PERHAPS you have to be a certain age to have witnessed real poverty when it came in ragged clothes and dirt-encrusted faces with the impetigo scars of deprivation.

Now poverty can be disguised in warm clothes that hide the spindle shanks of children under fed; malnourished on a carbohydrate diet cobbled up from the pennies left after feeding the heat and light.

My first, but not last encounter, with this demi-monde came in 1970s Glasgow shocking me to the core of my being and leaving me with an anger that has never abated.

Seeing the tail end of the slums was to enter a world I’d never imagined still existed – pages from the pen of Dickens. Dressed in vests and welly boots, clutching bread and buttered sugar ‘pieces’ children not much bigger than toddlers ran the back courts like packs of feral cats.

Anything was better than home where damp dripped down walls peeling off pathetic attempts at wallpaper. Beetles and silver fish scuttled in corners and rats were accepted wildlife. Black mould tracked up walls and bathrooms and councils told tenants not to breathe so heavily.

Poverty of this kind has a stench – an all-pervading mish mash of fried bits, damp, must, rank clothing and, above all, despair.

It seeps out and invades the nostrils and as a young reporter I learnt to mouth-breathe to avoid rushing from a house to retch.

Then I was ridiculed in the office for my soft southern horror at what I saw. That was the way it was, I was told with a hardened shrug.

I didn’t expect to be writing about it 30 years later; children in England denied a meal a day for a few million pounds – a mere drop in the Covid largesse.

For poverty isn’t as visible now as it was then – it’s invisible in many ways, covered up by food banks, charity shopping, the power of a young footballer who remembers hard times.

Covered up by politicians who blame drugs and iPhones for parental neglect not austerity and government policy.

Covered up by surface cleaning and box houses taking the place of tenements and neighbourly solidarity.

It’s estimated there are eight million families in the UK struggling to get enough to eat – the worst record in Europe. Eight million. More than four million children are growing up in poverty – poverty.

Benefits, zero-hours contract jobs, barely touch the scale of the problem and there seems an unwillingness to act until shamed into doing so.

No UK government department takes responsibility for children going hungry; no minister speaks on their behalf but plenty come forward to blame feckless parents and benefits culture.

The other night I watched a young boy speak movingly on television of his mother’s struggle to feed him and his brother and how she often went without to do so.

His pride in her was obvious. As was his barely suppressed anger that despite her two cleaning jobs she couldn’t manage. Rightly he felt no shame for their plight, merely that simmering rage that somewhere along the line they’d been failed.

His eyes gleamed with pride when he talked of footballer and campaigner Marcus Rashford, the only man he saw as caring.

“People don’t normally bother about us,’ he said sagely. ‘He does because he’s been there. His mother was my mother once.’

And there’s the nub. You have to walk that mile in somebody’s shoes to understand the pain, or at least have the empathy to.

Scotland will continue to supply free school meals during the holidays. It has historical precedent for learning empathy. Glasgow’s slums infamously were once worse than Naples's were when under Labour control.

No political party escapes heartlessness.

By the time you read this, assailed by all sides, Boris Johnson may well have done one of his now famous U-turns and agreed to open the canteens, shamed into it after shockingly misjudging public mood.

How, as many have pointed out, can so many of our leaders recklessly get it wrong time after time? God knows our lives are in profound disarray assaulted by endless woes and worries but our first duty must be to our children.

If we abdicate responsibility for them, we abdicate responsibility for our future however bleak it may be looking at the moment.

I think back often to those early years in Glasgow and what was accepted. I remember the head-scarfed women in Argyle Street, their faces pinched with worry, looking years older than their age; bad teeth or false ones taking their place.

Of the sallow-faced men dragging on fags for comfort and pints for forgetfulness.

But above all I remember the children – tough, defiant eyes, jumpers too small and holed, and always the wellies as Billy Connolly captured so well.

Never let those days come again. We’re already back to public charity and the kindness of those facing ruin themselves. Governments may fail us but the people won’t.

I hope they never do or truly we are damned.