying as something that happens to children — a problem for the playground, resolved (or not) by the time secondary school ends. What gets talked about far less is what happens next: the confidence it can quietly reshape, the relationships it complicates, the way it can sit underneath someone’s working life for decades without ever being named.

Babushka is my attempt to put a shape to that — not as a misery memoir, but as a play about memory, survival and the strange comedy of confronting who you used to be. Adult Suzanne and ‘15’, her fifteen-year-old self, have to find a way to talk to each other.

This isn’t about blaming individual teachers or schools. It’s about looking honestly at what adults might have missed, so that more children can be seen earlier — and so the adults they become don’t have to carry it alone.