The judge had already been passed the jury’s question by the usher before we got into court. In the jury’s absence, he unfolded it carefully, read it aloud, then passed it down for us to see.
Please can the judge repeat the direction about husbands and wives?
Leo and I glanced at one another. Sometimes a jury’s question can lead to hours of agonizing. It can show that they are clearly on the right track, or the wrong one. It can show they have grasped, or wildly misunderstood, the law. But this question felt like a punch. Did it mean that they wanted to acquit Rita, but were not sure if they could? Did it mean that they wanted to acquit Lee, but were unsure whether that really meant they then had to find Rita and Nick not guilty too? Or did it just mean that they also could not quite believe that this extraordinary doctrine was still part of modern law?
As the jurors came back into court to hear their answer, the judge repeated the law in exactly the same words he had already used. Being a man of brevity, the direction was short and to the point. He was careful to use the same phrase: neither more nor less, as he was required to do.
An hour later the jury had made their decision.
The atmosphere in a courtroom when a verdict is read out is unlike any other. It creates a tension so heightened that, even if you are an interloper waiting for your hearing to be called on afterwards and with no idea of the evidence or the charge, you feel giddy, like a tightrope walker, knowing you are about to fall off on one side or the other.
The jury filed into court and I tried as hard as I could to resist the temptation to look at them. I realized I was holding my breath. As the final juror took her place I could last no longer and looked up. Most of the jury were staring straight ahead at the judge or down into their laps. I ran through the things I had said earlier to Rita, encouraging her to prepare herself. But, despite my words, I had been sure they would acquit her. I thought they must have seen that she had little choice but to accept her husband’s way of life and had understood the domestic trap she was in.
‘Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.’
The word rang out, over and over again, to every count, for each defendant. The air in the court seemed heavy and I could not bring myself to turn round and look at the dock for fear of the expression on Rita’s face.
We returned to Salisbury Crown Court for the sentencing hearing a few weeks later. It was just before Christmas. In the pre-sentence reports prepared on their behalf, Nick and Lee admitted carrying out all of the burglaries. Both men also tried to exonerate Rita in the same document, finally maintaining that she was not part of it, that she knew nothing of their plan and had had no say in it. It was, of course, far too late for that.
It was a sentencing day and the courtroom was full of broken-hearted friends and families in other cases, filling the seats of the public gallery. After the hearing was over, I walked down the corridor to the cells to see Rita. A woman came up to me and it was only then that I recognized her from the front of the public gallery in court. She introduced herself as Rita’s mother. Her face bore little resemblance to her daughter’s, but then time had been cruel to it. She was almost ageless, the blows and knocks of life etched out in deep lines and shadows.
‘It’s a long time, four years. She’s never been inside before. She’ll find it hard,’ she said to me, without emotion. ‘Tell her we were watching and will tell the kids. And tell her to get a Visiting Order as soon as she gets there so we can come and see her for Christmas. If she asks about the social coming round, tell her not to worry about it. I will sort it.’ She was completely calm.
‘Of course,’ I replied. And then, ‘I’m so sorry. The jury must have disbelieved her. They clearly didn’t believe the other two. They must have thought that she was part of it as well. Unless …’ I trailed off. Unless the law had confused them, I thought. Unless they had misunderstood it and – having been told that the law considered Nick and Rita as inseparable, of one mind – had thought they could not convict him without also convicting her.7 I would never really know.
‘That Nick, he was always like that, you know.’ She looked at me as if she were weighing up my worldliness. ‘I know it’s hard. My old man was always up to it, like hers. Was in and out of prison when she was a child. She saw it all. And I do know. I know what it is to feel the back of their hand. But you know what, my old man would never have done this. If you were stupid enough to get caught, he used to say, then you faced it. And he would never, never have taken me down with him.’ Her face shifted and I wondered whether, when she got home, she would let herself cry. Tears for her daughter, and for herself, and for the same desperate cycle beginning all over again.
As I walked away from court later that afternoon, I thought of her words and began to wonder whether I had been wrong and the law had been right. For years I believed that marriage did not mean a thing: a stamped piece of paper, as easily torn up as made; an outmoded ritual that has no place in modernity. But then I began to listen to and think about the vows of marriage. The words were the biggest promises a person could make, and I began to notice among the friends I heard say them the subtlest of shifts in how the world viewed them afterwards; of their place in it together, as one unit. Maybe this antiquated rule just reflected a truth – that marriage did bind you together in a way nothing else could. Maybe, in marrying a liar and a thief and staying with him knowing what he was, Rita had become one too. For better, or for worse.
A week after the trial my grandfather died. My great oak of a grandfather, with his war-moustache and six-foot-four frame, who had spent a lifetime harvesting fields and feeding cattle and watching the seasons flow past him. He spent the day before he died chopping wood, enough to last all winter, as though he knew death was coming for him. He woke up, dressed himself in the tweed suit he always wore, and let his dog out of the bungalow where he and my grandmother lived. Then some premonition drove him back to his bed and he lay down, arms folded across his chest, and died. His dog jumped into his arms and that was how he was when my grandmother found him soon afterwards. Still warm, but with life gone.
Over the winter after the trial I went back to my grandparents’ farm – back to my childhood place of woodland hideouts and secret bush caves. I stayed the night with my grandmother, drinking sherry, looking at photographs and trying to keep the loneliness from her door. While my grandfather had spent long days in the fields, she had been at home: cooking, cleaning, caring for four children. As dementia followed its cruel course, she found herself in the past: not in the years of family life, but almost always reliving the war when she had served as a Wren. Defying her pastor father, she had signed up at eighteen, and her stories were always of friendships and adventures. Then, soon after her freedom had begun, she met my grandfather and one form of service was replaced with another.
The morning after I stayed the night, I went into his room. It was completely ordered – just as he had always been. I looked towards the window and noticed a shotgun leaning up against it. For some reason, that day it was not locked in the cabinet where he had always secured it. It had been his habit to wake in the early morning and spend a happy hour shooting rabbits in the garden from his bedroom window – my grandmother claimed this as the reason for their separate rooms. I walked towards the gun, reached out and touched its barrel, my fingers tracing the lines of the metal. In that moment I thought of Rita, and of my grandmother, and of all the generations of other women who had remained silently loyal to their husbands and, in doing so, had sacrificed themselves. And I thought how the law had helped them do it.
6
Maggie
Medway County Court
Children Act 1989
Section 31 – Care and Supervision
(1) On the application of any local authority or authorised person, the court may make an order—
(a) placing the child with respect to whom the application is made in the care of a designated local authority; or
(b) putting him under the supervision of a
designated local authority
(2) A court may only make a care order or supervision order if it is satisfied—
(a) that the child concerned is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm; and
(b) that the harm, or likelihood of harm, is attributable to—
(i) the care given to the child, or likely to be given to him if the order were not made, not being what it would be reasonable to expect a parent to give to him; or
(ii) the child’s being beyond parental control.
THE PAPERS FOR Maggie’s case arrived a few days before the hearing. They were already voluminous. I scanned through the brief and the chronology, trying to get a picture of the case. Maggie was a young mother, so poorly parented herself that the local authority did not consider she was able to look after either the daughter they had already removed three years beforehand or her new baby son. I found her date of birth. She was twenty-two.
I wondered when this set of facts had become so typical to me. It had not always been the case. I can still remember the first young mother I represented whose baby was removed by the state. It was in Basingstoke Magistrates’ Court, years before Maggie’s case, long before I really understood how the system of family public law worked. It was also long before I understood the power of a social worker over the outcome of a case. In the years to come, experience taught me that effective social workers worked well enough with parents to steer the case away from a contested court hearing so that I did not become involved and rarely met them. But I had not yet learned this and arrived on that first case to find my young client in the waiting room, sitting next to her social worker. ‘Cabbage leaves,’ the social worker was saying to her kindly, maternally. ‘That’s what you need. Not just any cabbage, though. It has to be Savoy. Just pop a leaf or two in your bra. Helps with the aching. It’s worked for all my other mums.’
All her other mums.
Those women she saw, week in and out, who discovered they need only think of their newborn’s scent or mewling cry to trigger some ancient part of themselves they hadn’t known existed, as the milk drew through their newly hard breasts as sharp as the slice of a knife. Those women who, even if they did not want it, or still could not comprehend it, found themselves mothers. When she saw me, the social worker gave me a half-smile, then got up and walked over to join a group of women on the opposite side of the waiting room. They were, I was later to realize, the team that always outflanks my clients in number and resources, made up of the local authority’s barrister, solicitor and social worker, the guardian – the independent social worker there to represent the interests of the child – and the guardian’s barrister.1 As I led my young client to a conference room, I listened as this group laughed with easy familiarity about some weekend mishap and noticed that they all held takeaway cups from the same café.
I knew that my client had already agreed not to return to hospital and her week-old daughter. Instead she would go back, alone, to her room in the house she shared with strangers. An order, the contents of which had already been agreed by all the parties, was due to be signed off that morning by the magistrates. Then the social worker could go to the hospital, take my client’s baby from the transparent cot in which she slept, and give her to a foster mother.
My client and I sat in the conference room, facing one another. It was only then that I understood the reason for the social worker’s advice. On this new mother’s sweatshirt two wide dark circles of leaking milk had formed. I watched her embarrassment at her inability to control this instinct to nurture, and I felt ill-equipped, unprepared. Not on the law – I knew the law. I knew what to say inside court, just not outside it. This girl, whose body now promised her that she was a mother, was being told by us all – the social worker, the solicitor, me – that what she was doing was brave and right. That what she was doing was for the best. For the baby. For her. For everyone.
I may not have known what to say to someone about to lose their child, but I knew what I felt coming from her in pulsing waves. Doubt. Fear. Powerlessness. ‘This must, you know, be your decision,’ I said, hesitantly. Her eyes remained fixed on the floor. ‘Section Twenty is about your consent, your informed consent.2 They cannot just take the baby without it. They need an order from the court to do that.’
I felt her shift and then, in a low monologue, she began to speak. She told me of the classes she had found, the projects she had been told about. The anger-management course. The drug and alcohol groups she was going to join. She paused. ‘I would do it all. I would do anything to keep her.’
I walked over to the other parties and could tell that one of them was telling an anecdote. The others were leaning in, waiting for the punchline, readying themselves to laugh. It made me hesitate. When you are the youngest professional in the room and your suit is cheap and the soles of your shoes are made of plastic, and everyone else appears to have been doing this job for as long as you have lived, it is hard to interrupt. The joke came. I stepped forward into their laughter and told them my client had changed her mind. They looked at me blankly, falling silent. I repeated the statement. She had withdrawn her consent. She understood the local authority’s concerns, but she did not want to give her baby up. She wanted to fight for her, even though she knew she might lose. Their expressions changed. It was clear what they were thinking. What are you doing? Why are you creating problems? Agreement is the best way – the least painful. We know that, and you should too.
The other parties and the furious legal advisor made calls to cancel hearings and meetings and stared irritably out of the window at the spring sun. In an instant, the ten minutes in court that we had anticipated became three hours of evidence, cross-examination and judgment. I paid the price in court through their unremitting criticism of this new mother and their determination to prove how strong the evidence against her was. Proof, as if it were needed, that they thought this contested hearing a futile and avoidable charade.
After the evidence and speeches were over, the magistrates filed back into court to give their decision. The lead magistrate – a man in his sixties – read out the judgment in a flat tone. The court, he said, adopted the reasons given by the social worker in her application and oral evidence. The legal threshold for the bringing of the proceedings had been met: the local authority had proved that this baby was at serious risk of significant harm. It was in the child’s best interest that an Interim Care Order be made placing the baby in the local authority’s care while they prepared their case.3 He approved the social worker’s recommendation that contact between the mother and the child should be ninety minutes, three times a week. In a statement that seemed to me extraordinary at the time, he agreed that this supervised contact was at a sensible and sufficient level to enable assessment and bonding between mother and child at this stage in the child’s life.
He looked up and past me, fixing on my client. It was the first time he had really looked at her. When he spoke, his tone had softened. He wanted to remind the mother, he said, that this was not a done deal. There would be a parenting assessment and if she engaged then the local authority would look to see whether they could place the baby back with her. This was not the end of the line. I noticed his vocabulary. I would grow used to it. The baby, not her baby. The mother. The father. Ownership had been claimed, individuality removed. Was it easier to make a decision that way, I wondered? I looked up at him and he gave me a small beneficent smile. Only later would I understand how hollow his words were and learn that, nine times out of ten, once a baby is removed it will never go back.4 Nor did I know then that, by losing her first child, this new mother had quadrupled the prospect of the same happening to her next baby.5 I could imagine how, when my client went home to sit alone and stare at unworn baby clothes and wait for her body to realize no baby needed it, she would yearn to fill its void. I did not know then how regularly I would find myself in court discussing a mother’s baggy clothes and denials of another pregnancy, or how often I would watch a client
’s plea to be allowed to parent the child already born over the swelling bulk of her next baby. But, although wretched, I never found it surprising. To be declared an unfit mother pulls at some primal part of womanhood. It is, still, one of the worst things to be accused of. I understand this overwhelming desire to try again – to prove the existence of maternal instinct and to fill a vacuum of self-love with someone who is predesigned to love you back.
After speaking to my client, the magistrate turned to my opponent and asked her to email the court a list of their facts and reasons to attach to the order, as usual.6 I glanced over, unsure how this could be allowed – surely it must be the magistrates’ words, not the local authority’s, which supported their decision – but the lead magistrate ignored my frown. When the document was sent through, the reasons listed seemed to me, at the time, overwhelming in their gravity. I knew that judges of the highest courts said that the removal of a child against the wishes of the parent was one of the greatest interventions the state can make. I understood it must be done only as a last resort, when all else has failed, after everything possible has been attempted to maintain the relationship and rebuild the family.7 And yet, reading that order, I admitted my relief that this tiny innocent would not suffer the experiment of whether her mother could parent or not. But in the years that followed I would tire of the regularity with which I heard the same phrases. Mother’s own background of poor parenting and spells in care. A chaotic lifestyle. Low IQ. A history of domestic abuse. Drug and alcohol misuse. Self-harm. Not engaging openly and honestly with professionals. Lacking insight into difficulties. Minimizing matters of importance. Reasons by rote, in a tick-list of censure.
Over time, I, like others in the family courts, felt the swelling panic among social workers that they too might find themselves on the front page of a newspaper next to the heart-stopping picture of a dead boy whose blue eyes matched his jumper.8 The odds are high. Two children a month are killed by those who are supposed to care for them.9 No one can claim that this numbing statistic is completely preventable, but the news cycle dictates that blame must be apportioned and that social workers should bear it. In the year in which my first care client’s baby girl was born, some 800 were also removed from their parents. Five years later the number had more than doubled to over 2,000, more than in any other country in western Europe.10
In Your Defence Page 12
