by Olivia Fane
The Social Services had been delighted with the sound of her. For because by now Josiah had lost his soft Lancashire lilt and enunciated his vowels even more perfectly than Lady Brack herself, they had found a perfect voice match, and it was social services policy to mix like with like as far as was practicable. One of Josiah’s previous foster families had complained of his ‘holding his chin too high,’ but at Fratton Hall, they decided, he could hold it as high as he liked.
But Josiah did not sit, nor stay, nor do as he was told. He didn’t eat his meals and he didn’t sit on Lady Brack’s knee when she asked him to. Lady Brack had been told about Josiah’s love of gardening, and she would hover by him when he was weeding, her silk scarf doing little to keep a bitter wind from her ears. On one occasion Josiah asked Lady Brack to tell him the name of a certain flower, but she didn’t know it and had to find the gardener. When they came back the boy had gone and all hell was let loose; within five minutes Lady Brack had even called the police. He was found a couple of hours later: he had buried himself in the compost heap.
Lady Brack was so pleased to find him that she wasn’t even angry, but ran Josiah a bubble bath with drops of her very own eau de cologne, ‘Oh Josiah! You don’t know how worried you made us! And now you’re back and safe with just a few blades of old hay in your hair, oh how happy I am! Now, I want you to tell us, why did you do such a thing? Is there something making you terribly unhappy?’
Josiah didn’t know what to say, but because Lady Brack was so insistent he eventually told her that he hated the wallpaper in his bedroom.
‘Josiah, is that all? Is there nothing more serious than that? That can be so easily remedied, you know! Funnily enough, I’ve always hated that pampas grass design. It’ll be such fun to repaper your room!’
Lady Brack told her husband Sir Peter (knighted two years previously for services to the export industry) in bed that night about the latest Josiah saga.
‘And where do you think we found him, Peter?’
‘Mmm,’ mumbled Sir Peter, as he struggled with the last three clues of a crossword.
‘In the compost heap! Can you believe that?’
‘Well, just about,’ he said.
‘Anyway, I thought it was time we redecorated his room.’
‘Darling, he doesn’t seem very happy. He might not be with us very long. Is it worth it?’
‘Men understand nothing!’ said Lady Brack, happily, as she turned off the light.
So Lady Brack became ever more devoted to her charge. She would pore over Osborne and Little’s nursery collection, and then make Josiah sit next to her after his tea and insist that he confide in her (that was the word she used) how, in an ideal world, he would have his bedroom look.
‘For you’ve grown out of little cars, haven’t you? But what about these aeroplanes? Have you ever been in an aeroplane, Josiah? Have you ever been to Paris? Shall I tell you about the trip I made to Paris when I must have been your age?’
And yes, Josiah proved quite good company, an excellent listener, and stared up at Lady Brack with his large melancholy brown eyes and quite stirred the cockles of her heart. He also adored her dog Clover quite as much as she did, and he would get down on his knees to stroke her, and lay his head on her back. And to do Lady Brack credit, it was at her house that he stopped wetting the bed for the first time since leaving home.
A full three months later, with Josiah’s bedroom happily wallpapered with a design imported from France, (onion-sellers with striped shirts and moustaches riding bicycles) the Bracks, the Social Services, and Josiah himself were still getting along famously. But then something happened, a bridge too far, an unfordable chasm. Josiah spent his last day with the Bracks on his eighth birthday.
Lady Brack wanted to give him a birthday party; though in fact she wanted to give him something else even more: the clothes to wear at that party. She had inherited in almost pristine condition a child’s green velvet suit complete with lace collar and cuffs, circa 1880. Her son Angus had worn them at a wedding when he was about the same age, and in fact, as she explained to her husband much later, when she first set eyes on Josiah she thought, how very, very pretty he would look in just that colour green. All she needed was an excuse to retrieve the entissued garment from the attic, and a birthday was as good as any. ‘And he’s been with us six months,’ she pleaded with her husband, ‘It will be a mark of our trust in him!’
On the morning of his birthday she gave him his present, suitably wrapped and bowed, and Josiah’s pleasure on opening the parcel was so palpably great that even Sir Peter was rather moved. For as we know, Josiah didn’t like ordinary toys, he wasn’t an ordinary boy, but he knew instinctively when something was lovely, and this velvet suit assuredly was.
Lady Brack let him wear it straightaway and took him to her bedroom so that he could admire himself in the full-length mirror.
‘Josiah,’ she said to him, ‘You look wonderful! I knew the moment we first met that one day I’d give you these clothes, and now they’re yours!’
Josiah even kissed her in gratitude, and kissed Clover too, because he was so pleased. Yes, Josiah was that close to a comfortable life, for that one kiss made Lady Brack quite determined to take Josiah away from his primary school and send him instead to King’s College prep school, where both her sons had been so happy. And after that, doubtless, he would follow them to Eton! O lucky boy to have landed on her doorstep!
Lady Brack’s mistake was not so much to give Josiah the pretty velvet suit but to give him a party. How she had loved giving parties when her sons were small! She rang up her friends and told them about the wonderful Josiah and that all grandchildren were invited; and she blew the old flour off her Constance Spry cookbook and found that very same recipe for Victoria sponge she had used all those years ago.
Lady Brack baked all morning, and watched Josiah running up and down the garden lawns from the kitchen window. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that the clothes were old and delicate, and must be kept clean, as she might have done to her own children.
When the guests arrived at three that afternoon (six middle-aged women, a girl of four and two boys of eleven), Josiah was about as cute as a cuttlefish.
‘Patricia,’ the women exclaimed, one after another, ‘doesn’t he look exactly like Angus? When I first saw him I thought I was seeing a ghost.’
‘You’re not a ghost, are you, Josiah?’ said Lady Brack, protectively. She watched him whiten.
‘Now just when was it,’ asked one, ‘when we last saw that darling outfit? Such beautiful lace!’
‘I remember the occasion only too well,’ said a woman in a navy blue cashmere cardigan. ‘Alicia’s wedding. Pitlochry Castle. Bitterly cold.’
‘Come here, young man! Can I just take a look at that beautiful lace?’
But Josiah stayed as still and stalwart as a soldier. This third woman, who was Lady Brack’s first cousin, leant over him to take a closer look, picking up the collar as she did so. ‘Quite exquisite!’ she enthused.
Lady Brack was watching on, anxiously. The two eleven-year-old boys were both wearing football kit, and were shoving each other off the arm of the sofa. The four-year-old girl was sitting on her Mummy’s knee sucking her thumb. There was an unhappy pause in the conversation.
‘So, Josiah, what do you think of your new home?’ asked one of the guests, innocently.
‘I’ve got a present for you!’ said another.
‘And so have I!’ said the third, rummaging around in her handbag.
Then Josiah suddenly said, ‘And I’ve got a present for you all!’ With that, I’m afraid to say, he pulled the lace from the collar and the wrists of that pretty jacket, and tore the lace from the bottom of the britches, and threw it at them. And away he went, running up the stairs to his bedroom, and from the landing shouting down at Lady Brack, ‘I am not somebody else!’
All Lady Brack wanted to do was follow him, but her friends held her back and said it was best to
let him cool down. The boys gloated happily, and to a certain unforgivable extent, so did the women, who for half an hour capped each other in reLating terrible fostering sagas they had heard about. And down fell the questions on poor Lady Brack, does he steal, well you might not know quite yet, and is he ever violent and has he been cruel to the dog? Then because the children were getting bored and Lady Brack was so faultlessly polite, she invited them all into the dining-room for a birthday tea, when all she actually wanted to do was throw the lot of them out of the house.
If ever there was a moment to pity the boy, pity him now. Josiah had ripped off his green velvet clothes and did his best to tear them, which was hard work except for a sleeve where a moth had given him a head start; then he’d scrumpled them up and thrown them under his bed. But the agony he felt was not anger at those stupid people, for the anger was vented the moment he lay shivering on the bed. Rather, his feelings were of remorse and loss: loss at first of the pretty clothes he’d had on, but then the loss of his old life where he had a proper place, and the way his mother had made him laugh and his father who made him feel king of the world. All he wanted was to find them again, and he couldn’t understand why there were so many people looking for them and where they had gone, because he knew they would never, never leave him. And then it occurred to him that perhaps he was the missing one, perhaps that very first day they hadn’t realised he was going to school and they were out looking for him even now. And because Josiah was thinking very, very hard he was quite sure he’d heard his father calling him from the garden. ‘Jo, Jo,’ he heard. So softly, as in a dream, and he ran to the window to open it.
‘Daddy, are you there?’ he said to the cool breeze. The trunk of his body was shaking and he held on to the sill to steady himself.
‘Daddy? Daddy?’
With a sense of urgency he threw on some clothes and slunk out of the back door, even while the others were still enjoying his birthday tea. Again he heard his name, Jo, Jo, and he wandered into the small wood at the bottom of the garden. Every shadow of every tree promised him his father; again and again he ran towards them in a state so heightened that when he heard a twig break he jumped to attention. One minute he was ready to fall into his father’s lap; and the next to throw himself into an abyss of despair. And as the minutes wore on, the abyss grew ever deeper and more inevitable, and he began to make preparations to throw himself into it.
He found a spade and began digging under a rose bush, his small hands sliding impatiently over the wooden handle. Then he threw down the spade and began to dig the earth out with his fingers.
Sir Peter Brack was watching him from an upstairs window. He had already seen the torn lace on a table in the drawing room, had put his head round the dining-room door and had an earful about Josiah’s antics that afternoon, but the velvet suit wasn’t from his branch of the family, while the Madame Isaac Perere he’d planted himself.
But the saddest moment was not the slap, nor the threats (all carried out the following morning) that Josiah would be removed from their home, nor the shouting which brought Lady Brack out into the garden in tears, but the very first moment, when Josiah had first seen the shadow running towards him, and was waiting to be scooped up in its arms.
Chapter Six
ON THE 2ND JUNE 1992, Josiah Nelson, aged eight years and one day, was classified as an emergency. His mother had not resurfaced, his father had not spoken a word for nine months, and even a course of ECT hadn’t managed to resurrect him. His grandparents were still living in the US, his uncle wasn’t even interested in meeting the boy, and he had been deemed a failure by no fewer than five foster families. Lady Brack, it’s true, missed him terribly; but when the social worker had picked him up that morning, Josiah was sobbing so convulsively, and Sir Peter had been so disagreeable, that the fostering lady was persuaded to put a little black cross by ‘Brack’ in her file, for despite having six spare bedrooms, they were incapable of providing a child with a loving home.
Then there was Josiah himself, who had once been so appeaseable, so ready to fall in with a new plan; he was now absolutely resistant to any suggestion put to him. He even refused the temporary lodging with his teacher, whom he ‘hated,’ and in fact he seemed to hate everyone, and more than anything else in the whole wide world, he said, he hated families.
‘If you don’t co-operate, we shall have to put you in a Children’s Home,’ said June Briggs.
‘Then put me in a Children’s Home! I don’t care!’ shouted Josiah.
They were lucky to find a vacancy. Usually the Social Services are good at easing a child into a new situation – supervised meetings, key workers, trial days etc. But, as I have said, Josiah was now an emergency. It was a question of dropping him off with a suitcase. The Hollies, a large Edwardian Residential Care Home for Children on the outskirts of Cambridge (Coleridge Road, Cherry Hinton) was to be his home for nine years.
The girl who received Josiah at the brown-painted door of his new home was called Kerry. She was dark and skinny and dressed in skimpy black clothes and looked about fourteen, but in fact she was eighteen and had already been on the care staff for a year.
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Are you Joe?’
‘Josiah’, corrected the boy.
‘Josiah! What a lovely name! Come in, Josiah,’ and she stood to one side and ushered him in, and told the social worker who had brought him that they would be just fine. Josiah was the youngest in Kerry’s fold by two years, and her heart went out to him. All she’d been told was that the lad’s mother had deserted him and his father lay catatonic in Fulbright hospital, and that foster care hadn’t worked out.
‘You and me,’ said Kerry, bending her knees to meet him in the eye, ‘are going to be best mates, you’ll see! Fancy a glass of orange squash?’
‘No thanks,’ said Josiah, politely.
‘Well, then, I’ll take you to your room,’ said Kerry, picking up Josiah’s suitcase. ‘You follow me. You know what? You’ve got the best room in the house! Your bedroom is twice the size mine is, and it’s got the best view, right over the gardens.’
The stairs were steep, and Josiah found himself having to hold onto the banister. Each step was a climb in itself, and Josiah pulled himself up behind her, because there was no alternative. With a flourish, Kerry opened the door on the other side of the landing.
‘Here you are, Josiah. Not bad, is it? But it’ll be even better next week because we’re giving it a lick of paint and you can choose any colour you like!’
Kerry put the suitcase down on the bed and then sat herself beside it. ‘So what d’you think?’
‘Who was Rob?’ asked Josiah, still standing by the door.
‘Rob?’ asked Kerry.
‘“Fuck you Rob,”’ said Josiah. ‘Look, there’s a message.’
The message was small and in pencil, written neatly under the light switch.
‘Ah Rob!’ said Kerry, as though she’d only just remembered who he was. ‘Rob had this room before you. And now he’s gone. You see, young man, he was always in trouble with the police, just for small things, nothing serious. But yes, he went down yesterday. And that was lucky for you, because this is the best room in the house. And you’ll get new paint.’
‘Where did he go down to? Won’t he come back?’
‘No, he won’t come back, not here he won’t.’
‘Is he in prison?’
‘That sort of thing.’
‘Wouldn’t he be upset if he found me in his room?’
‘He won’t find you. He’s not coming back, I promise.’
Josiah sighed. ‘Promises, promises,’ he said morosely, looking at the floor.
‘Have you had some bad luck with promises?’
‘I’d like to unpack on my own, if you don’t mind,’ said Josiah.
‘You mean you want me to go?’ asked Kerry, surprised.
‘Yes, I want you to go.’
‘Right-o,’ said Kerry. ‘Just to warn you, they’re ba
ck from school at half past three, and tea’s at five. I’ll be in the kitchen if you want anything. And remember, the bell goes three times for afternoon tea. You’ll soon get the hang of it.’
Josiah, at this time in the story, was a mere eight years old, but he was not broken. He was brave for his father; he was brave for his mother. His father was a rock, and his mother a lioness, and he was brave for both of them. And he knew that one day they would find him again, and in fact, even now they might be looking. That knowledge gave him strength, even at the worst of times. So when he went downstairs at five o’clock he held his head high. There were even a few minutes when his companions gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Kerry thought Josiah looked just like Mark Lester in Oliver, a film that had set her heart so aflame that it was the chief reason she’d gone into residential social work in the first place. And there was another girl who’d been eyeing him up for mothering, called Maggie, who was ten and wore frosted pink lipstick and stilettos.
‘Maggie, you come here a moment,’ said Kerry, kindly. ‘I want you to meet young Josiah, who’s going to be staying with us a while. And I want you to be his special buddy, and make sure he gets everything he wants.’