by Trisha Merry
The first thing we had to do, as the other children were waking up and feeling the tension, was to break the news to all of them, as gently as possible.
I was on my own in the sitting room, trying to take it all in, while Mike got the children up and dressed upstairs. In came six-year-old Daisy, in her pink pyjamas and sat next to me on the sofa.
‘I saw the ambulance come this morning,’ she told me, almost in a whisper. She shared a bedroom with Chrissy and Sheena, at the front of the house, so all the activity must have disturbed her. ‘I looked out of the window and watched them take the baby out.’
‘Yes, sweetheart.’ I drew her towards me and put my arm round her. Daisy wasn’t a cuddly child normally, but she seemed to appreciate being close. I think she felt afraid. ‘The ambulance people came to try and make her better,’ I said.
‘Did they take her away?’ Her bottom lip quivered.
‘Yes, sweetheart. They took her back to the hospital.’ She didn’t ask the most important question. Perhaps it didn’t occur to her, and I didn’t tell her. It would be better to break it gradually to the older children, all together.
So Mike and I gathered them round the kitchen table for breakfast and told them what I had already told Daisy. There were a few tears, and some questions. We knew we had to answer them carefully, without being dishonest.
‘Did she cry?’ asked Chrissy.
‘No. She didn’t make a sound.’
‘What is it?’ asked Sheena.
‘We don’t know yet. I expect the doctors will do some tests and let us know.’
Most of the children were very quiet as they took this in.
‘Poor little Michelle,’ said Paul, with uncharacteristic sensitivity.
‘Will she get better?’ asked Ronnie, always looking for something more.
‘I expect she’s dead,’ added Gilroy. ‘They’re probably burying her already.’
This was clearly getting out of control. I had to steel myself. ‘Baby Michelle is now at the hospital and the doctors are trying to find out what made her ill. Let’s not worry too much about her now. She is in the safest place. We’ll see what we can find out during the day and I expect we will be able to tell you more when you get back after school.’
There were sighs and tears around the table, but most of the children nodded silently, shrugging off their concerns as they went off to brush their teeth and get ready to leave.
I was glad it was a school day, so I would only have the three younger ones at home with me, and they weren’t old enough to understand what had happened. I needed time to try to come to terms with this tragic death myself. I could think about what to say to them all later.
After school, we broke the news more fully, together, Lizzie, Mike and I, so we could give all the children lots of hugs and reassurance.
We told them simply what had happened, that she had been unwell when she came to us and had died peacefully in her sleep, and her little body was as perfect as when she arrived three days before.
‘Can anybody die in their sleep?’ asked Ronnie, the eldest, with an anxious look.
The others all listened intently for my answer.
‘Not unless you are very old. Otherwise people only die if they are already very ill.’ Now I know that may not be strictly true, but I had to try and prevent them all worrying that they might die that way, so I felt that was the best answer I could give them.
As I went to bed that night, another wave of shock hit me. I couldn’t stop shaking at first, and then I must have fallen asleep. I think I slept through half the next day too.
Sometime in the afternoon, somebody hand-delivered a letter. I found the envelope on the front door mat at teatime. The envelope was handwritten and addressed to me, so I opened it tentatively and read the two pages. Was it my imagination that the blurred ink was tear-stained?
It was only as I read it through the second time that I realised it was from baby Michelle’s birth mother. That stopped me in my tracks. I had not given her a thought until I read her letter. It was a beautiful letter, in which she apologised again and again for having put me in such a dreadful position of responsibility for their sick child, and said how guilty she felt for my having had to face such a terrible situation.
I read the whole letter through three times, trying to take it all in through my own tears. At the end she said she would like to meet me, if I was willing, and gave me her telephone number. She told me she had taken a few days off work – compassionate leave they called it.
I mulled it over for an hour or two, thinking how much they must blame me for what happened. Perhaps that was why she wanted to see me. She might accuse me of causing Michelle’s death. But as I read it through for the fourth time, later that evening, it seemed to be quite the contrary – she was blaming herself, and that wasn’t right. So I rang her and invited her round for coffee the next morning.
When she came, I saw that she was a few years older than me, very gentle and well spoken. We sat down in my kitchen and she told me her story. She had a lovely husband and an older child. She and her husband were both successful professionals and she had planned to have a nanny or an au pair to come and look after the new baby while she was out at work. But when Michelle was born, though full term, she looked so small and frail, and needed to stay in hospital to have special care, so they decided to give her away to someone who could look after her better than they felt they could.
‘Michelle died the first time just after she was born,’ said Ellen. ‘She had a heart condition as well as a cleft palate.’
‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ I was quite shocked. This was serious. Why had no one told us? We should have known.
‘They immediately resuscitated her.’ Ellen’s eyes welled up. ‘I know it sounds criminal to say so, but I wish now that they hadn’t.’
I drew in a breath and she noticed my reaction.
‘You think that’s wrong, don’t you? I suppose I would too if it was the other way round. How can a mother feel her baby would be better off dead? But it’s not like that.’
‘No, I’m sure you had Michelle’s best interests at heart,’ I soothed her.
‘But it’s true,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it would have been better for all of us if she hadn’t been resuscitated at birth. She could have died a calm death, in dignity, without them causing all the pain and heartache you have suffered as a result.’ She paused, the tears running down her cheeks. ‘I feel so guilty that I didn’t keep her from the start, but I didn’t think we’d be able to cope. And now I feel even guiltier that I passed on the responsibility to you. And the tragic discovery of her dead body in the morning . . . I can barely imagine how terrible that must have been for you. I’m so sorry.’
We wept together. ‘Yes, it was a horrendous shock,’ I agreed, reaching my hand out to touch her arm. ‘But that wasn’t your fault. Please don’t blame yourself. It must be more my fault than yours.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I should have noticed how poorly she was when I fed her in the middle of the night . . . but I didn’t. And I must have done something wrong. It must be my fault. I blame myself.’
‘You mustn’t do that,’ she sprang to my defence. ‘I’m here for us to share our grief, and for me to support you through these difficult days.’
‘Thank you,’ I sniffed. ‘And I want to support you too.’
‘Society can be so unforgiving, can’t it?’ she said. ‘But I’m not worried what other people might think of me. I know what I did wrong – I made that bad decision to wash my hands of my own baby and pass her and all her problems on to you. I knew she wouldn’t live long – they told me that at the hospital, just after they’d revived her. So it was very wrong of me to pass her on to you, knowing the inevitability that you would be hurt.’ She paused again to try and compose herself.
I was doing the same. Ellen was devastated, for them, for Michelle and for us. She was a lovely woman, intelligent and understanding.
‘Well, my husband and I have talked about this together, and we want you to know that we don’t attach any blame to you at all. Quite the contrary. We want to thank you for caring so much and so well for our little Michelle. We know that you gave her those two days of happiness and love. We should have been the ones to do that, but you and Mike did it for us, and we will be eternally grateful to you both for that.’
‘Thank you. I appreciate that. But you must not let yourselves take on the guilt. As parents or foster-parents, all any of us can do is to do our best at the time.’
Because of Michelle’s sudden death, the hospital had to do a post-mortem on her to establish the cause, which took several days.
Finally the day of the funeral came. We hadn’t wanted to go, but Ellen insisted, so we had a support worker come in to help Lizzie look after the little ones while we were out and the older ones were at school.
The funeral itself was in a little church by the side of the road. Mike and I sat near the back. There was a hush for a few minutes, then the door opened and everyone turned to look, as the undertaker walked in, carrying a tiny white coffin, chest-high in his hands.
I froze. Seeing that coffin and knowing that baby Michelle’s lifeless body was inside it was something I will never forget. At that moment, if I could have run a million miles away, I would have done. I don’t remember the rest of the service at all.
We drove back home in silence, each with our own thoughts. It had been a difficult, sombre day, but now we had to move on. Ellen rang us a couple of days later to invite us to the interment of Michelle’s ashes, but we decided not to go. It would be a family affair, and we weren’t family.
‘But you were the only family she knew,’ said Ellen.
We dived straight back into our usual routines and carried on as before, but the inner turmoil and guilt never left me; not for a very long time. I could not think about looking after such a young baby ever again, and I refused even to pick one up for ages. I rang Social Services and told them I could only take six months upwards. That was my new rule. Somehow, just saying it gave me comfort. I could not go through all that again.
10
Real Elephants
Laurel, our abandoned baby, found under a bush, was now two and a half. But unlike Gail, the toddler with hydrocepahalus, who had been adopted the previous year, nobody had even mentioned the possibility of adoption for Laurel. So when her social worker came round one day, I asked her what was happening about it.
‘Yes, we’ve been hoping to put Laurel up for adoption,’ she said. ‘But the fact she has no legal parents or relatives makes it much harder to process the paperwork. I believe a child can only be put up for adoption if his or her parents or closest relatives sign their consent to it. In Laurel’s case, she has no known relatives, so I think we first have to make her a ward of court and then go through the court to gain consent for each stage of the adoption process, if Social Services decide to go that way. I’m sure they would if they could, because that way they wouldn’t have to pay towards her keep.’
‘Wasn’t she made a ward of court when she was found?’ I asked.
‘Apparently not. Probably because of the police investigations to try and find her mother or any relatives. They went on for quite some time, so it wouldn’t be possible to go for Ward of Court until the police signed off her case.’
‘But I thought they’d done that by now?’
‘To be honest, Trisha, I don’t know. They don’t tell me things like that. I’m just Laurel’s social worker, after all.’ I detected a hint of irony in her answer,
‘And I’m only her foster mother,’ I added. We both smiled.
‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ she said. ‘I’ll let you know.’
Daisy and Paul had been with us for four years and we loved them to bits. Most of our foster children were now at school, so that gave me a bit of respite during the day, with only three little ones at home, although that was sometimes more time-consuming, without the older ones to keep them entertained. I did miss Lizzie, but she’d gone off to university now, as I knew she might. However, she came home quite often and always loved to help when I needed her most, during the school holidays.
Daisy loved school and did have a few friends there, but she was never invited round to tea or to play with any of them. Nor did she ever bring anyone back home. If I suggested it she went quiet. I suppose she was inclined to keep herself to herself, finding her own space, which was difficult in our house. But now she could read anything and loved reading longer books, when she wasn’t drawing or knitting. Somebody gave her a Spirograph for her birthday, and she loved making patterns with it, which she coloured in beautifully.
Based on their characters and likes, it was hard to think of Daisy and Paul as siblings. He was always the action man, in the thick of things, cheeky and mischievous, sometimes a bit pushy. He was occasionally invited somewhere for tea . . . but never a second time. The trouble was, he grew very sturdy and didn’t realise the impact of his own strength.
At about this time, we had a succession of emergency and short-stay placements. Most of them hardly stayed long enough for us to get to know them.
Then after a lull of a few weeks, there was another call from Social Services.
‘Can you take a little one?’ asked the woman on the phone.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I told you I couldn’t have any more young babies.’
‘Yes, I know, Mrs Merry, but Mandy is not a baby. She is nearly two years old and her family live nearby. Her father is particularly keen to have her near enough to visit regularly, so please, do you think you could reconsider? It would be a perfect placement for this child.’
So I agreed and, as I put the phone down, I wondered about Mandy’s mother. Why had she not been mentioned in the same sentence as her father? Maybe something had gone wrong there?
So Mandy came to join us. She was a lovely-looking child with dark wavy hair and rich brown eyes, but quite stubborn, and even at not quite two I could see she was a bright little button – I could almost hear her thinking. It looked like this child was going to be challenging in her own way, but I’ve always relished a challenge. I knew at once that I was going to enjoy having her to stay and watching her blossom. It’s the psychology of children that fascinates me – the way they learn and the way they think. Mandy was going to be one to watch.
I always patrolled round the children’s rooms at night before going to bed myself. On the night Mandy came, everywhere was quiet, but I looked into each room, paying particular attention to the little ones, Alfie, Laurel and Mandy. They were all fast asleep, so next I went into the older girls’ room, where all was fine, then last the boys. AJ and Ronnie were sleeping soundly too, though I had to tuck AJ’s legs back under the straightened duvet before going next door to Paul and Gilroy’s room. They were in bunk beds, with Gilroy at the top, so I had to stand on the end of Paul’s bed to check Gilroy . . . and I was shocked at what I saw. One hand was sticking out and in his fist was the missing knitting needle. I’d forgotten all about it. Although he was soundly asleep, he clutched it so tight that I had a job to extricate it from his hand. Fortunately he didn’t stir, but even in sleep he had a malicious look on his face. I wondered what he was intending to do with it.
There was a clue a couple of mornings later, when Paul had a very lucky escape. Gilroy took the safety rails off the bunk-beds, then started bouncing up and down, harder and harder, until his top bunk gave away. Gilroy and his bed came crashing down on Paul’s . . . and missed him by seconds. Paul had a very lucky break that day, having got out of bed to go to the toilet, unnoticed by Gilroy. When I heard the rumpus, I rushed up to their room, arriving only a second after the crash, just in time to see the triumphant look on Gilroy’s face when he thought he had killed Paul, then his disappointment when Paul sauntered back into the room, very much alive and well.
Having not experienced the danger, Paul was quite amused. But the whole incident had unnerve
d me so much that I had to go out and buy two single beds for immediate delivery, so that we could split the boys up straight away.
The time had come to consider a move. We loved our house in Sonnington, loved the garden, loved the orchard . . . but we didn’t love the neighbours. We didn’t like the cliquey people who lived around us, and murmured to each other whenever I walked past them pushing the pram. They never took to us, with our rag-bag of children, and could never bring themselves to see how lovable they were.
Then there was the school. Sometimes when I was called to go and sort out one of the children’s misdemeanours – mostly Gilroy’s, but quite often AJ’s or Paul’s as well – it might be break-time and I would have to take the little ones with me to cross the playground. I was sad to see that my kids were usually playing in one corner, apart from the other children. I spoke to the headmistress about it.
‘Whenever I come to the school,’ I explained to her, ‘I see all the other children keeping away from mine. Did someone tell them to do that?’
‘Certainly not, Mrs Merry,’ she said in her snooty voice. ‘We believe in inclusion here. We treat everyone as equal.’
‘Well, somebody needs to make sure,’ I said. ‘Because some children seem to be more equal than others . . . and there’s no inclusion here for my foster-children, as far as I can see.’
We decided it was time to sell the house and move somewhere we might be more welcome and where there were more activities and clubs for the older children to join.
We didn’t have to look for long before we found a huge Victorian semi in just the right place, a few miles away, on the edge of town, near a park. A semi probably wasn’t ideal and I dreaded what these neighbours would be like; especially what they would think of having all of us moving in, with just a party wall between us. But it was a good house, well built, and it went back a long way. It had a big family kitchen and a room we could convert into a playroom for the kids. There were plenty of bedrooms too – enough to have Gilroy in his own room, away from Paul and the others. We wouldn’t have three acres at this house, but the garden was larger than average, so it would be fine. The move couldn’t come soon enough.