Four Waifs on Our Doorstep

by Trisha Merry

  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.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. One day Carrie ran away across the meadow to the next farm and found somebody to speak to. She apparently told them I had beaten her with a stick on the set-aside field. Well, we’d been out looking for her and came back to find the police, social workers, everybody waiting for us. I showed them all into the house and a policewoman undressed Carrie to see the wounds she’d complained of.

  ‘What did you find?’ I asked her.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said in a surprised voice. ‘There’s not a mark on her.’

  ‘Well, I did tell you she wasn’t telling the truth. It’s not really her fault. She had a difficult background until they all came here. She never had enough attention when she was small, so she’s been trying to make up for it ever since.’

  ‘So did your mum, Trisha, hit you?’ asked the social worker again, just to make sure.

  ‘No,’ muttered Carrie, looking down at the floor.

  Eventually they left us to ourselves again, to another ‘normal’ evening of madness and mayhem.

  That night, after the children had all gone up to bed at last, Mike and I flumped into our chairs in the living room. We talked about the incident with Carrie and I told him about Jamie’s temper tantrum when they came in and Stacey’s latest misdemeanour at school.

  ‘The trouble is, I daren’t even sit down to have a coffee or the phone will ring from Stacey’s school and tell me she’s stolen the class’s dinner money, or exposed herself to a teacher . . .’

  There were times, and that was one of them, when Mike and I looked at each other and both gave out a long, slow breath.

  ‘I hope this is the bumpiest it’s going to be,’ I said.

  ‘Hope is all we can do,’ he agreed.

  After years of social workers, health visitors, agency workers and the like before we adopted the children, it was quite a relief to have them to ourselves at last, now that we’d adopted them, but it does suddenly hit you that you really are on your own.

  As the children’s behaviour worsened and their rebelliousness increased, I was nearly ready to give up some days, things were so bad. There seemed no end to it all. It felt like whatever I did, somebody would tell me I was wrong. I talked to lots of the experienced agency staff as well as a couple of psychologists I knew and asked for their suggestions about how to deal with the children’s problems, but they all gave conflicting advice, so I was even more confused.

  I was knitting with fog with these kids. I tried everything the experts suggested. I felt like I was holding a pair of scales all the time. On the one hand, if I did this, or on the other hand . . . Was this really just teenage hormones, as some people suggested, or was it me doing things wrong?

  That’s when I decided to join an adoption support group. I went in and sat in this room with about twenty-five other people, all of whom seemed to have adoption breakdowns.

  They were all moaning that they hadn’t been given enough information. Some of them had young people with schizophrenia, others had children who were heavily into drugs and all sorts. My God, they made my four sound like angels! I remember sitting near this lady called Morag who ran the group and she had circles round her eyes and halfway down her cheeks. She looked as if she’d just been bombed.

  A social worker stood up. ‘Right, what you all need is respite, and you need some training sessions, and you need help with . . .’

  We sat around the room, lapping this up. ‘Ah, lovely. At last – just what we need.’

  ‘Of course, if we had the funding, this is what we would do, but . . .’

  There was a loud, collective sigh of frustration around the room.

  ‘Why have we come here?’ asked one woman. ‘If all we’re going to be told is this is what you could have if we could afford it, but we can’t?’

  I became quite hostile and this social worker didn’t seem to understand why. Morag was bravely trying to cool our anger.

  Then somebody who vaguely knew me called out: ‘Don’t talk about social workers to Trisha. She’s likely to get up and thump you!’ Somebody else said something about Social Services telling lies.

  ‘Huhh,’ I said. ‘Don’t even get me on that. And don’t get me started on why one person who needs it most can’t have information when everybody else has that information, but won’t admit to it.’

  By this time, everyone was laughing, so at least it broke the tension. The woman sitting next to me turned towards me.

  ‘Have you adopted them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Problems?’

  ‘Yes, you could say that.’

  ‘I’m a solicitor,’ she said. ‘And I work on behalf of adopted children. If ever you need me . . .’ She gave me her card and I put it in my bag.

  That evening I told Mike where I’d been. ‘I don’t think I’ll be going there again,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much misery in one room!’

  Stacey, reaching puberty at twelve, was now going out of control. I don’t think she could handle how she felt. She wrote letters saying she wanted to have sex with as many people as she could. She ran off to a girlfriend’s house one night and didn’t come back till the next night. This happened quite a few times after that.

  One day she came back from her dance class with a pair of see-through tights on, but no knickers or skirt. Everybody could see.

  There was something new every day, sometimes more than once a day. She was either sitting next to a boy on the school bus with her blouse undone, or she was stealing money from people’s pockets in the cloakroom, or stuff from their lockers. She drew sexually insulting notes and pass
ed them round her class, and she drew sexually explicit graffiti all round the school. And every time I was called in to help them deal with it or to bring her home. It got so much that we arranged for her to see a therapist for a few sessions. I went to see him myself and told him what was going on.

  ‘This is out of my league,’ I said. ‘What should I do about it?’

  ‘Oh, she might grow out of it. It’s just a reaction to something she’s seen.’

  It was all causing huge problems at Stacey’s school.

  ‘You can’t go to school looking like that, Stacey,’ I would say, when she was plastered with make-up and had an old blouse on that was so tight it was bursting.

  Or if she was meeting her friends, she would have pulled her V-necked sweater right down to leave nothing to the imagination, thinking I wouldn’t notice. When I stopped her, she took it personally.

  ‘Don’t you want me to go out looking pretty?’

  ‘But Stace, you can’t go out like that, and you’ve got no knickers on, have you?’

  The school was constantly ringing me up to complain about her, and people were phoning me and saying: ‘I saw your Stacey in town. God, didn’t she look terrible?’

  The incident that I remember the best was all about a skirt. I bought Stacey a new school skirt, which had to be no more than two inches above the knee. I made sure that it was actually knee-length, so there would be no argument.

  She put on her new skirt and looked very demure as she came down to breakfast in it. She still had that skirt on when she left for school, but within the hour I had Mrs Hacket on the phone from the school office.

  ‘Mrs Merry, can you come in?’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  I went in to see Mrs Baker, the headmistress, and noticed straight away the disapproving expression on her face, like a bad smell.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Merry,’ she began, pointing me to a seat next to Mrs Hacket. ‘We were just wondering why you allowed Stacey to come to school in such inappropriate school uniform.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. She’s wearing the knee-length skirt I bought her in the school shop.’

  ‘That’s no skirt,’ she said. ‘Mrs Hacket tells me it’s a boob-tube.’

  ‘No. I’m sorry but that can’t be right. I saw her walk down the road to school in her knee-length skirt.’

  ‘Well, all I know is that Mrs Hacket followed her down the corridor and she said it was so short she could see the cheeks of Stacey’s bottom. And when she turned round, it apparently left nothing to the imagination at the front.’

  ‘No, you definitely must have the wrong girl. I bought her skirt myself from the school shop.’

  But after a lot of toing and froing, I discovered that she had indeed changed out of her skirt and into a tiny, elasticated boob-tube as soon as she got to school.

  ‘It was in her locker,’ said Mrs Hacket. ‘So that confirms it, I think, don’t you? And while I was there, I noticed a load of make-up in there too. Do you let her bring make-up to school?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ I said.

  ‘Then she must be stealing it.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so. She has plenty of make-up of her own at home.’

  ‘But not at school,’ said the head. ‘Until she stole it.’

  The trouble was, Stacey now had such a high profile in that school, because she had so often stolen and broken the rules, that she was automatically the one they would suspect. In this case they were right, but it was a different story when they suspended her for stealing money and phones from her classmates’ bags when she arrived late at a drama lesson, following a lecture from another teacher about her bad behaviour.

  As soon as the others noticed their things were missing, they all looked at Stacey.

  She was hauled up before the head of year and made to write a statement about what she was doing when she arrived late. As usual, she couldn’t resist embroidering her story and making it sound much more dramatic, so that didn’t help her case either. The head of year didn’t believe her and suspended her for the rest of the week.

  Of course, I wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not, but she was adamant that she hadn’t done it this time.

  ‘You know the story about the boy who cried “wolf”?’ I asked her, and explained how it related to her. ‘That’s the trouble, Stace. Even if you didn’t do it, they’re all going to think you did.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Stacey said. ‘They put a CCTV camera where everyone left their coats and bags. Maybe that will show who did it.’

  I phoned up the school and asked if somebody could check the CCTV footage for the time Stacey was supposed to have been stealing all these things. The next thing I knew there was a phone call from the head of year to say it had been someone else, so Stacey could come back to school.

  ‘Don’t you think you owe Stacey an apology?’ I suggested.

  He mumbled something and put the phone down.

  The next day, Stacey came home with a supposed letter of apology from this man. It was very brief:

  Dear Stacey,

  Because of your past behaviours, I’m sure you can understand why I made the judgement I did.

  Mr Archer.

  ‘Not much of an apology, is it, Mum?’ grinned Stacey.

  I went into the school to see Mr Archer the following morning, all guns blazing.

  ‘Surely you should have checked the CCTV before suspending Stacey? You should have looked at the evidence.’

  He looked me in the face. ‘Well, of course she’s a troublemaker.’

  ‘But that’s beside the point. She hasn’t actually done anything this time.’

  ‘Only because somebody else beat her to it.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘The trouble with you, Mrs Merry, is you’re too overprotective. It doesn’t matter what any of your children do, you’ll always believe they couldn’t have done it.’

  ‘Well, she didn’t do it this time,’ I said abruptly and flounced out, slamming his door, which gave me some satisfaction.

  21

  Just a Joke

  ‘Their secondary school must take some responsibility for the children not doing better. They were all bullied at school.’

  Extract from a psychologist’s report

  When she was thirteen I moved Stacey to a small, private Christian school, because I thought it might be better for her. But her lying and her stealing only accelerated all the more. We had complaints about her unauthorised absences, even though I’d dropped her off at school every morning. More than once we were called into the school because she had been found in a classroom with a group of lads in a state of undress.

  At home, Stacey constantly overrode the others. ‘No, I’m going in with Dad to get the fish and chips on Friday night,’ she insisted, and the others just backed down.

  But it was her effect on Sam that was the most worrying. Stacey has always admitted to being a drama queen and she certainly made the most of any opportunity to act up and shock the other three. She often tried to frighten them in different ways.

  On at least a couple of occasions, Stacey walked into Sam’s bedroom with nothing on but her knickers and said to him: ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  He was horrified, poor lad. No wonder he was such a mixed-up kid.

  Not long after I found out about this, a friend of mine came up from Cheltenham to stay for a few days. Alison is a play therapist and was interested in all the tales of woe I told her about the children. While I was cooking, I suggested she go and look round the house as we’d just finished doing it all up and the children each had their own bedrooms.

  ‘Go and look at Sam’s art in his bedroom,’ I said. He loved drawing and painting and had put some of his artwork up on display.

  She came back into the kitchen with a serious expression that made me stop what I was doing.

  ‘Sam needs help, Trisha,’ she said.

  ‘Well, his drawing is quite good,’ I replied,
completely misunderstanding what she meant.

  ‘No, have you seen his play?’

  She made me go up with her and have a look.

  All the bedrooms were big and he had a pasting table down one side of his. He had a King Arthur’s Castle model, with dragons and all sorts of other extras. So we’d given him this pasting table to do all the enactments on. He had a lot of Lego, with the Lego people, and his model farm.

  When we had climbed the two flights of stairs to his room, I saw some of the farm set out on the pasting table.

  ‘Ahh, he’s always loved this farm,’ I told Alison, thinking it was some kind of security for him that he still played with it.

  ‘Have you really looked at how he’s set it out?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Look how he’s got the farm hedging around the edge, with four Lego children and two adults inside. And then he’s got two more people over here with the dragons, down on the ground. And look at this group of people, quite a lot of them, on this side. He’s put lots of animals around them, all lying on their sides.’ She paused. ‘And over here’ – she pointed at a separate group – ‘these people are surrounded by lots of dead animals, big, small, all sorts of animals. And there’s the same thing in the opposite corner.’

  She had me worried now. I had never really looked at all this before, but now I was beginning to catch on to what she was talking about. I dreaded what else she was going to tell me.

  ‘Now,’ she said, pointing at the first group, surrounded by hedges, ‘this is Sam and his family, in here, protected by this. And over here are the baddies. They’ve all been killed now. These people over here . . .’ she explained, ‘they’re the baddies now.’

  I looked at it all and I thought, yes, I can see . . . I knew nothing about play therapy, so I’d always fondly thought it was just Sam playing imaginary games. A part of me still wondered, was she reading too much into this? Something that may not be there at all?