Four Waifs on Our Doorstep (24 page)

The first week in December is when we put the Christmas trees up. This is when Mike and I almost come to blows, every year.

‘Why does it have to be so early?’ he always asked, as if it was a new question.

‘Because it’s our family tradition. It’s good for the children to have traditions, and it gives us a longer time to enjoy it all.’

‘Well, why can’t we just have one tree?’

‘Because that would only be in one room.’

We always had one tree in the breakfast room, one tree in the sitting room and one in the dining room. And the children decorated them all. We used to have a competition to see who could
decorate theirs best. They had boxes and boxes of decorations to choose from, but they usually all ended up fighting over one length of tinsel!

These are the things I used to do with my grandmother when I was little, and you never forget that. I think it’s important to offer children traditional things – all the things they
had never experienced before.

For these children, it was two extremes. The environment they came from, they had nothing – no toys, no decorations, hardly any food. They couldn’t remember Christmas before they
came to us.

‘Oh, we used to send packages in for them at Christmas,’ Steve told me once. ‘With toys and crackers and food.’ I asked Jamie about that and he made a face.

‘Dad used to sell them,’ he shrugged. ‘And even after he went, all the things that Social Services gave us got sold by Mum or her boyfriends.’

To come from that level of deprivation, into a household where there seems so much . . . Perhaps I made the mistake of thinking that, by overcompensating, it would make things better for them.
Now, looking back, I don’t think it did. It just confused them, and possibly made it even harder for them to cope.

I remember once hearing a psychiatrist talking about ways to handle a child’s bad behaviour.

‘You may find,’ he said, ‘that by taking some things away from the child, it might stop the temper tantrums.’

On one occasion, when Jamie had just thrown a very big wobbly that frightened us all, I calmed him down and told him about that.

‘There are various ways I could deal with your anger, and one of them is that I might have to take something away from you.’

‘OK,’ he muttered, kicking the chair leg and avoiding my gaze.

‘How would that make you feel?’

He shrugged. ‘All I had when I was young, was my mum, and they took me away from her,’ he said. ‘So what can you take away that beats that?’

He was right, of course. Good, bad or indifferent, she was his mother. I mulled it over for a minute or two, as we sat in silence.

‘Right, Jame,’ I said to him. ‘I’ve thought about it, and this time I’m not going to. But next time there will have to be some action. If I don’t take
something away, I might have to keep you in, or stop you watching television, or . . . There has to be a sanction, something that will help you see how important it is not to get so angry that you
frighten everyone like you did today. OK?’

With his head down, he gave a slight nod.

‘If you lose control like that at school, you might have all kinds of people coming in and what we don’t need is all the Social Services and everyone playing the heavy with you or
with us.’

I’ve often found that children can say things which absolutely knock you off your perch, just like Jamie did that day.

He’s never grown out of that sensitivity to anything someone might say to him, at home or at school, which he mistakes as a personal criticism and it sets off a tantrum. He always had to
be the leader, the father figure to his siblings, so it’s understandable that he doesn’t take criticism well. But despite everything, I still really love him. Funny boy. He wants to get
things right.

Something I had always done with foster children as well as those we had adopted, was to put up a photo of their parents, or at least their mother, somewhere in the house.
Usually it was a positive thing, but occasionally it had quite the opposite effect.

I had scanned and printed a photo of Jill and pinned it up on the drawing board where they could all see it. It had been up so long that I didn’t think they were taking any notice of it,
until I saw all the little pinpricks where they had been stabbing her eyes. I quietly took down that photo and replaced it with another and within hours they had stabbed her eyes out completely. I
didn’t see whether it was one or all of them doing it, but each time I just replaced the damaged photo with another copy. In the end it stopped. I suppose they got fed up with stabbing it
every time.

I did ask Stacey about it once, when we were chatting in the kitchen.

‘Well . . .’ she replied in a cold voice, ‘she was a prostitute . . .’

That silenced me for a moment. I had no idea she even knew that word. ‘Well, how do you know she was?’

‘If a woman goes upstairs with different men, what is it?’

I realised how slow I had been to see how attuned these children’s perception of their mother could be. They may not fully understand what they witness . . . but they take in enough to
process it in their own immature way. And from that, they are taken into the care system, where everything is sanitised – their history wiped clean. This is now your new home; like it or lump
it. So forget how bad that was because you’re going to be OK now . . . Well, it doesn’t work like that.

Despite everything, Carrie’s feelings towards her mother still niggled at her. It was about three years since the freeing-order meeting, and I think she was the only one
who had been concerned that she might never see her any more.

‘I think I’d like to see my mum again,’ she said to me one day.

‘Do you really want to see her?’

She pondered for a moment. ‘Yes.’

‘Are you sure?’ It worried me that of all the children, it should be Jill’s least favourite child who had changed her mind. ‘You haven’t seen her for quite a while
now.’

‘I know.’

‘Do you want me to ring up and ask?’

‘Yes, please.’

The following morning, I asked her again. ‘Do you really want to see your mum?’

‘Yes, please.’

So I called the letterbox contact line and told them.

‘Oh,’ said the familiar snooty voice. ‘I’ll ask Jill if that’s what she wants.’

‘Not long ago you told me she wanted to see the children.’

‘Yes, she wanted to see all of them.’

‘But maybe not Carrie on her own?’ I didn’t like the way this conversation was going. I feared for Carrie and wished I hadn’t acted on her wish, but I couldn’t
ignore it.

‘I will ask Jill and let you know.’ The line went dead.

Only a few minutes later, the phone rang.

‘I asked Jill and she said no, she didn’t want to see Carrie again.’

‘But why?’

‘That’s all I can tell you, Mrs Merry. Goodbye.’

So now I had to think how I was going to break this news to Carrie.

‘Mummy feels that her life is OK at the moment,’ I explained to her later that morning. ‘And she doesn’t feel it’s a good time to meet at the moment. She thinks it
would upset you and upset her.’

But this was a child with learning difficulties and a very young cognitive age. It was all too much for her to take in and cope with. She was distraught and I could do nothing to console
her.

20

W
e had lived in our house since before we adopted the children. But my fostering agency became so successful it grew out of its first basement
offices in Victoria Road and now needed to take over the whole house. So we looked around for another large house, this time without any neighbours to complain about the children’s noise and
their various antics.

As soon as we saw this beautiful old farmhouse at the end of a long drive, in rolling countryside a few miles out of the city, we knew it was the place for us. We were surrounded by fields and a
long way from anywhere, but there was a bus that plied the country lanes and passed the end of our drive, on the way into town, so we felt it was perfect. Somewhere for the children to breathe
fresh air and run riot to their hearts’ content.

It came as a complete surprise to me when people expressed criticisms and suspicions about our move.

‘Why are you bringing the children here? It’s very remote,’ sneered one health visitor.

‘Because it’s such an idyllic place to bring children up in,’ I replied. ‘And because of their background, they can be quite difficult, so it gives them the freedom to be
themselves without having to worry about annoying the neighbours.’ But I saw what she wasn’t saying and I’d have loved to tell her: No, we’re not going to beat them up,
we’re not going to sexually abuse them, we’re not going to torture them!

‘Well, if they’re that difficult, why did you adopt them?’

‘Because we wanted to, and because we love them.’

‘Who chooses to live so far away from anywhere?’ asked a teacher.

‘We chose it as a family,’ I replied, as sweetly as possible, wanting to ask why it mattered to him. ‘We had a family meeting and everyone agreed.’

I suppose that it might have looked a bit odd to some people. But it was right for us.

The move had come at a time when all four children were being bullied in school, and three of them were causing various degrees of mayhem as well. After a period of relative
calm, I was constantly in demand again.

Carrie, aged ten, had a superb support worker at her school, but her attention-seeking led her to making unfair and usually untrue accusations against me, her support worker Tracey or anyone
else, pitting us all against each other, to gain any kind of attention to herself. Mrs Harris fully understood Carrie and did everything she could to smooth out all these situations.

‘My mum beat me up last night,’ she would tell her support worker one day, and then that evening she would tell me, ‘Tracey hit me today.’

‘Oh,’ I’d say. ‘I had better come into school and see Mrs Harris about that then.’

So the next morning I’d go into school and see Mrs Harris. Carrie was called in to join us and confronted with the things she’d said.

‘I didn’t say that,’ she insisted. ‘Mum didn’t beat me.’ And later: ‘Tracey didn’t hit me.’ But she was now in the head teacher’s
study, with all our attention on her. Just what she wanted.

The next day, and every day, it would be something else. ‘Mum smacked me,’ she told them one time, and another time, ‘Mum wouldn’t let me out of my room’, or
‘Mum didn’t give me anything to eat’. Whatever it was, I’d be called in.

The same happened when she came home from school. If her support assistant so much as looked at another child, Carrie would be enraged that she wasn’t focusing entirely on her, so she
always tried to make trouble. It would be ‘Tracey pulled my hair today’, or ‘Tracey stabbed my arm with a pencil’, or ‘Tracey wouldn’t let me have my
lunch’ . . . I became a constant visitor in poor Mrs Harris’s office, and she was always so calm and so patient about it all. That woman was a saint. Tracey was very long-suffering
too.

I tried to explain to Carrie at home. ‘If you say things that aren’t true about Tracey, she might leave and then you won’t have anyone to help you. You might even have to leave
the school yourself, for telling lies about people.’ But I could see that, with her learning difficulties, Carrie just didn’t understand that actions have consequences.

Fortunately, Mrs Harris and Tracey agreed with me that there was no malice in her. Everything she did was a claim for attention and we rode the storms together.

This was the best school the kids went to and Mrs Harris was the best head teacher. She organised speech therapy, reading tests and all sorts for them. Sam made four years’ progress in his
reading in one year there.

But when it was time for Carrie to move to the next school, that’s when things became really bad for her. Because of her low cognitive age and her speech defect, she was always getting
picked on, kicked or sat on in the playground and came home from school in tears most days. I used to tell her teacher and it might get better for a bit, but not for long.

Every day they were ringing me about Carrie. ‘She’s spitting at other children . . . she’s making rude gestures . . . she’s forgotten her homework.’

‘This child has learning difficulties. She’s got a ten-minute attention span,’ I would say. ‘That’s why she often loses her way between classrooms, or forgets what
you’ve asked her to do. Her homework was out for her to bring this morning, but she must have forgotten to put it in her bag.’

On one particular occasion, I dropped off the others and then took her to the doctor for something in the morning and we got to the school at breaktime. She found her friends, but then another
girl came up to her.

‘Oh, there you are, Carrie,’ she said. ‘Vicky’s looking for you because she wants to start a fight with you.’

‘I was really scared,’ Carrie told me later. ‘Vicky is a bad bully and she always spites me.’

‘So what happened?’ I asked.

‘Vicky came over to me and she kept hitting me. I didn’t want to hit her because she is smaller than me. I didn’t want to get told off.’ I took that with a pinch of
salt.

Apparently, quite a crowd gathered. Sam saw it and tried to intervene, which got him into another fight, and the older children on the adjoining playground went to look. Big brother Jamie saw it
was Carrie and Sam and jumped over the wall to rescue them. Fortunately he managed to stop the fights that day.

The school phoned me up and I had to go and collect Carrie and Sam early. That was when I decided to take Carrie out of that school and look for one more suitable for her, somewhere that would
cater better for her learning difficulties.

I tried every school and special unit I could find, but nobody was willing to take her at that stage, so I just had to keep her at home for the rest of the year and teach her myself.

When she did get a place for the following September, it was in a small special needs unit at a private school, where she started at a year below her actual age, which was much better for
her.