by Angela Hart
‘Yes, but I can stay on Wednesday after judo, can’t I?’
We both reassured her we’d do our very best to get her to her judo exam, but explained that afterwards she would be spending the night at the children’s home.
‘OK,’ she said sweetly. ‘Bye-bye. Thanks for a lovely time! Love you!’
‘Love you too,’ we found ourselves calling back, again in unison.
We had come to love Danielle, and that was why all of this was so painful. We’d had some lovely, special moments while she’d been with us, and Jonathan and I had bonded with her more deeply than I think either of us realised until now. Seeing her little triumphs and witnessing, for example, the wonderful times she spent with my mum, were priceless.
When Jonathan and I got back in the car and drove off without Danielle we looked at each other and shook our heads. Despite her lucid moments, we had to admit her mental health seemed more unstable than ever. Dealing with this was so much tougher than we could ever have imagined. We wondered how we were going to manage Danielle’s confused expectations and what would become of her. We had no idea what the future held, but we knew we’d never forget Danielle, come what may.
Social Services readily gave us permission to take Danielle to the judo exam, but unfortunately it turned into a complete fiasco. As we pulled up in the car park of the school hall after collecting her from the children’s home, Danielle did a runner, darting back out through the gate and across the road without looking. A man on a bicycle narrowly missed her and Jonathan had to call out an apology as he sprinted after Danielle. He caught up with her less than a hundred metres away: Jonathan was a fast runner, even in his fifties, and Danielle was already out of breath and stopped in her tracks when he reached her.
‘Danielle, what on earth are you doing? You could have got hurt.’
She was puffing and panting and very red in the face.
‘I thought I was going home. What are you doing, bringing me here? I wouldn’t have got in your car if I’d known what you were going to do. I’ve warned you. I’ve warned Angela. I deserve better than this. What the hell is going on?’
Jonathan managed to keep her talking as he steered her back to the school car park and encouraged her to climb into the back of our car and buckle her seat belt. The words ‘warned Angela’ set alarm bells ringing, and Jonathan decided we could not take any chances. She’d made a threat to harm me before, and now it was clear we really could not be certain of what she might do next; her mental state was too unpredictable.
I agreed it was best for everybody if we took Danielle straight back to the children’s home, where they were well equipped to deal with a child who might turn violent or need restraining in some way.
‘Danielle, you do deserve the very best. I’m going to take you back to the children’s home now. That is where you’re staying tonight. All your things are there. Angela and I will phone tomorrow and hopefully we can come and see you again very soon. OK?’
‘Yes, good. That’s OK. I want to see you soon.’
She spoke in a soft voice, nodding and biting her lower lip. I wanted to throw my arms around her and I was silently cursing the terrible past she had had. Nobody should have endured what she had gone through, and I found myself wondering what Danielle would be like had she not been damaged in the way she had.
‘Good. We want to see you soon too,’ Jonathan told her.
‘Yes, we do,’ I said emphatically.
‘Promise?’ she asked.
‘We promise.’
‘Will you always keep in touch?’
‘We will do our very best, Danielle, we can promise you that.’
She waved as she went back into the children’s home, and just before she disappeared behind the entrance door she gave us a wonderful smile that lit up her whole face. I’ll never forget it.
Epilogue
We kept our promise to Danielle and are still in touch with her today. Sadly, there is not a classic happy ending to this story, but I have come to terms with this and I believe Danielle is now in the best place possible, for her needs.
After just a few weeks in the children’s home Danielle’s behaviour became so erratic the staff didn’t know how to handle her. They tried to encourage her to behave by filling her day with more and more activities, taking her on trips and giving her goals and incentives. Nothing worked and unfortunately the other kids resented Danielle terribly. One night about six or seven boys and girls ran away from the children’s home for a few hours, in protest at the way Danielle was being given ‘preferential treatment’ despite being such a troublemaker. The next day the situation turned critical when Danielle suffered a major blow-up. She flew into a terrible rage and was completely out of control, threatening to harm the other kids and damage property. As a result she was taken to the psychiatric unit of a local hospital, and I found out afterwards that she went in an ambulance, bound in a straightjacket. The thought of Danielle being in that state still brings a tear to my eye to this day.
When Jonathan and I visited her she seemed calm and rather subdued. There was no spark in her eyes; she looked slightly drugged up, although I found out later she hadn’t been given any medication at that point.
‘I’m sorry about all this trouble,’ she said flatly. ‘I can’t help it. I don’t know why I’m like this. It’s good to see you. Will you come again? Will you bring me a book to read?’
We assured her we would.
Danielle was kept on a psychiatric ward for six weeks. Hatty and Deirdre both went to see her, which she appreciated. She was great with all of us when we visited, making an effort to chat about this and that and generally being polite and very sweet. I think we all hoped and expected that Danielle would ultimately leave hospital much improved, having been thoroughly assessed, given a diagnosis and prescribed the best drugs or treatment that would help her recover and move on with her life in a positive way.
It didn’t turn out like that. Instead, after the six weeks Danielle was transferred to a secure hospital three hours away, where she would be supervised around the clock. We were told she would be staying there ‘indefinitely’.
I’ll never forget the day Jonathan and I visited her there for the first time. As soon as we stepped through the large glass doors into the spacious reception area we were greeted by a friendly and confident young woman who was wearing a white doctor’s coat.
‘Who are you here to see?’ she asked efficiently.
We gave her Danielle’s name and, after looking in her notebook, the woman nodded and said, ‘Please, come this way.’ As we walked along a corridor another doctor suddenly ran up to us and told us to stop. He said he’d take over from here, and when the young woman walked away the doctor explained that she was actually a patient who had a habit of posing as a member of staff. Jonathan and I were rather embarrassed and laughed nervously, both of us feeling like we’d stepped onto the set of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
It was upsetting to find that Danielle was much less lucid and even less alert than she had been the last time we saw her, and we were told that the medication she was now on had made her gain weight. She was sitting in a communal lounge, watching daytime TV, and it was difficult to hold a conversation with her as she had one eye on the screen and kept starting sentences she didn’t finish. Some of the other patients interrupted too, coming over to tell us things that made no sense.
‘Just ignore them,’ Danielle said. ‘They’re off their rockers. I’m the only normal one in here, isn’t that right, Pauline?’
Pauline – a woman with purple hair and a ring through her nose – split her sides laughing and tried to give Jonathan a drink of her tea, which was in a child’s beaker.
Danielle was eventually diagnosed with a personality disorder – we never knew the details – and she stayed in the same secure hospital until she was almost eighteen. We made the six-hour round trip every month for nearly five years. Danielle’s condition hardly seemed to change. She always welco
med us warmly, we chatted about this and that and Danielle usually ended the visit by telling us she loved us, and she couldn’t wait to see us next time. She still had problems keeping dry, and she told us this every time we saw her, without fail. Meanwhile, her weight crept up and up.
Occasionally Danielle talked about the past and her time with us. In the beginning we always told her how Scooter was and she said she looked forward to having him back ‘when I get my own place’. This never happened: sadly, he died long before Danielle left the hospital.
She often asked after my mum, talking fondly about the films they watched and the board games they played. Sometimes Danielle’s memories were very muddled. For instance, she remembered we’d talked about making jam and going to see the Crown Jewels one day, but sometimes she thought we’d already done those things although we never had. On several occasions she told me she would organise the trip to London ‘next time I’m in town’ or ‘when I get time off’.
From the secure hospital Danielle was eventually moved into a supportive lodging home where there were specialist carers and medical staff on duty 24/7. Jonathan and I continued to visit and one day, out of the blue, Danielle told us she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I was shocked but not surprised. She said she used to hear voices, and that a woman used to appear, who told her to do things. ‘I thought I was crazy, but I wasn’t, was I?’ Danielle grinned. ‘All this time, Angela, I thought there was something wrong with me, and there wasn’t! It was just the schizophrenia causing all the trouble. It wasn’t me, after all. I knew it wasn’t my fault.’
In all the years, she never discussed her abuse or mentioned her father, or any detail of her life before she went into care at the age of five. It was as if she had deleted that part of her childhood from her memory. She did, however, tell us one very upsetting fact: she confessed that she broke our showerhead so many times because she was using it ‘in a sexual way’ on herself. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t help it. I was used to the feeling, from when I was a little girl.’
A couple of years ago we found out that Danielle had gone missing from her supportive lodgings, along with a male resident. It turned out they stole a car, booked themselves into a guest house a few hours’ drive away, got drunk and ended up being arrested after driving away from a petrol station without paying. Danielle was sectioned after that episode, and she went back into the secure hospital for a while before moving into another fully supervised flat.
We saw her last year. Danielle is twenty-three now and is still under 24/7 supervision, but she is on a much more even keel. She’s made many friends in her housing block, has several hobbies and is very chatty and pleasant to be around. Her weight has dropped too, and the medication she is on is working well and causing minimal side effects.
‘You did so much for me,’ she said at the end of our last visit. ‘Thank you for keeping your promise and staying in touch. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
For years I beat myself up about Danielle, and Jonathan doubted himself too. We questioned whether we’d done enough for her and if we could have done anything differently, anything at all that might have changed this outcome. We felt that way right up until she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. That changed our perspective, and Hatty helped enormously in this regard too.
‘Angela,’ she told me, ‘it’s an absolute miracle you and Jonathan coped with Danielle for as long as you did. You should be very proud. You gave her a lovely home and a lot of love, in extremely difficult circumstances. You always had a watchful eye and a sympathetic ear, however much Danielle tested you. Even when your personal safety was at risk you still wanted to do all you could. You enhanced Danielle’s life, be in no doubt about that. You went above and beyond your duty.’
Hatty’s kind words comfort me to this day, but of course I still wish I could have done even more; I’m sure anyone would in my position.
I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to share Danielle’s story. Life is not a fairy tale, and the reality is that fostering is a very tough job with no guarantee of success. Sometimes you have to accept that a ‘best outcome’ is as much as you can hope for.
Nowadays Danielle phones us often, and she always ends the conversation by saying, ‘I love you both to the moon and back.’
When I hear those words I do believe we did our best, and that she is doing all right, all things considered.
First published 2018 by Bluebird
This electronic edition published 2018 by Bluebird
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-5098-3906-3
Copyright © Angela Hart 2018
Cover images: plainpicture/Demurez Cover Arts/Basia Stankiewicz. Photo posed by a model.
The right of Angela Hart to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Certain details in this story, including names, places and dates, have been changed to protect the family’s privacy.
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