I was fully expecting someone to come and find me. I wanted Karen or John to rescue me and tell me everything would be OK. It got colder and darker. I was scared but determined not to give in. In my mind, it became a battle of wills.
At some point during the night, I curled up on the rubber safety surface of the park and fell asleep. No one found me; I assumed they were not even looking and that I hadn’t been missed. I woke in the gloomy dawn light and decided to walk to the only place I felt wanted – the school. When I got there the doors were open and a couple of staff members were already there, preparing for the day. They found me a blanket and made me some food and a hot drink.
I didn’t know it, but when Karen realised I had gone she had called the police and social services. There were police patrols searching for me and the police helicopter had been sent up to find me. John had been out all night, looking.
The teachers at the school were aware that I had gone missing and called the police, who came and got me and took me back to Karen. Though angry with me, she tried to be understanding; she told me it was unacceptable behaviour. It was the first time I had ever done anything like that and it caused a lot of worry. All my friends soon heard about it and many were quietly impressed that a 10-year-old could manage to evade a manhunt for a whole night by hiding under a climbing frame.
Then there was someone else who had been following the events closely, of whom I was unaware at that stage.
While I was getting on with life in limbo at Karen’s, my details had been circulated among the adoptive community. At the time, there was a British fostering and adoption magazine called Children Who Wait. It was full of pictures and biographies of children who were looking for homes. My photo was printed in it with a description that read: ‘After many sad disruptions and losses, Lauren is now ready to move to a forever family.’ It said I liked Brownies, which I didn’t, and mentioned that I had several siblings but that I was being placed on my own. ‘Despite the disruptions she remains optimistic and cheerful,’ it concluded.
Many miles away in Oxford a lady had seen the photo and brief details in the charity magazine and made enquiries about me. A single, professional, well-educated woman, she was totally different from any of the other people I had been placed with. She was well progressed along the adoption process. Unbeknown to me, already she had had several meetings with the social services department looking after me and had even been to Karen’s house when I wasn’t there. When I went missing she was called and informed and she waited, worried about my safety, until she heard that I had turned up, safe and sound. My disappearance and volatile behaviour did nothing to deter her. As she told me later, she believed I deserved the chance of a better life and she knew that, if she was going to take me on, it would not be an easy ride.
Her name was Elizabeth McDonnell. She decided she wanted to adopt a child because she had forgotten to have children herself. In her early fifties, she had never formed a permanent relationship. Her career had taken over and she was a bit of a workaholic. She worked at a very senior level in welfare policy with homelessness and the underlying cause. As part of her role, she had been involved in research into mental health, looking at why some people were more resilient than others and what could be done to help those who had bad starts in life. She became engrossed in the subject; she had done a lot of work around the effect on children in care and ways to improve their future prospects. She started to think about what she wanted to do for the rest of her career and decided to stop working and do voluntary and freelance work instead. Initially she considered fostering older teenage children, and when she was talking to someone about it they asked whether she had thought about fostering or adopting younger children. She assumed she wouldn’t be eligible because of her age and the fact that she was on her own (she didn’t realise that social services preferred to place older children with older single people). So she contacted a charity called Action for Children, which helped potential adoptive parents find children, and it went from there.
Through that organisation, she was vetted and counselled. She had been advised that it was better to go through a charity than a local authority and they did a thorough job. In January 2002, she started a formal legal process to become an adoptive parent. There were checks and visits, and training. She was formally approved in September of that year and started to look for a child. Later that autumn, she found me. By Christmas of that year, a few weeks after I ran away, she was told that the placement was likely to go ahead but the authorities decided not to tell me until after the festive season.
At the end of December, my case worker came to visit and explained that there was a woman who hoped to adopt me. She wanted to be my forever family and she lived in a city called Oxford. Then I was handed an album she had made for me. It was full of photos of herself, her family and her home; it also had photos of her dog. It was very well thought through, it was set out for me. ‘This is me,’ she wrote beside a photograph of herself. She looked kind and mumsy. I flicked through the pages. There was a photograph of a bedroom. ‘This will be your room, but we can change the colour scheme if you want,’ she wrote. The room had a sink in it, which I thought was amazing – I had never been given choices before.
‘I like the look of her. I’d like to meet her,’ I said.
I was keen – that had never happened before.
At each previous placement I had been passed around and had arrived with little choice. I wasn’t given any opportunity to express myself, I never felt wanted. As soon as I saw the book, I felt Elizabeth would be different.
A contact was arranged and in January she came to visit me up at John’s house. She drove for many hours in the snow and brought her dog with her – a tiny, yappy Terrier. She also had a cat. I loved animals and was thrilled at the prospect of going somewhere with pets. John had a massive Old English Sheepdog. By the time Elizabeth knocked on the door, I was really excited as I answered. I was smaller than she was expecting. She looked down at me and smiled. Her face was warm and friendly. She arrived early and had been waiting around the corner. I could tell she was nervous.
‘Hello, Lauren,’ she said.
The dog she was holding was squirming and managed to break free from her. It ran past me into the house where John’s dog stood, startled. It barked and the Old English Sheepdog turned and ran out into the garden. We all laughed. John invited her in and we sat down among all the clutter of Christmas that hadn’t been put away and chatted easily. She asked me about school and I told her about my friends and teachers, and my favourite subjects; she told me a bit about herself. Straight away, there was a connection. I had a good feeling about her.
Together with John, we went for lunch at the Toby Carvery. I had a long cowl-sleeved sweater on and the sleeves kept dropping in the gravy. We talked about our lives; she asked me about my brothers and sister and about my parents. With previous carers, it had been a subject that was usually avoided. I liked the fact that she acknowledged my past. After lunch we went for a walk in the snow.
It is safe to say that I loved the lady who became my mum from the first time I saw her. She had never fostered before, I was the first child she chose and she jumped in at the deep end. As we walked in the winter chill, I could tell she was hesitant about putting her arm around me. There were no hard and fast rules about boundaries and she was feeling her way. I went up and gave her a big hug; I thought she was lovely. I wanted to go home with her that day, I knew she was right – she didn’t look like the sort of person who was going to hurt me. But the rules said we needed time to get to know each other and to make sure the placement was something we both wanted, and so, at the end of the day, she made the long journey back to Oxford.
But I had already made up my mind.
‘Can I come with you?’ I asked.
She shook her head kindly and assured me that we would see each other again very soon. I was sad when she went but, for the first time, I was filled with hope.
Chapter se
ven
MUM
Anyone can have a child but to be a mum takes thought, time and effort. And Elizabeth had worked hard to get to the stage where she was a potential mum. She had been approved by social services and, rather than passively pass through the system until all the boxes were ticked, she had been very proactive, making it clear what was expected of her and what support she expected.
She was the first person to raise my domestic circumstances with my case worker. She realised I wasn’t living where I was supposed to be living: she had been told that I was living with Karen in Karen’s house, yet when she visited I was with John. She was surprised but by then was starting to realise just how chaotic things had been for me and how chaotic the system for children in care was. That made her even more focused on adopting me. She found it odd that social services were not aware of my situation.
I’ve since learned that some people get involved in fostering and adoption for the wrong reasons. For some, who get an allowance if they look after a child, there is a financial incentive. Others want to concentrate on saving children to mask issues they themselves are working through. Elizabeth had thought an awful lot about what she was doing; she knew a lot about me by that point. She had met my schoolteachers and seen my bedroom at Karen’s.
It wasn’t long before we met again, and over the following weeks we had a lovely time getting to know each other. The second time I met her she drove up again and stayed at the nearby Holiday Inn for a couple of days. I stayed with her for the whole day until it was time to go back at night. She brought a huge art box and filled it with stuff she thought I might like to do. All I wanted was to play in the shower and run up and down the stairs, but she was fine with that. She couldn’t get me to sit down and talk because I was so excited. I was dressed in a mish-mash of clothes and had children’s shoes with heels. She was obviously still wary of my behaviour because I would go into the cafe on the ground floor to snatch sachets of sugar and at one point had disappeared for a while; she thought I’d run away.
We spent a lot of time in the hotel room. I wasn’t fussed about going out so we stayed in, did some art and talked. Elizabeth wanted to know all about me, and I wanted to know about her. She asked what I liked, what I liked to play, what toys I liked. She never assumed anything. Whenever she spoke about the future she always said, ‘If you did come and live with me’. But by then my mind was made up – I wanted to live with her.
During that time, one of our conversations turned to the subject of what I would call her. There was no pressure on me at all.
‘If you do come and live with me, it doesn’t matter what you call me,’ she said. ‘You can call me whatever you want.’
‘I might as well call you Mum, because that’s what you’ll be,’ I shrugged. It was so easy and, more importantly, it felt right. For the first time in my life, I felt I was conferring the title on someone who would actually take it seriously and who would work to earn it. From that moment on, Elizabeth McDonnell was my mum and I was her daughter.
The next step in our relationship was for me to visit her in what would be our home. Mum came and picked me up and drove me back to Oxford for a sleepover. Again, it was completely different from the previous placements; we were being encouraged to spend time together and to get to know each other. I was thrilled at the prospect of going to look around the house and town where I had already decided I was going to live. It was like going on holiday; I had never been so far south and I had never heard of Oxford.
When I got there it was amazing. Mum lived in a really nice part of Oxford and was surrounded by historic-looking buildings. I thought Oxford was a fantasyland with all the spires and picture-book buildings – there were even swans on the river. Her house in Oxford was a Victorian terrace. It was homely and to me it seemed huge, spread over four floors. I spent much of the time we had running up and down the stairs. It was cosy, especially on a cold winter’s night. It felt very different to what I was used to and seemed very posh. Mum worked at the time – she was involved in voluntary work and she had a circle of well-to-do friends who all worked in charities, at the university and were people who commuted to London. They were well-educated professionals in decent jobs. The neighbours were teachers, lawyers and academics.
I hadn’t been used to living with people who worked. It all felt solid and stable; it was also scary because I had never experienced anything like it before. I wondered if I would fit in. Before I met Elizabeth, part of me worried that I would just get bounced into another nightmare situation but, when I saw the environment she lived in and the life she lived, I realised this was not going to be the case. She seemed dependable.
During the period when we were getting to know each other, I had a planned contact visit with Terri. At that stage, I was only seeing her and my brothers three times a year. Mum never discouraged me from seeing her – quite the opposite. She thought it was important that, no matter what happened with the adoption, I should keep in contact with my birth family. The visit coincided with a day when Mum was with me so she came along to meet the rest of my family as my nan and granddad were scheduled to be there too. The meeting took place in a social services office. I took Terri a red rose. It was lovely to see Nan and Granddad but, as usual, Terri was hardly bothered.
‘You alright then?’ she asked dismissively. She hardly made eye contact.
There was no conversation. Several years later, Mum told me that, during the four contacts she attended between Terri and me, she hardly ever saw Terri speak to me, other than to make brief small talk. She would just ask if I was OK out of courtesy and that would be it.
Terri did do me one service after that meeting, however: she gave Mum her blessing. She liked her when they first met and told social services that she agreed with the proposed placement. It was the one good thing she did for me. The authorities also had a duty to ask Shane. I think he may have been in prison at the time because he wouldn’t give an answer, so they overruled him and made the decision for him. In subsequent months when the adoption process was going through the courts, he kept missing court hearings because he was so unreliable. I assume he would have said no anyway as he always did.
Soon after that meeting with Terri I was told that everything had been approved and I was to start my new life with Mum in Oxford. I was overjoyed. For me it was a completely new start and filled with possibility.
The only aspect I was sad about was leaving the primary school I had started six months previously. I had settled in and made some good friends there. When I moved I was in Year Six and the move was going to happen in the middle of the term, halfway between Christmas and Easter. Mum came up to collect me on a Friday before the weekend of the move and had arranged a special surprise with the school.
She arrived early in the morning and took me in to school to say goodbye to all my friends. The head even said a few words during assembly and wished me good luck. Mum took a photo of me with my classmates before I left; she made a big deal of it. In all the other schools I had attended and left, I had never had a chance to say goodbye. I was there one day and somewhere else the next. By making a point of marking my leaving, Mum was making sure I felt valued. It was the hardest school to leave but also the best because I could see things would be different from then on.
I moved on 15 February 2003. When I left Karen’s I had about half a dozen books and a couple of toys. It was the sum total of my life to that point. As a parting gift, Karen packed me off with 16 bin bags full of broken toys and clothes that weren’t mine. It seemed a bizarre thing to do, and Mum later said she reckoned she took the opportunity to empty her loft and pretend that the rubbish she found in it was all mine. Although I was sorry to say goodbye to John, as he had been good to me, the excitement of starting a new life far outweighed any sadness.
On the journey south I was excited and didn’t stop talking. We stopped on the way for lunch. Mum told me later that I looked like a ragged orphan – my clothes were filthy and I smelled. S
he didn’t say anything at the time but she had to have the windows down. When we got home she suggested that it would be lovely to celebrate moving into my new home with a bubble bath. I wasn’t too pleased because it wasn’t something I was used to, but she persuaded me and, while I soaked in the water and washed, she got rid of most of the rubbish and dirty old clothes I had been sent with.
That weekend we had a moving-in party and Mum brought out a cake. She had placed a candle on top of it for everyone significant in my life. It was a lovely thing to do. Mum had gone to see a therapeutic worker who specialised in children and adoption, and she talked through how it might be for me when I first moved. That was when she was given the idea for the cake and candles – the thought behind it was to make sure I knew that the important people in my life would still be in my life and the door was not shut on them. As we lit each candle, we went through my birth family, former adoptive people, teachers and friends.
Meanwhile, I had a new family in Oxford. I had a new Granny and Granddad, two cousins, two uncles and an auntie. That first weekend we had a big family day at our house and afterwards we went to the nearby park. There was a lake inside the park, which had frozen over, and, while Mum was demonstrating how dangerous it was to walk on frozen ice, she fell through up to her knees. It was hilarious!
Mum had gone shopping before I arrived and filled my drawers with clothes. I had a hat and scarf, my own mirror and a mermaid soap dispenser.
The following weekend I was taken to Somerset to stay with Mum’s brother, Uncle Michael, and his wife, Victoria. They lived on a farm and had horses. It was magical, but during the weekend Mum got a glimpse of the darker side of my behaviour. Up to that point I had generally been good, if not overly excitable, but there were still deep insecurities and unresolved issues in my mind that I didn’t understand. I still had trouble accepting authority and was prone to mood swings.
Girl for Sale Page 7