An adorable six-year-old in a pink top reaches up to me, her bright green eyes pleading for a hug. Next to her a slightly older girl, with curly brown hair and laughing dark eyes also reaches up. I lift the first child on to my back and bounce her around for a few moments before gently setting her down again. The games are starting and it is time to get into a circle and pay attention.

I am dressed in a spotty shirt, outsize trousers, stripy socks and a glittery bowler hat. This isn’t my usual working gear, but I am visiting this Greek refugee camp as an undercover clown with The Flying Seagull Project. Hoards of children, some barely older than toddlers, run free around the camp. Their parents have travelled with them from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan in the hope of finding a life away from violence and poverty. Now they are stranded in camps in Greece while politicians deliberate on where they can go.

The Flying Seagulls visit this camp every day to provide games, organised play and shows for the children. Ash Perrin, the ringmaster, has seen an improvement in behaviour since they started: “It used to take 15 minutes before you saw their child faces. They came with hard adult faces. Now the minute they see us it’s the vulnerable open child we see. They’re responding well.”

Undercover clown Anna Leach (right) with professional clown Miriam Needham. Photograph: Anna Leach

The games are simple and based on sound and movement that is easy to understand without language. “If you need to use words to describe it – give up, you won’t get through,” says Perrin. “We try not to speak too much anyway because there’s something very inclusive about not needing to understand anything to play the game. A circle is a very strong structure. In a circle there’s no start or finish so no one gets to be at the front. It’s a productive shape to use.”

Perrin has seen clear signs of trauma among the children. “We see kids that at one moment would be the sweetest most genuine little faces and the next moment be the most angry and violent.” I’ve seen this for myself. The older girl who wanted me to pick her up earlier on lashed out at the other child, biting her hand hard, her face instantly transformed from smiles to fury.

Perrin and his troupe of clowns want to bring the children moments of a happy childhood with laughter and games. “We can create something that feels light, and caring, and more than just eating a plate of food or having a bed,” he says. “Something that’s catering to their personality, to their sense of belonging, their sense of mattering.”

We can create something that feels light, and caring, and more than just eating a plate of food or having a bed Ash Perrin

Miriam Needham, a professional actor and one of the troupe, adds: “Happiness matters like food, like water, like warmth, like shelter. I’ve seen the change it can bring to people, how it can make people strong just to laugh. Happiness and joy are contagious – it goes from the children to the parents out to the whole community.”

Psychologist Jayne Crimes, who has been working in a refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos, says a project such as the Flying Seagulls would be beneficial for the children there: “One of the things that is really positive about a group like that coming into their environment is that it creates a momentary sense of safety. It creates a sense of being able to connect to the present and a chance to connect with other kids. It’s a structured experience but one that is fun and allows them to forget things.”

She says the children at the camps are bored and frustrated: “Many parents describe how it’s very, very difficult to keep the kids occupied during the day. The kids are really frustrated – there’s often fights … many are withdrawn socially. They’re aggressive with their siblings. There’s a lot of bed-wetting, which is often a sign of anxiety.”

The troupe of clowns working with children at the refugee camps when the writer visited earlier this year. Photograph: Anna Leach

Increasingly academic research is recognising the importance of play in children’s development. David Whitebread, director of the Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning at Cambridge University, says: “Play is something that children do all the time. It’s how we’re evolved to learn. It’s absolutely crucial.”

He refers to studies on the children who were severely neglected in orphanages in Romania in the 1990s: “It’s well documented that the one thing that made a difference helping those children to come back to being children and having some semblance of normality in their development was play therapy.”

A common misunderstanding around play and development, Whitebread adds, is that children are best off playing by themselves. “It is important that they have time to themselves making up their own games, but actually what evidence we have so far suggests we need a mix. Children love adults playing with them as well –providing the adults are genuinely playing, rather than trying to organise them. We talk about guided play, that’s quite a common concept now. And turns out to be very effective.”

Perrin plans to keep working in the camps in Greece through next year. “If they’re not going anywhere then we can’t either,” he says. “They need emergency emotional support and moral lifting. Otherwise we’re going to have kids growing up with deeply rooted psychological disorders.

“Ten years from now these children are not going to be children. They’re going to be able-bodied, angry confused, psychologically unwell people. And then the process for helping them heal is far more difficult and far more complex. That’s why we have to do something that immediately caters to some change of atmosphere, some injection of positivity. We’ve got to do something now.”

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