Angels in Our Hearts

by Rosie Lewis

  I smiled. ‘You’ll find a place for her, if you look hard enough.’

  Another week passed with no word from Graham or anyone else at social services. Increasingly desperate for a positive decision, Ellen rang them every day, even sitting outside Graham’s office for hours at a time, trying to prove to him that she was determined to take care of her daughter. She kept telling me that no news had to be good news but, personally, I wasn’t as confident. The decisions of social workers, like the verdicts of juries, were sometimes unfathomable and impossible to predict.

  Hope was a joy to care for. At ten weeks, she was already making a series of different sounds in response to Ellen’s chatter, and her babble held us all enchanted, Emily and Jamie in particular. Irresistibly drawn to her, they tended to pick Hope up for a hug whenever the mood took them. Since Ellen only got two hours a day with her daughter, I had worried that she might resent their interest, but she seemed to delight in it, calling them over whenever Hope did something she thought they might like. A strange rattling gurgle in Hope’s throat proved exceedingly popular, and when Emily and Jamie laughed at her, she would smile back with glee.

  It wasn’t until the second week in May that Ellen finally heard that a decision had been reached by the looked-after children’s team. Ellen had received a text from Graham at around 9 a.m. telling her that he would call her later that day to explain what would happen next. Ellen arrived early for contact that day, her face clouded with anxiety as she told me about Graham’s message. ‘I know what he’s going to say,’ she stated with near certainty. ‘I don’t think I’ll even bother answering his call. Nothing ever goes right for me.’ But her eyes were filled with hope.

  For the next few hours, while I couldn’t stop chatting, Ellen was mostly silent. Sitting on the floor with Hope propped up against her stomach, she ran her fingers over and over her hair, pulling it up into a tight bun and letting it unravel before bundling it up again. When Ellen’s mobile rang just after 4 p.m., her face drained of colour. My legs went weak. She threw me a desperate look and stood, holding onto my hand tightly as she lifted the phone to her ear.

  Two days later, when Hope was twelve weeks old, Ellen came to take her baby home. Their temporary separation was about to dissolve, and for me the moment was special, electric almost, but bittersweet as well; Hope held a special place in my heart, and over the weeks I had grown fond of Ellen as well, enjoying the unlikely companionship of our afternoons.

  The sky was a clear blue, and warm air drifted into the hall as I opened the door with Hope balanced on my hip, her small suitcase, packed the evening before, standing on its side nearby. Ellen beamed when she saw us, reaching out and taking Hope, who kicked excitedly at the sight of her mum. Her hair was up, she had small silver studs in her ears and her eyes were alive with anticipation. I offered her a cup of tea but there were so many butterflies swirling in my stomach that I half hoped she would refuse. ‘I’ll get going, I think, Rosie,’ she said, car keys jangling in her hand. ‘I’m excited to show Hope her new room.’

  I smiled. For most people, taking their own baby home was such an ordinary event – a happy one, but something that was taken for granted. It was easy to forget that, for some, life wasn’t always as kind. ‘Oh, yes, you must be. There’s a bottle made up for her and the rest are sterilised. I’ve put a few cartons of ready-made SMA in there as well,’ I said, handing Hope’s nappy bag to her. ‘Just so you get a chance to settle before having to think about chores.’ Ellen caught the look on my face and, feeling exposed, I switched to my briskly efficient mode, patting Hope’s back and planting a brief kiss on her forehead. ‘Right, I’ll help you to the car with her things.’

  Ellen didn’t move. ‘Rosie?’ she said, and there was something about her tone that stirred a fresh wave of emotion in me. A lump rose in my throat and I coughed. ‘She’d probably be in someone else’s arms now if it weren’t for you,’ she said, her voice quivering. Reaching out, she squeezed my hand. ‘I’ll never forget what you’ve done for us.’

  More than a little choked, I pressed my lips together in a shaky smile. ‘I’m so happy to help,’ I managed to say before pulling them both into a hug. Foster carers are sometimes able to bridge the chasm that separates social workers from birth parents, and I’ve known many who have kept a relationship of sorts with a child’s family, some maintaining friendships years after a placement has ended. As Ellen started the engine and headed towards her new life, I hoped that if she or Hope ever needed help in the future, she wouldn’t hesitate to return. For my part, I would always be there for both of them.

  Epilogue

  I heard from Ellen often in the months following Hope’s departure, mainly by way of panicked phone calls late in the evening. ‘Her poop’s gone bright yellow!’ she’d shrieked without preamble the day after she took Hope home. ‘That can’t be right, surely!’

  Later that week she discovered a lump at the back of Hope’s neck which, after careful consultation on Google, she diagnosed as a tumour – it turned out to be one of her vertebrae. The next day she rang in a flap because she couldn’t hear Hope breathing. ‘Her chest’s moving up and down, but not as much as usual.’

  ‘Noisy breathing,’ I said, trying to keep the amusement out of my tone, ‘not so noisy breathing; it’s all good.’

  ‘I’m not one of those highly strung mothers who fly into a panic about everything, Rosie,’ she’d said defensively.

  I stayed silent. She started to see the funny side. ‘Oh, what kind of madness is this?’ she’d groaned, laughing in spite of herself.

  Two weeks later, though, Ellen rang with some amazing news – Mark, Hope’s biological father, had returned home. My guess was that her love for Hope had perhaps helped her to see that she was more than a product of her past, allowing her to move on and accept that she deserved to be happy.

  I’m still fortunate enough to see the couple regularly, and it’s a thrill to see Hope, now a happy and bright girl of nine, thriving in the warmth of Mark and Ellen’s unconditional love.

  Introduction by Rosie Lewis

  I can remember the first time I read one of Casey Watson’s fostering memoirs. It was at the end of one of those days early on in a placement, when the newly arrived children were bewildered and angry and particularly inventive when it came to finding ways to challenge me, and I was beginning to question my own ability to help them.

  Reading Casey’s book was like being invited into her home. Shining out from the pages, over and above her strength, kindness and determination to help the children in her care, was a gentle humour and sense of fun that seemed to carry her through the most difficult fostering days. What I found particularly inspiring was her candidness and her ability to admit that were times when she felt vulnerable, when she questioned herself and when she wasn’t always sure of the way ahead. It was then that, like me, she was able to draw on the love and support of her family; her husband, Mike and her birth children.

  It is testament to Casey’s skill as a writer that I feel as if I know the Watson family as well as I know my next-door neighbours, and so I am thrilled to be able to introduce these brief insights into their lives.

  Dedication

  I’d like to dedicate this book to all my fellow foster carers, wherever you may be. I’ve never known a time when the service has been quite as stretched as it is today, not just in terms of the numbers of children needing care, but in the complexity and breadth of their problems. And I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling overwhelmed sometimes. Yet on we all go, because we know we can each make a difference. To quote the Dalai Lama, ‘If you think you’re too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.’ Hats off (if not mosquito nets) to you all.

  Casey

  Just a Boy

  Kindness is a language which the deaf

  can hear and the blind can see.

  Mark Twain

  Dropping my shopping in the hall, car keys hanging from my mouth, I ran through the house to g
et to the phone before it cut off.

  ‘Hello,’ I spluttered, trying to catch my breath.

  ‘Casey, hi there,’ said a familiar voice. It was John Fulshaw, my fostering-agency link worker. ‘You sound puffed,’ he observed. ‘Are you okay to talk?’

  ‘To you?’ I replied, laughing. ‘Anytime. Do you bring me good tidings?’ I felt a ripple of excitement about why he might be phoning. Mike and I were between placements at the moment, a state of affairs I became bored with very easily. Perhaps John had a new child for us. Now that would really make my Wednesday. ‘Well?’ I finished.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do.’

  I was just about to ask him for chapter and verse when he continued. ‘But only of a temporary nature. It’s a fourteen-year-old boy who lives with his elderly grandparents and needs a place to stay just for a couple of days.’

  He went on to explain that this boy, who was called Cameron, wouldn’t be one of our usual kind of children, who mainly came from terrible backgrounds or were already in the care system. This was different. It was a lad who lived in perfectly agreeable family circumstances and who needed a place to go only because his grandmother had been taken ill and hospitalised. Apparently, Granddad, who was disabled, wouldn’t be able to manage on his own, which was why a place needed to be found right away. He also needed to be able to spend time with his sick wife, John finished, and obviously couldn’t be in two places at once.

  ‘And our lad’s a bit too much of a handful to be home alone then, is he?’ I chortled. I knew what fourteen-year-old boys could be like.

  ‘Not at all,’ John corrected me. ‘Quite the opposite – he’ll be no trouble at all. There’s just one thing you need to know, really. He’s blind.’

  For the first time in my life, I think, I was completely lost for words. I tried to recall if I’d ever even met anyone who was blind before, and couldn’t, and then, of course, my brain starting whirring. What would it be like, having a blind child living with us? Would it be difficult? Would we need to move the furniture?

  ‘Casey?’ John prompted, obviously mistaking my logistical musings for reluctance. ‘Don’t feel obliged to say yes to this. We can ask someone else, I just thought you might be interested. I know you’re itching to get another child in and I thought this might make an interesting stop-gap for you both. He’s a lovely lad – really funny and doesn’t let his disability faze him. Do you want some time to talk it over with Mike?’

  ‘God, no,’ I reassured him. ‘Mike will be absolutely fine with it. I don’t need to ask him because I know he’ll say yes.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure …’ John said. ‘It would only be from tomorrow to Saturday morning. There’s a family member travelling up to take over then, I believe, and –’

  ‘Sure I’m sure,’ I told him. So that was that.

  As I expected, Mike wasn’t fazed in the least. By the time he’d got home from work that afternoon, I’d already been busy on the internet, fact-finding. And it had been really useful. Taking inspiration from the website of a school for the blind, with their sensory rooms, musical instruments, interactive and soft play areas, I already had lots of ideas.

  Mike seemed to find all this amusing. ‘Soft play areas?’ he asked. ‘You said the lad was fourteen, didn’t you? Not four! And if he’s been blind from birth [something else I’d managed to clarify] I expect he’s capable of a lot more than you think. Still,’ he mused, looking around him, ‘it does make you think, doesn’t it? He’s obviously familiar with his own surroundings but I reckon it will still be pretty challenging to navigate himself around here.’ He closed his eyelids. ‘And it’ll certainly be an eye-opener for us, eh?’

  Mike’s lame jokes aside, I felt quite excited about the following morning, and also a bit more prepared, having spent half the evening doing more research and finding out that, contrary to what I’d always thought, many blind people could see at least some things; could often distinguish daylight from night-time, and see blurry outlines of objects and people. So my idea of perpetual darkness wasn’t correct at all. And I was about to learn more. I couldn’t wait.

  It seemed as if the weather was on my wavelength as well. Thursday morning dawned to match my mood – sunny and expectant. It seemed the British climate had, for a change, decided to be kind. It was mid August and for almost the first time that month, it seemed to be in accord with everyone’s seasonal expectations.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ said my grown-up son Kieron as he came down to the kitchen. ‘Do I smell bleach? Honestly, Mother, at this time?’ He did. I was on my hands and knees, giving the floor a last once over. We had a dog – Bob – and I was conscious that with a visitor coming to stay, mucky paw marks were a no-no, even if the visitor couldn’t see them.

  Kieron stepped over me to get to the cereal cupboard. He had a busy day planned, going off with a mate of his to pick an amp up from some far-flung location; Kieron was in college, but had being earning a few quid over the summer DJing and was doing a disco at the local youth club on Friday night.

  ‘You do,’ I said, ‘and talking of smells, can you do me a favour? Can you nip out to the garden before you go and pick what you can find for me, flowers-wise?’

  It would be nice, I thought, bearing in mind what I’d read about sensory-impaired people relying more on their other senses, to have the place smelling nice for Cameron’s arrival.

  Kieron duly did, and, in fact, still hadn’t left when the car containing Cameron pulled up outside. Though not with John – there was no need for John to be involved in this handover. There’d be no reams of paperwork, no ominous-looking manila files to be gone through; just a quick chat with Cameron’s social worker, Jeremy.

  I went to the front door and opened it ready, taking stock as the two of them approached. It felt a little weird watching someone so intently when they couldn’t see you, but my eyes were drawn to him as if by a magnet. He was a tall lad – he looked more like sixteen or seventeen than fourteen – and good-looking, too, with a shock of conker-coloured hair. I noticed straight away that he walked without the aid of his social worker and instead had a white cane that snapped into life when he shook it, and sort of hovered, just above ground level, swinging left and right in front of him, as he deftly made his way to our door.

  I didn’t know what he could see of me, but Cameron had a huge smile on his face, and appeared to be looking just above my head. This was no surprise really, given the difference in our height. I’m four foot eleven, and this kid had to be six feet tall. I was just about to say hello when I almost jumped out of my skin. Out of nowhere, this robotic-sounding voice had suddenly spoken. ‘Good morning,’ it said. ‘It is 10.00 a.m.’

  Cameron laughed and turned his head. ‘That’s a fiver you owe me, Jezza,’ he said to his social worker. ‘Told you we wouldn’t be late, didn’t I?’

  Jeremy seemed amused by my startled expression, ‘Talking watch,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘We had a bit of a bet on the way over, because I was getting in a bit of a fluster about being late, and Cameron – he’s a bit of a whizz with numbers, aren’t you, Cameron? – had a wager with me. And it looks like he won.’ He grinned at his charge. ‘But it was for a cream cake, not a fiver. Bit of a chancer, this one,’ he chuckled.

  I shook Jeremy’s hand. ‘Come on in,’ I said.

  ‘And mind the step!’ Kieron added. He and Bob were now just behind me, having obviously come to say hello.

  ‘Oh, that’s okay,’ Cameron shot back, deftly crossing the threshold unaided. ‘My stick has built-in radar so I knew about that step a few inches before I touched it.’

  Kieron and I looked at each other and I was just about to say something dumb when Cameron added, ‘That was a joke, by the way.’

  It set the tone perfectly, and it was with jovial spirits that we had our mini-meeting. It seemed Cameron did have some basic vision – dark and light, some fuzzy shapes and muted colours – and, between them, he and Jeremy explained the practical things about safety,
as well as what Cameron liked to eat and ‘watch’ on TV. This surprised me. It never occurred to me that a blind person might enjoy television, but apparently he did, very much so. In fact, it turned out he was a whizz with a TV remote, and showed me something I’d never realised; that there was a reason for the little knobble on the number five button – it was the point visually impaired people could navigate from. There was even such a thing as ‘audio description’, which I’d also never heard of – some programmes had a narrator describing the scenes as they occurred to make it easier to picture as you listened to the programme. Amazing! I thought.

  Twenty minutes later, Jeremy had to set off, having scribbled down his mobile number for emergencies, handed me a slim file of information, and assured me he would be back on Saturday afternoon to pick Cameron up. We said our goodbyes and then I went back into the dining room where we had left Cameron, to find him engaged in conversation with Kieron.

  ‘Ah, Mum,’ Kieron said. ‘There are rules to having Cameron here, so listen up.’

  I blinked at him. My son is lovely, but his Asperger’s can make him rather inclined to rules and regulations, and I had visions of him interrogating the poor boy relentlessly.

  ‘Don’t you have to be somewhere?’ I asked him.

  But Kieron shook his head. ‘Not till lunchtime now,’ he said, waving his mobile phone at me. ‘Joe’s gotta do some stuff first. Plus I have to walk Bob for you …’

  ‘For me?’ I asked drily. Bob was very much Kieron’s dog, he being the one who’d just turned up with him, fresh from the dogs’ home, after all. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘we’ve just been chatting and Cam’s been telling me some of the stuff you need to know. And first up is that if you leave a room, you always have to say so. Just so he knows, and doesn’t jump out of his skin when you come back.’