by Angela Hart
‘So, it did happen?’
‘What did happen?’
‘I did have bruises and a broken arm?’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘But how?’
I waited and then Maria shrugged her shoulders. ‘If Gerry told me cows could fly I would have believed him. Ha ha!’
We’d got into a routine of Babs coming to visit Maria at our house for a couple of hours every week, which was agreed by the court. These visits went really well and you’d never have known there had been any break in the contact.
Babs let Maria paint her nails, she asked her about school and she told Maria some stories about when she was a baby. She wasn’t what you would call ‘hands on’ when it came to playing games, reading together or doing anything remotely physical, but Maria didn’t seem to mind. Babs would sip tea, eat biscuits and chatter away very easily. Occasionally she’d say something inappropriate, like reminding Maria about the time she tried to eat dried noodles when she was hungry as a child, and telling the story like a funny anecdote rather than the shocking memory it was, but on the whole she was good company, kind and loving, and the visits went well.
Maria always looked forward to seeing Babs, but then one day she asked, ‘What if my mum finds out I’m seeing Nanny again? I don’t know what she’d say.’
‘I’m sure your grandmother would be able to explain to her why it’s so important that she sees you,’ I told her, ‘and I think your mum probably already knows, as Social Services certainly do.’
I was right, because I bumped into Colin outside the shop one morning.
‘I saw Mum,’ he said.
‘How is she?’
‘Not bad. I think she’s OK with Maria staying here. She told me, “I don’t care what she does.”’
‘I see. Well, I don’t think that’s a message I’ll be passing on to Maria,’ I said.
‘No, that’s exactly what I thought. She doesn’t always think before she speaks, my mum.’
That evening Maria announced, out of the blue, ‘I hope Social Services gets a full care order when this inter-thing runs out.’
‘Interim care order,’ I said.
‘Yes, that. I want to live with you, Angela. You’re always nice to me even though I’m not a nice person and everyone else hates me.’
‘No one hates you, Maria,’ I told her. ‘We all think the world of you.’ But although, for a moment, she looked pleased, I knew it was going to take a lot more than kind words – however truthful they might be – to build up her confidence and self-esteem. Gerry has no idea how much damage he’s done, I thought. Poor Maria had no self-belief and she’d grown up in an environment of fear. She had been physically hurt and mentally abused, and what’s more, Gerry had used mind games to play tricks on Maria about how she was physically harmed. It was despicable.
It was another three or four weeks after the court hearing before Maria was able to stop going to church. Even after the interim care order was put in place, her stepfather insisted that she should continue her religious education, and it wasn’t until Maria told her social worker very clearly that she really didn’t want to go any more that Social Services took the decision to let her stop.
Another good thing that happened once the interim care order had been agreed was that Maria was able to move back to her old school. As the local school was within easy walking distance of our house, there were no more long taxi rides, and as well as picking up most of the friendships she’d had when she was there before, her work improved too.
Unfortunately, Maria continued to have difficulty sleeping and she was often tired in the morning, complaining that she hadn’t slept well. This had been an ongoing problem, but now when she woke up in the night, instead of tossing and turning, she would read. She devoured anything, from fiction to comic books to stories about seemingly ordinary people who turned out to do heroic things. She was like a little word vacuum, and as well as expanding her vocabulary and feeding her imagination, she loved learning new sayings and expressions. She still made us laugh by adapting them, either accidentally or deliberately, into things like ‘reading between the lies’ and ‘not having a log to stand on’.
The last couple of reports we’d had for Maria from her previous school said that she was making good progress. But when I’d spoken to her class teacher just before she left there, she’d admitted that it wasn’t entirely true. ‘We mainly said those things about Maria’s progress because we wanted to encourage her,’ she told me, ‘and because we thought she would read the report herself when she took it home.’
However, at the first parent–teacher meeting we went to after she’d returned to the local school, the comments were considerably more positive. ‘I’m very impressed with the progress Maria has made in such a short time,’ her class teacher told us. ‘She’s the best in the class,’ her English teacher said, which wasn’t surprising, considering how avidly she devoured every book we could provide her with. In fact, although we had a good selection of books in the house, Maria was such a fast reader that it wasn’t long before we were visiting the library twice or even three times a week.
As the months passed, it was a real pleasure to watch Maria develop into an articulate, popular little girl with a bit more confidence than she’d had when she first came to live with us. She might have been swapping the healthy lunches I was giving her every day for crisps and chocolate bars – as I discovered later! – but at least she had friends to swap them with, and she no longer felt like an outsider.
However, the clock was ticking on Maria’s time with us. The interim care order could only remain in place for a limited period, after which a permanent decision would have to be made about whether Maria was going to return home to live with her mother and stepfather or remain in care for the longer term, with the granting of a full care order in place. I couldn’t see how she could possibly be allowed home after all the disclosures I’d been passing on to Social Services, but unfortunately as a foster carer you learn to take nothing for granted. Jonathan and I were aware we did not know the full story, and we rarely ever do. We are not lawyers either, and as I’ve said before we’d been surprised and disappointed by the decisions of the authorities in the past, so who knew what might happen?
21
‘Every clown has a silver lining’
It wasn’t long after Maria had returned to her old school that her social worker started helping her to put together a book of her life story, which is standard practice for children who are in foster care for any length of time. The life story book helps them understand and remember where they came from, what they have done and achieved in their life, and who the important people are. Typically, the book will record data like the child’s place and time of birth, information about where they have lived, details of siblings, pictures from key events like christenings, birthdays and holidays, plus certificates gained at school and clubs and so on.
I am always reading articles and books about child development and I was struck when a feature I read in a fostering magazine quoted Leo Tolstoy, the Russian author who wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina in the 1800s. ‘Happy people have no history’, he said. I thought at first that it was an odd quote to include in the feature but it makes sense when you think about it: people who’ve had a happy childhood just take it for granted, and there may be no ‘stand-out events’ they remember, because everything has run smoothly and happily. It’s not the same for children who have experienced trauma, and they also tend to develop a view of themselves that’s coloured by those traumatic events. This can make for a life story packed with much more ‘history’ than for the child who grew up in a happy, normal household.
It’s important for children who have been subjected to distressing and disruptive experiences to have a record of the good things that have happened to them and of all the positive things they’ve achieved. And as well as being a record of the past, a life story book also provides a means of linking a child’s present with their f
uture – a way of filling in the blanks, to make life easier to cope with for the child, going forward.
Jonathan and I always keep a memory book for any children we foster, but that is separate from the life story book, which has to be compiled under the guidance of a trained social worker. This is because it isn’t as straightforward as simply listing all the events in the child’s life. Sometimes the book will begin with a family tree, which is put together from information provided by the child, their grandparents and other family members, and from any relevant records that can be provided by Social Services. Then maybe the trained social worker will visit the hospital where the child was born, where he or she might take photographs and see if they can discover any information about their birth weight, time of birth and so on.
It’s the sort of information children who are brought up by their own parents take for granted, because they can ask about it directly if they want to know. Children who have been adopted or taken into care may have lost all contact with their families and so may not have anyone to provide them with answers to those questions.
Every aspect of a life story book, all the questions and discoveries, have to be handled very sensitively, so that children feel they are in control of the content, and so that they can choose not to pursue a particular line of inquiry that might involve having to rake up and relive unhappy or potentially disturbing memories.
I helped the social worker who was compiling Maria’s life story book by going through a pile of photographs that Babs had given her. The idea was that we’d choose a few to go in the book, but it proved less straightforward than I hoped.
I spotted several depicting what appeared to be happy scenes in the back garden of one of the houses Maria lived in when she was much younger. Her mum was there, and Colin and Babs. Inevitably, Gerry was in a few too, though he was typically doing something in the background rather than being at the centre of a family scene.
Maria pushed several photographs away from her, across the table, saying very emphatically each time, ‘No. Not that one.’
There didn’t seem to be a pattern. I might have expected her to reject all of the ones with Gerry in, even the ones with him blurred on the sidelines, but this wasn’t the case. In fact, she even rejected one that just showed a rabbit hutch in the garden, and another of the kitchen, with her mum unpacking some shopping.
I didn’t challenge Maria. Unfortunately, however careful you are, you sometimes find that a whole can of worms has been opened before anyone realises what’s happening, and a child may discover or remember something that causes them very significant distress. For this reason, I trod very carefully, and as Maria carried on looking through the photographs I simply stayed quietly by her side, to show support without interfering.
My mind wandered back to another child I worked with years earlier. The boy was fourteen, and he worked for several weeks on his life story book, both with us and with his social worker. Although he did occasionally get a bit upset when he remembered some of the things that happened during his early childhood, he really enjoyed drawing his family tree and seemed to be dealing with the whole process quite well.
Then, one day, his social worker came to our house with the finished book, which by now contained everything that was known or had been discovered about his life until the present day. To our surprise, when the social worker handed it over the boy suddenly froze. He already knew about every single thing that was in that book: he’d helped to put it all together himself. But there was something about being handed ‘the story of my life to date’ that hit a nerve and evoked his frozen response. ‘Take it away,’ he eventually stuttered, and he didn’t regain his composure until the social worker had gone outside and locked it in the boot of her car, promising to keep it at her office for as long as the boy wanted her to.
The following year, the social worker was moving to another part of the country. The boy was still staying with us and she suggested to Jonathan and me, ‘It might be a good idea if I give you the book. Put it somewhere out of sight, and leave it there until he asks for it.’ So, we wrapped it up carefully, put it in the attic and didn’t mention it again.
And that’s where it stayed for many years, until he grew up and had children of his own. When he came to visit us one day, he happened to say, ‘I wish I’d kept the life story book I did when I was living with you. I’d like to know all that stuff now, so that I can tell my kids about their family and about all the things I did when I was their age.’
It was lovely to see the expression on Jonathan’s face as he said, ‘Hold on a minute. I’ll be right back. I think we can help you with that.’ And it was lovely, too, to see the puzzled look on the young man’s face quickly turn to delight when Jonathan handed him his carefully wrapped book. We never did find out what had disturbed him all those years before, but it just goes to show that it is worth persevering with something like this, as you never know when the time might be right for a child, or adult, to return to their memories.
Watching Maria sift through her photographs, I couldn’t help worrying about the next part of her life story. What would happen to her after the final court judgement was made on her future, and would she be able to confront her past one day, or at least be able to revisit it without feeling traumatised all over again?
Within a few weeks of returning to our local school, Maria was made Student of the Month. Foolishly, in an attempt to encourage her to keep up the good work, I’d said I’d give her £1 as a reward for every test she did well in, which was a promise I was soon beginning to regret!
Jonathan and I had always thought that Maria was a very bright little girl, largely because she was so good at reading. She had a phenomenal memory too, which she had put to good use when she reeled off all those details during the lengthy phone calls she used to make to her mother. It was particularly gratifying to see her work improve so dramatically, and to know that she was both willing and able to make the effort required to reach what we felt was her high academic potential. Now, all we could do was continue to encourage and help her in any way we could, and hope that nothing happened to prevent her from sticking to the new path she had set out on.
We were gradually beginning to learn more about Maria’s old life. The journey to and from the local school was a fairly short, safe walk from our house, but I always walked with Maria, just as I had done during her very first stay with us when she was seven. Now she insisted every day that she didn’t need me ‘tagging along’, but I was not changing my mind. Then, one day, as we were walking along the path through the park, she suddenly took to her heels and ran off.
I went after her as fast as I could, but didn’t catch up with her until she was almost at the school gate, when she told me angrily, ‘You don’t have to come with me. I’m not a baby. I can walk to school on my own. I did it every day from our old house when we lived here before, and that’s a much longer walk than it is from yours!’
‘You walked on your own to school before you moved away to the other school?’ It was a cross between a question and a repeat of what she’d just told me. I was shocked about this as Maria would have been very young and I knew the route she would have had to take was across a very busy main road that was notorious for accidents. Parents had been campaigning for years to have a crossing installed, but to no avail.
‘Duh, yeah,’ Maria answered. ‘Mum and Gerry didn’t mind! Gerry said he could see if I was going straight there . . .’ She stopped herself and looked puzzled. It was as if a light bulb had gone on and she realised for the first time that Gerry couldn’t actually see her when he wasn’t there.
‘Well, now you’ve got me for company,’ I said cheerfully, keen to move on and deliver her to school in a decent mood. ‘I can’t let you go on your own, Maria. I’m not allowed to, even if I wanted to. Not till you’re a bit older. Let’s make the best of it, shall we?’
Instead of answering, she just shrugged, then swung her backpack off her shoulders and walked in throug
h the school gates, leaving me wondering how on earth Christine and Gerry could have allowed Maria to make her own way to school when she was so very young.
Sometimes, she would say something out of the blue, apparently unconnected to anything that was happening at the time, but presumably because a memory had somehow been triggered, possibly subconsciously. For example, one day when she was helping me lay the table for Sunday lunch, she suddenly said, ‘Mum made me put my finger in a match flame.’
I kept my tone of voice as neutral as possible as I said, ‘You put your finger in the flame of a match.’
‘Yes,’ Maria answered, her tone as neutral as mine. ‘It was so that I would burn myself.’
‘So that you would burn yourself?’ I repeated it as a question.
‘Yes.’
‘I wonder why your mum would want you to do that,’ I said, carefully non-committal, without any trace of criticism in my voice.
‘I don’t know.’ Maria spread her fingers, palms upturned, and looked down at her hands, then raised her left hand to her mouth and starting nibbling one of her fingernails.
‘I haven’t ever put my finger in the flame of a match,’ I said. ‘But I imagine it would be very painful to do something like that. I don’t think I’d do it again if I was you.’
I wrote it all down afterwards in the notes I keep for our six-weekly review, and when I told Jonathan about it later that evening, he was as upset as I had been.
Another day Maria told me that she had invented a story in her head, after reading for ages in her room.
‘Are you ready, Angela? Then let me begin!’
Maria cleared her throat and said: ‘Once upon a time in a dark, dark house, there was a dark, dark kitchen. And in the dark, dark kitchen there was a stool made of dark, dark wood. And when the little girl was naughty she would stand on the dark, dark stool until the nasty man came to get her. One day, the little girl decided to creep down off the stool and steal a biscuit from the cupboard, because she was hungry! When the nasty man came back he hit her with a big stick. I think it was a snooker cue, as he had been out playing snooker with his friends, but it was dark so I couldn’t see.