Richard feels embarrassed about his mother his teenage peers laugh and call her an old lady because they all have young parents.
Society expects children to be born when the parents are still young, not only for biological reasons but also because of social attitudes.
Richard is only seventeen while his mother is already sixtyfive. All his friends mock him, saying his mum looks like an elderly spinster. Even at secondary school, when the attractive, youthful parents arrive to collect the younger pupils, Richards grandmother shows up instead, walking with a noticeable limp. He is mortified and finds the situation uncomfortable.
He has run away from home more than once, disappearing for weeks at a time. His mother, Ethel, constantly begs him to pull himself together and stop behaving like this. He, however, believes she has deeply hurt and insulted him.
One day he returns to the flat to find his mother gone. The neighbour tells him that Ethel has suffered a heart attack and is now in the hospital, and that it is all his fault. She never meant any harm, the neighbour adds.
On a frosty morning he discovers a small bundle in a dustbin. He quickly adopts the infant, raising the child as his own son. While his own family abandoned the baby in the rubbish, Ethel devoted her whole life to the child, which is why she seemed so old when Richard was still a teenager.
Overcome with shame for his earlier actions, the son rushes to the hospital, weeps, falls to his knees, kisses his mothers hands and begs for forgiveness. She readily forgives him, after all he is her son.
