‘Aren’t you gorgeous?’ she said.
Pauline and Graham had dressed us in matching dresses and put our hair in bunches.
It was immediately apparent that Barbara and Pauline were complete opposites. Barbara had a gruff, loud voice and spoke with a different accent. She wore clothes that looked far too young for her. She wore skintight jeans and a tight top with a plunging neck; her ample cleavage was pouring out the top. Her hair was highlighted in different shades of blonde. She was what you might describe as rough and ready, with hard features and a nose ring. Although she was in her late thirties, she looked a lot older. She was a smoker and she didn’t work.
She brought along her partner, Paul. He was quiet. They had been together for a long time but did not live together and were not adopting as a couple. Her children seemed fun, too, and, while she spoke with Pauline and Graham, we all played wheelbarrows in the garden together. As they were older than we were, we thought they were cool.
We didn’t speak about very much on the first meeting. Barbara asked general questions – what school did we go to? What were our favourite lessons? What television shows did we like? She seemed excited but I wasn’t. With hindsight, I know now that we were being processed through a system. Barbara was to have three meetings with us, all observed by a social worker, and she would have fulfilled a set criterion before she was allowed to take us home. It was a formal procedure designed to get children out of care and into permanent homes, where the council no longer had a financial obligation to look after them. Foster carers were paid money; adoptive parents were not.
After that first meeting, we met Barbara twice more. I wasn’t particularly interested and at one meeting recall sitting outside with my portable CD player listening to music through headphones. I knew we were moving on, and I didn’t want to stay with Pauline and Graham. Already I had detached myself from the situation. Although we had some nice times, I had never allowed myself to become attached to them because I knew it was not going to be forever.
After the meetings, Kirsten and I never spoke about them or what was going to happen. We never discussed moving to a new family. At that time, I don’t think either of us understood what family meant. We stayed with people, they bought us clothes and fed us but we had never experienced family. We didn’t know how to behave and this lack of structure was becoming increasingly obvious the older we got. We were so independent, we were at times uncontrollable. Kirsten was especially wild: if she didn’t want to do something she wouldn’t. She didn’t want to get to know people, and she didn’t want to bond. We had no reason to believe that a move to Barbara’s or anywhere else would be permanent; we had no concept of what permanent meant. Kirsten was eight and she didn’t trust anyone; I was a year younger and I didn’t know how I was supposed to act around adults. Half the time I would do everything I could to please them and make them like me; other times they would make me angry and I would misbehave and test them.
After the meetings with Barbara the social worker visited again. She was very excited.
‘Do you like her?’ she asked.
I shrugged.
‘Well, she loves you, she can’t wait for you to go and live with her.’
And that was that. We were going to a new town with a new family – a forever family. There were three weeks to prepare.
Once again our lives were about to change.
Chapter five
ALONE
During our time with Pauline and Graham, we had contact visits with Shane and Terri, although we never saw them together. After the stabbing incident, in 1996, they split up. Each visit was attended by all my siblings and their social workers. Because we were such a big family, and each set of children had their own case worker and guardians, there would be a crowd of us. The meetings were supervised; the social workers were there to observe and report. A few were in the Wacky Warehouse play centre, where we would go off and play, while Terri would sit in the corner, bored. The idea of the visits was to maintain some sort of a family structure and allow us all to keep in contact. By that time we were being offered for adoption so there was never any suggestion that at some point we would go back to live with Terri if she sorted herself out.
While Terri would be indifferent, Shane would make an effort to show an interest. He would ask what we had been doing and if we had been good, and he used to goad the social workers. We knew we were never going back and that took Shane’s power away. I despise both my birth parents but on those visits I think Shane did at least try to make some kind of effort. I don’t think he ever felt bad about what he’d done, or guilty about the way he treated us, because he wasn’t a remorseful person but I think he felt bad about the situation. When he saw how happy we were when we were all together, I’m sure he felt bad that we had been split up largely due to his actions.
I loved seeing my brothers. As soon as we saw each other, it was as if we had never been apart. It was a struggle being away from them after all we had been through, and the visits allowed us to be a family again. We would run around and wear ourselves out and forget that anyone else was there. It was just us; it really didn’t matter if Terri or Shane were present or not, we weren’t interested. When Terri wandered off for a cigarette none of us wondered where she’d gone; we were with each other and that was all that mattered.
Each of us was affected by what had happened. Kirsten was becoming increasingly unruly. I was overly affectionate. Jamie was shy and timid – all he wanted to do was hug me and sit on my lap. Sometimes we played Barbie dolls together. We used to talk a lot while the others were off doing things; he was very calm while everyone else was hyperactive. He used to like doing my hair – I had really long hair and he would tie it up for me. Harry was the opposite. He was a little rascal; he would run around bossing everyone. Jayden was quiet and brooding.
The visits happened between three and four times a year and we also saw Nan and Granddad once a year. But it was not enough: we had all shared difficult times and survived them together and to go from living closely every day to hardly seeing each other was hard to adjust to.
Visits would end with us being separated. It was awful when we were taken away. We didn’t care about leaving Terri or Shane, but it was heartbreaking to leave each other. We literally had to be dragged off each other and we were all crying. Jayden tried to calm us down and assure us that we would see each other again but we all knew it wouldn’t be for many months. Jamie and I clung onto each other or ran away and hid. Sometimes we needed to be restrained, screaming and kicking. It felt as if we lived a million miles apart: even though we were all still quite close geographically, it was obvious our lives were moving in different directions. We could have seen each other more, but the authorities deemed there was to be no contact in between the arranged visits, which were closely supervised and two hours in duration.
We were rationed.
I later realised that locations had been chosen that did not have clocks in them so we were unaware when the visits were going to end, so we couldn’t run away together. However, I learned to recognise the looks on the adults’ faces. They became increasingly anxious when each visit was up because they knew they would have to tell us it was time to go.
When I think about those visits now, I can only conclude that the system majorly failed us all. It was awful: we went from a family unit, which was dysfunctional but close-knit, to seeing each other three times a year. It was like being torn away from familiarity. I often felt isolated and it was so cruel, having that irregular contact. We never knew when it was going to be so we didn’t have it to look forward to, and when it happened it was for two hours, which goes so fast when you are having fun. We never saw each other without Terri or Shane in the background, which was a distraction. It was almost as if the system was designed to break the sibling bond down, rather than maintain it, which is what eventually started to happen.
Thanks to those visits, I can now instantly recognise children on contacts. And at the t
ime it was very clear to other people that we were on a contact and in care. The signs were easy to spot; we were accompanied by people who looked businesslike and authoritative. No matter how much the social workers tried to blend in, it was easy to tell. While Shane and the other parents wore tracksuits, they would wear formal clothes and carry briefcases and notepads. There were five of us who looked similar but we all arrived at different times, with different adults. The first thing we did was hug and kiss. It would have been better if we had been allowed to meet in the car park, getting the initial greetings out of the way so we could then walk in together. People would look at us with a mixture of pity and embarrassment as the story unfolded before them.
Once it had been decided that we were going to live with Barbara we were swiftly moved on. We were enrolled in a new school in the new town where we were going to live, and our new uniforms were bought for us. We hardly had anything to pack. As Pauline and Graham were fosterers, the clothes and toys we had stayed with them, ready for the next children to arrive at their door. We only had a small bag each with a few toys and a few clothes to tide us over. Barbara had bought us both a new wardrobe. I felt like a doll, being passed between people and dressed according to their taste.
Barbara, her partner Paul and her children came to pick us up. Pauline saw us off and stood crying in the front doorway as we climbed into Barbara’s car. Graham stood next to her, impassive. I wouldn’t hug them before I left – I didn’t want to. It was awkward, it always was when the time came to say goodbye. We had lived there for two years and then overnight we were off, never to meet again. It was the same in all the placements we had; a line was drawn underneath them. I was used to that but it still felt weird; I became adept at forgetting and putting emotions aside.
The journey to our new home was fun. We stopped on the way for a McDonald’s, and Barbara’s children, David and Sharon, were friendly and seemed genuinely excited about having new people in the house. They had bought us each a keychain with the letters L and K on them.
The house was in a rough part of town. When we pulled up outside it reminded me of the street we lived in with Terri and Shane. The houses were unkempt and they all looked the same. Barbara’s house was featureless from the front, just like the others. Inside you walked down a dark hallway, which had a bedroom leading off it and opened up into the living room, which was lime green and almost the same shade as the top Barbara had worn in her introductory DVD. The whole house was badly decorated – the wallpapering wasn’t finished and the kitchen was very small.
It was a four-bedroom property. Kirsten and I shared a room, which suited us as, despite the fact that Barbara was now our prospective mother-to-be, she was still a stranger and the house was a strange environment. Having seen little in our short lives to convince us that adults could be trusted, we felt safer together in the same room. We had bunk beds and, for a long time after we moved in, Kirsten, who slept on the bottom, still preferred to sleep in the same bed and climbed up the back of the bed when the lights went out to get under the covers with me. It was a scruffy house and, with four children, it felt cramped. It was very different to Pauline and Graham’s much bigger house.
When we arrived, Barbara had done all our clothes shopping for us. We didn’t have a say in how we were to be dressed and she had decided to put us in identical outfits, as if we were twins, just as Pauline had done. She thought it was cute to always have us in matching outfits. I resented this from the start and felt like I was her plaything. What was more worrying was that she dressed us as she herself dressed – like tarts. She wore skintight jeans and little tops with suggestive slogans on them, and she bought us tight trousers, little shorts and cropped tops. We looked older than we were and the clothes looked provocative. It was a completely different style from the conservative dresses we were made to wear at Pauline and Graham’s.
In the years since leaving our birth home we had undergone different changes in appearance, from dressing like feral kids through two very distinct identities and, although at the time we accepted it, I can only imagine now that it would have had some sort of effect on Kirsten and me. We didn’t know who we were or how we were supposed to act. Were we prim and proper Sunday School children, or precocious, pre-teen brats? Neither of us had been given the chance to develop our own tastes and identities because we were forced to take on those that were imposed on us.
The domestic set-up at Barbara’s felt unstable. She didn’t work so there was little routine. Paul lived elsewhere but spent a lot of time at the house and she was always overtly affectionate with him in front of us. He used to come round and watch horseracing on the television and, because Barbara did not drive, he would ferry her around everywhere.
It soon became apparent that David and Sharon did not have a great relationship with their mum. They often argued and would be out a lot of the time. I’m not sure what effect Kirsten and me arriving had on the family dynamic but we arrived with our own issues and challenges. We argued a lot and there always seemed to be tension in the air. Kirsten and I were left in the house with the adults and to remove ourselves from the inevitable atmosphere caused when there was an argument we used to play in the garden a lot, making mud pies.
The street was on a council estate and the next-door neighbours were not welcoming. They hated Barbara, would argue the whole time and, within a few months of moving in, Barbara had had a physical fight with one of them.
From that day on they had a vendetta against her and we were warned that we could not play in the street anymore in case we were attacked. Life at Barbara’s soon became stressful, which is probably why she and Paul smoked the whole time. They even smoked while they were eating and didn’t seem at all bothered that their habit could be affecting the range of health problems I had. My eczema and asthma were still bad and no one knew my full medical history because Terri had never taken me to a doctor. I had two inhalers for the asthma, a blue one and a brown one. Cold weather would trigger it and I’m sure the smoking didn’t help. To this day, I still don’t know if I ever had chicken pox as a child or whether I had any inoculations – there were no records. My breathing and skin complaints did not get properly checked out until I moved to Barbara’s. I needed wet wraps for the eczema, which were full-length bandages dipped in a special solution. It was uncomfortable but did at least offer some relief from the continual itching, which was brought on by stress. I often scratched until my skin bled.
It soon became apparent that the woman who made the comical introductory DVD for us wasn’t so nice as she and the social workers had made out. She had little patience with us and our behaviour. We could be challenging, there was no doubt about it – we had come from a very difficult background – but she couldn’t sympathise. For example, I wet the bed frequently in those days and, whenever I did, I got scared and tried to hide it by turning the mattress over. Barbara could smell it so she told me off and smacked me. I wasn’t even shocked – violence had been a regular fact of life, I thought it was what adults did to children.
Barbara’s moods very quickly turned. Her face reddened, her voice rose and she would spit when she talked. She scared me. Often she didn’t need to say anything, she delivered a withering look that made me feel like I was nothing. I couldn’t understand why she wanted to adopt Kirsten or me – she didn’t seem to like us very much. Barbara drank and she was unpredictable. She had the capacity to be nice but, even then, always there seemed to be a pay-off. She stroked my hair lovingly but then pulled it, jerking my head back. It was meant playfully, she would laugh while she was doing it, but to me it seemed spiteful. I never knew what she was thinking or what she was going to do next.
Barbara was preoccupied with her make-up and toiletries, and would often accuse me of stealing her shampoo – she had a thing about hair. She tied mine back very tightly and, when I went to school, she counted how many times the hairband had been tied to make sure it was secure. When I got home, she counted to make sure it had the same num
ber of knots in it from the morning. I got headaches at school. Whenever she was angry, she constantly reminded me that she had done me a favour by taking me in.
The first Christmas we were with her I remember her putting empty bags in other bags and telling us they would have all been full of presents if we hadn’t been so naughty. It was a strange way of teaching us a lesson. I woke on Christmas morning, excited by the bags, and tore through them while she watched. The more I opened, the more I started to resent her.
‘That’s what you get for being naughty,’ she laughed. But then she pulled a gift from behind her and gave it to me.
‘You don’t think I’d give you nothing, do you?’ she cooed, which made me feel bad for thinking she didn’t get me anything. It was a form of psychological control.
Although Barbara was supposed to be our forever Mum, it was becoming increasingly plain that she was having trouble coping. As the months progressed, her relationship with her own children got worse and the rows and problems in the house became overwhelming. We all seemed to be arguing the whole time. Kirsten hated it and argued back. I don’t recall lots of detail about the time; I was young and so much happened in the following years that many early memories are vague, but I have since seen documents from social workers that paint a detailed picture of the way the household fell apart and how Barbara was increasingly unable to cope. They describe ‘testing misbehaviour, which included chewing furniture, and persistent, confrontational lying over comparatively trivial matters’. We were disturbed children and I’m not sure whether Barbara had been made fully aware of this; she was certainly not equipped to deal with it.
One report describes our first six months with Barbara. ‘There were a number of problems with the girls’ behaviour,’ it states. ‘Kirsten in particular frequently wet herself, sometimes by accident but also quite often deliberately. There were also acts of defiant disobedience and many examples of lying.’ The report made it clear that Barbara felt I was the problem in the house. It goes on to give a description of what she told a psychologist she was seeing: ‘She describes Lauren displaying persistent, negative behaviour and a refusal to accept discipline.’ According to her, I was unable to concentrate; I was mean, destructive, disobedient, jealous, secretive, stubborn, moody and I hung around with troublemakers and stole things. I was eight years old at the time but I was no angel, and Kirsten and I needed specialist guidance to help us recover from the trauma of our early childhood.
Girl for Sale Page 5