by Angela Hart
Maria talked about the fact she had two stepbrothers called Frank and Casey, who lived in the house with her mum and stepfather, Gerry, and she also had a half-brother, Colin, who lived with her nanny. Colin was a teenager and she told me, ‘Mummy had Colin when she was young so he’s always lived with Nanny and Granddad.’
Granddad Stanley was not Maria’s ‘real’ grandfather – Babs had remarried – and he was ‘on the sick’, Maria informed me.
‘I can’t remember what’s wrong with him, but he can go in a big deep sleep if he doesn’t eat the right things,’ she said.
I figured he was probably diabetic, and then Maria added, ‘That’s why I can’t stay with Nanny. She has her hands full with Granddad! He is so poorly he can’t even have a job!’
‘Oh dear, I’m sorry to hear he’s poorly.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Maria added, ‘he likes to watch telly in the daytime anyway. And he has to give himself injections, so he has to be at home in his chair all the time.’
Maria then went on to tell me in a very matter-of-fact way that she didn’t know her real dad.
‘He says I’m not his but Mum says that’s a lie,’ she divulged as she skipped along, holding my hand. She said it as flippantly as if she were talking about what she had done at break time at school, and I felt a pang in my chest. Not only was this sad to listen to, but it seemed this inappropriate and upsetting detail had been reported to Maria by her mother.
Poor love, I thought. What a complicated family, and what a shame about Maria’s father.
Of course, I knew better than to take all of this information as read. I’ve found on many occasions over the years that children can embellish facts, bend the truth or choose to forget certain details when they take part in conversations like this. Given Maria’s age I didn’t think she would have set out to invent such a story – especially such an unfortunate one – but I did wonder whether the version of events she’d been brought up believing was accurate, and why her family would tell her such things.
Babs threw open her front door with a flourish when Maria knocked on the large brass door knocker.
‘Babe! How are you!’ she cried joyfully. ‘Come and give Nanny a big cuddle!’
She scooped Maria into her arms and kissed the top of her head before she even looked at me. It was lovely to see.
‘Sorry, love, you must be Angela. Where are my manners? Nice to meet you. Now come on in, the pair of you.’
Before I had time to politely suggest that there was no need to invite me in, I was being ushered into the lounge.
‘Park yourself there, love. I’ll put the kettle on. Stanley, we’ve got company. Stanley!’
Stanley was engrossed in a TV programme and was sitting engulfed in a cloud of smoke. An ashtray containing about ten cigarette butts was on the coffee table beside his large armchair, alongside a grubby plastic tub containing several different packets of prescription drugs.
Stanley reluctantly curled up the edges of his mouth to give me the most insincere and unwelcoming smile I had even been unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of.
‘Nice ta meet ya,’ he said in a strong cockney accent, before immediately turning his attention back to the TV.
Babs had already put the kettle on, so I agreed to stay for a cup of tea. When I say ‘agreed’ I guess what I really mean is that I didn’t have any choice but to accept. Babs was a characterful, curvaceous lady who wore her vibrant red hair in a fancy bun and had her lips painted with sugar-pink lipstick. She had a friendly, open face and was clearly an extrovert. My gut reaction was that I liked her. I felt she was a very warm person, but I was soon to find out that she was surprisingly blunt and plain-talking too.
‘So, what’s Maria told you?’ she said to me.
She looked me in the eye and I could tell she was not a woman you could easily fob off with pleasantries. To make matters worse, before she settled herself beside me on the sofa she plonked down an extremely large, steaming mug of tea. My heart sank a little as I registered it was going to take me a while to drink.
‘Oh, not much,’ I said. ‘Let me see now. Maria did tell me that Colin lives with you.’
‘That’s right,’ Babs said. ‘He’s older than Maria, you see, nearly a man, looks after himself. It’s a shame Maria’s so much younger as I’d take her in too. Isn’t that right, Stanley?’
She looked over to Stanley who grunted and nodded without taking his gaze off the TV screen.
‘Anyway, love,’ Babs went on, patting my arm, ‘I’m grateful to you for taking care of her. It won’t be for long, I’m sure, and Maria is welcome to visit us any time she likes.’
Maria was sitting in the corner stroking an elderly looking cat who was purring loudly.
Often the relatives of the children I foster are wary of me, and they certainly don’t go out of their way to get to know me or become friendly. I was trying to work Babs out. Maria certainly seemed very at home here, which was a good sign. Then Babs suddenly leaned in to me and asked very loudly and indiscreetly, ‘Did Maria tell you about her dad?’
‘She did mention him,’ I said, feeling anxious as Maria could hear every word that was being said. ‘Anyhow, I’m very glad to have met you, Babs, and if you don’t mind I’ll finish my tea and get out of your way so you can enjoy your time with Maria.’
With that I took a large gulp of tea, even though it was still a bit too hot to swallow.
‘Did Maria tell you her dad claims she’s not his?’ Babs responded. ‘Well, let me put you in the picture, Angela. He is her real dad, and the only reason he says he’s not is to hurt my daughter!’
I thought to myself that in fact it was Maria who was perhaps suffering the most hurt, particularly at this moment in time. ‘Well, it’s been nice to meet you and I think I’ll get going now . . .’
‘No need to rush off. Like I say, Maria’s welcome any time, and so are you, Ange. I’m grateful you’re looking after her. My daughter’s done nothing wrong, of course. It’s these men. Can’t rely on any of them to look after kids the way we women do, eh, Angela? That Gerry, I blame him.’
She rolled her eyes and nudged me conspiratorially, as if we’d been friends for years and were gently ribbing the men in our lives because they couldn’t do an everyday task, like making a child’s packed lunch, as well as we could. It seemed wholly inappropriate for Babs to be talking this way about a father supposedly disowning his daughter.
Realising I was not going to be able to escape as quickly as I wanted to, I encouraged Maria to tell Babs about some of the things we’d done in her short time with us. We’d gone to the festival and Maria explained that though she didn’t win the theme park tickets in the raffle she wanted, she did win a toy in the tombola.
‘I could choose,’ she said proudly.
‘So what did you choose?’
‘A fairy doll!’ Maria beamed.
Babs rolled her eyes once more.
‘It’s all fairies and witches and magic with you, isn’t it, Maria?’
She nodded and smiled, but when Babs added, ‘No wonder, I blame your parents,’ the smile slid off Maria’s face.
I looked at Babs and raised my eyebrows, not knowing quite what to say.
‘She’s psychic, my girl,’ Babs explained. ‘My mother had the gift and so has Christine.’
‘Oh, I see,’ I said.
I didn’t want to get caught up in a conversation like this. While I’m open-minded and I appreciate that some people do appear to have more ‘intuition’ than others, I didn’t feel comfortable discussing this in front of Maria. I thought any talk of psychic powers might be a little unsettling for a seven-year-old girl, although given the way Babs was I figured Maria had probably heard plenty of things like this before.
‘Right,’ I said, rising to my feet. ‘I really must be going now and I’ll be back at the agreed time. See you later, Maria. Thanks for the tea, Babs.’
Maria nodded and smiled at me and carried on stroki
ng the cat. She seemed very relaxed and happy to be there, despite Babs’s inappropriate chatter, and as I left Babs told me she was cooking Maria’s favourite dinner of chicken nuggets and potato waffles with spaghetti hoops.
‘I like to spoil her, don’t I, Maria?’
Maria nodded again. ‘You’re the only one who treats me nice,’ she said.
Babs completely ignored this, but I made a mental note of this comment. I would have to pass this on to Social Services, as well as Babs’s cryptic remark about blaming Gerry, as I was obliged to do whenever I heard something that might require further investigation.
When I picked Maria up later she was in a good mood and asked me enthusiastically if we could bake some cakes together.
‘Me and Nanny watched a cookery show on TV. Can we make fairy cakes?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I love baking.’
‘Good. Nanny said she was not much good at baking and I’d better ask you! She said she expected you’d be good.’
I smiled, but I also felt slightly uncomfortable. It didn’t take a genius to work out that though Babs was happy to see Maria and include her in her life, she didn’t appear to be particularly willing to put herself out for her granddaughter, over and above having her to visit.
The following evening, Maria helped me bake some biscuits and cakes. At one point she was sitting at the kitchen table, singing loudly while rolling out some raw biscuit dough, when she suddenly jumped up, stood on the chair and started waving her arms above her head, doing a little dance.
‘I’m glad to see you’re feeling so cheerful,’ I told her, putting one hand on the back of the chair and getting ready to steady her with the other if the need arose, as it looked as though it probably would. ‘But maybe it would be better to do that with both feet on the ground!’
‘I’m sorry,’ Maria said, jumping down off the chair and taking a few steps away from me. ‘I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right, Maria,’ I said, taken aback by her reaction. ‘I’m not cross. I just don’t want you to fall off and hurt yourself. Do carry on with the song though. I was enjoying it.’
Unfortunately Maria didn’t sing again, and I was sorry to have broken her happy mood.
In fact, she didn’t speak again either, until we were putting cut-out biscuits shapes on a baking tray. I spilled a bit of flour on the floor, which landed by Maria’s feet, and this made her shriek and go very still and quiet for a moment.
Then she suddenly exclaimed, ‘I jumped on the sofa.’
You can sometimes tell when a child is trying to say something more than the words suggest, and that was certainly the case now. For this reason I was very careful to keep my tone as neutral as possible as I repeated, ‘You jumped on the sofa?’
‘Yes.’
Maria paused.
‘When?’ I asked her eventually, thinking she meant she had done it at our house.
‘At my house,’ she said. ‘They were cross with me. So he made me jump off other things. The table first, and that bit of wood at the end of the bed.’
‘I see.’
There was another pause. Maria looked at her hands and started picking at the skin around her nails, as if this was suddenly a very urgent task that took all her attention and meant she couldn’t look at me. Then she breathed in, as if she was about to dive off a big diving board and needed to inhale as much breath as she possibly could.
‘Then he said I had to jump off the drawer thing in Mum’s room, which is quite high and . . .’
‘And?’
‘And I was scared. It wobbled a bit when I stood on it and I said I didn’t want to jump. I don’t know who . . .’
‘You don’t know who?’
‘I don’t know who pushed me. Mum and him were standing right beside me, laughing. But I hurt my foot when I fell on the floor. And I banged my head.’
‘So someone pushed you?’ I asked her, my voice still flat and as matter-of-fact as I could keep it in the circumstances.
‘I think so. Mum said I was a crybaby and it was my own fault.’
‘I think that I would have probably cried if I’d hurt myself.’
‘You would?’
‘Yes, I would, definitely.’
‘Are you cross with me, Angela?’
‘No! Not at all. I’m sorry if you thought I was cross when I asked you to get down off the chair,’ I told her. ‘I just didn’t want you to get hurt.’
Maria was now staring at the flour on the floor. ‘You could see where I walked,’ she said, somewhat mysteriously.
‘Yes, I expect I would,’ I said, guessing that she meant she would make footsteps in the flour if she walked in it.
‘I wish we could eat them now,’ Maria then said, changing the subject abruptly and dropping a duck-shaped piece of biscuit dough on to the baking tray. ‘How long will they take to cook?’
The next half an hour or so passed pleasantly as the biscuits baked and Maria waited eagerly to taste one once they had cooled. Unfortunately, before bed, her mood suddenly changed again, for no obvious reason.
‘Why do you nag, nag, nag,’ she snapped when I asked her to go upstairs and get into her nightie.
‘It’s bedtime, Maria,’ I said calmly. ‘I’m only asking you to do what you need to do before bed.’
She huffed and puffed up the stairs as she criss-crossed between the wooden edges; then when she got into the bathroom to clean her teeth she kicked over the waste bin and told me she hated my house.
‘I’m sorry you’re feeling like this,’ I said. ‘Maybe I could read with you tonight. Would you like that?’
‘No, all your books are rubbish!’
‘Well, then, perhaps we could visit the library after school tomorrow and you could choose some books for yourself. How about that?’
‘Why are you being nice? I bet you want to make me jump off the bookcase, don’t you? You’re just pretending to be nice.’
‘Maria, I would certainly not want you to jump off the bookcase. You might hurt yourself, and that is the last thing I want. My job is to keep you safe and comfortable and to look after you as best I can, and that’s all I want, Maria.’
She scowled at me and then suddenly blurted out, ‘I don’t like the games Mum and my stepdad make me play.’
‘I see,’ I said, not flinching or showing alarm. ‘You don’t like the games, Maria?’
She picked up a book and thrust it towards me. ‘Read me this,’ she said rudely.
I took the book from her hand and stayed quiet for a few moments, to give her space to expand on what she’d said about the games, but she didn’t.
‘I think it would be more polite if you said to me, “Angela, please can you read me this?”’ I said as kindly as I could. ‘Right, let’s get started . . .’
As I’ve said before, it’s very important not to put words into the mouth of a child when they make a disclosure of any kind. For example, if a child makes a statement such as ‘Daddy took me upstairs’, you have to be extremely careful simply to repeat what they’ve said so that they know you’re listening, but you don’t ask them any questions. There are two reasons for this. First, you might cause the child further upset by probing, and, second, you might say something that could later be construed, if a case goes to court, as having prompted them to say something they didn’t really mean.
Later that evening I made notes in my diary about everything Maria had told me that day, which I would pass on to Jess the social worker when I saw her next. As I did this, Jonathan praised me for keeping calm and sticking meticulously to the rules we’d been taught at the numerous training sessions we had attended over the years.
‘It’s second nature now after all this time,’ I responded, even though I was pleased by Jonathan’s praise. Fostering can be very tough at times, and having a partner like Jonathan there by my side, encouraging me every step of the way, has been invaluable and has helped keep my spirits up on many an occasion.
We both recalled a good example we’d been given on one particular course, which illustrates very well how easy it is to introduce a thought into a child’s mind. The story we were told was this. A nursery teacher said to a group of children, ‘When we walk down this road, we’re going to pass a house with a blue door.’ Then, later that same day, she asked them, ‘Do you remember when we walked down the road and saw a house with a blue door?’ And the children said that they did. A few days later, she asked the children, ‘Do you remember when we walked down the road last week and we passed a house with a red door?’ This time, the children looked a bit confused, and while some of them said that the door was blue, others weren’t sure. But after the teacher told them the same thing repeatedly over a period of weeks and then asked the children what colour the door was, they all said it was red. Inevitably, if you apply the same principle to emotional feelings and reactions, it can have a similar effect.
For example, when you ask a child, ‘Are you upset because Tommy hit you?’ it’s possible the child doesn’t really know why he’s upset. However, when you suggest a reason, he or she may latch on to it and then, in his or her mind, that is what caused the upset.
I sincerely hoped, despite all I’d heard so far from Maria and Social Services, that there was an innocent explanation for her bruises. I also hoped the ‘games’ and the jumping off the furniture business were not as sinister or peculiar as they seemed. In hindsight this sounds like a naive wish, but I always live in hope. I think I have to be like that in order to do my job, because if I didn’t try to focus on the positive and wish for the best-case scenario, I think I could end up in a very dark and depressing place, which would be no good for anybody.
‘I know we can’t, but I really wish I could just ask her what she meant by the “games”,’ I said to Jonathan when we went to bed.
‘I know,’ he admitted. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. Poor Maria, I’m afraid she’s been through more than we might ever know. No wonder she has nightmares.’
Right on cue we heard Maria calling out in her sleep. Fortunately, she soon settled that night and I didn’t need to go to her, but this didn’t mean I slept soundly myself – far from it. I couldn’t bear to think that such a sweet little girl had been subjected to any kind of abuse, and the increasingly likely possibility that this had happened made my heart heavy.