Four Waifs on Our Doorstep

by Trisha Merry

  I changed Simon and Caroline’s nappies and washed their hands for them. As I was getting out the cereals, Hamish came in.

  I sniffed . . . twice. ‘Have you had an accident, love?’ I asked him quietly.

  He gave me a puzzled look, and I realised he probably didn’t know what I was talking about.

  ‘Have you done a pooh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you wash your hands?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right, come on then, because we have to wash our hands after going to the toilet.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, because pooh has germs in it, and you don’t want to eat with dirty hands or you’ll have germs in your tummy.’

  Just then, Anita joined us and the same smell wafted from her.

  So I took them both into the bathroom. Sure enough, the toilet wasn’t flushed and there was no paper down there. Just as I was flushing the loo and wondering about no paper, I turned around to see brown handprints all over my beautiful new Laura Ashley wallpaper.

  I confess I had a despondent moment, then a sigh and a shrug to remember how pretty my blue diamond-patterned walls had looked. But it was no good reacting negatively, because the children wouldn’t have understood. They clearly didn’t know about using toilet paper. After all, if a family doesn’t have enough food to eat, do you think they’re going to go and buy toilet paper?

  Well, I didn’t know whether to wipe the wall or wash the children first. Of course, it had to be the children . . . and that was a horrible job.

  OK, I thought, this might be harder than I expected, but I can do it – yes! (I did try to get the marks off later, and bleached them out in the end, along with some of the pattern.)

  What we need is a chart, I decided, with columns for teeth, face, hands, toilet paper – a star in the column and two pence in the jam jar. Four pence out if they forget. I’d get that started as soon as possible, then once they had settled in we could start another column for not swearing – another two pence in the jar. I laughed to myself, guessing it would be a while before we could put a star in that column!

  The four waifs had a huge breakfast, three or four helpings, spreading chaos across the table. After that, I took them back up to the bathroom. Caroline hung back.

  ‘Here’s a toothbrush each.’ They looked puzzled. ‘This is how I clean my teeth,’ I said, showing them. They seemed to find it quite amusing.

  ‘Why do you do that?’ asked Anita.

  ‘To keep my teeth clean so that they don’t get decayed and fall out.’

  They all looked surprised.

  ‘We never had a toothbrush,’ explained Hamish.

  ‘And here’s a flannel for each of you, and a hairbrush.’

  Finally, we took them down to the playroom we had created in our basement. You should have seen Anita’s face when she first caught sight of all the toys. She just stood there for a second or two, transfixed. Within less than a minute though, the three older children had pulled everything off the shelves. They were treading on the toys in their rush, and the whole room was in turmoil. Their short attention spans and complete lack of restraint created pandemonium.

  Meanwhile, Simon sat silently where I had put him down, on the carpet amongst some cushions in one corner of the room. The only movement he made was to turn himself round to face the wall. I put a toy in his hand and he looked at it with vague interest, but seemed unsure what to do with it. Had he ever seen toys before? It seemed unnatural to see a baby sitting up and not taking any interest in the people and things around him.

  But how old was he? And the others too? They were all so small and painfully thin. As the room warmed up, the children peeled off their shabby tops. I looked at what labels I could find. Hamish had told me he was seven, but I was not surprised to learn that he was wearing clothes for a four- to five-year-old. Anita was in clothes for a three- to four-year-old.

  ‘How old are you, Anita?’ I asked her.

  ‘Six,’ she replied as she grabbed a ‘My Little Pony’ from Caroline, who then pulled a tuft of her older sister’s hair as she tried in vain to regain it. ‘I’ll be seven in December,’ she added, pushing Caroline down onto the floor. I distracted the younger girl with a baby doll. I was beginning to have concerns about their development, so I was relieved that at least Anita knew her birthday.

  ‘What about Caroline and Simon?’ I asked. ‘How old are they?’

  ‘Caroline is coming up to five,’ said Hamish. ‘And Simon is two and a half.’

  When I looked at their labels, I found that Caroline was in clothes for a child of eighteen months and Simon in clothes for a child of twelve months.

  So the ‘baby’ wasn’t a baby at all. That was the biggest shock. Why wasn’t he up and running around like two-year-olds should? Why were the two younger ones so tiny? Had they been premature? Was there a history of poor weight-gain? I would probably never know, but at least I could feed them up now, while they were with us.

  I picked up a ball, sat where Simon could see me, cleared a space on the floor and rolled the ball towards him. He watched out of the corner of his eye as it approached and stopped, but he made no move to reach out and pick it up. This didn’t seem right to me. Was he traumatised by the situation – by fear? Or was there something else? Did he have learning difficulties, perhaps? Did he have health issues, or maybe it was down to a problem at birth?

  I started watching the others. Caroline’s movements were immature for her age, and her speech was mostly grunts, very difficult to understand. Had she been referred for speech therapy? She seemed to have almost a split personality. On the one hand, she was fearful of everything, but on the other she had a fierce temper and she dug her heels in. ‘I will not,’ she said whenever she was asked to do something.

  Anita, well, she appeared to be quite bright and bubbly on the surface, like most six-year-olds. But, watching her exaggerated poses, her distinctive movements and expressions, and the way she seemed to crave our attention, especially Mike’s, my first instinct was sexualised behaviour. Then I thought, no, surely not . . . this is just a little girl who hasn’t been cuddled or loved. That’s all she’s looking for.

  Hamish was on edge all the time, looking out for his siblings, checking on their welfare. He seemed almost resentful of us and the opportunities we were giving the children. It was as if he couldn’t let go of his responsibilities towards them. In between looking out for them and reminding me to change the younger ones’ nappies, he kept nervously gazing up the stairs. I guessed that perhaps he was thinking of food.

  ‘Are you hungry again, Hamish?’

  ‘Yes. And we need to get more food,’ he answered.

  ‘We’ve still got plenty left,’ I said in a gentle voice.

  ‘No, but we need more cereals and more milk and more pasta and . . .’

  ‘We can go later on this afternoon.’

  ‘No!’ He was shaking. ‘We have to go now.’

  ‘Come with me,’ I said. I took him up to the kitchen and opened the fridge, and all the food cupboards. ‘Look, Hamish. We have loads of food – much more than any of us can eat in a week.’

  ‘But we might run out of bread, or cornflakes, or . . .’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said, putting my arm round his reluctant, bony body, trying to soothe him. I wanted to tell him that if we ran out of cornflakes, we could have Rice Krispies, but I thought it was too early to suggest such a thing. ‘We won’t run out of anything before this afternoon. I promise you we will go to the big supermarket at teatime and stock up on everything . . . as much as you like.’

  He looked at me with amazement. ‘Anything?’

  ‘Yes, whatever you think we might need.’

  ‘But we have to go every day,’ he insisted, anxiety creasing his face. I always had to go every day to get food.’

  ‘If that’s what you want, Hamish, then that’s what we will do.’

  ‘Yes, because we mustn’t run out of food.’

 
‘No, we will never let that happen in this house,’ I assured him. ‘Did you sometimes run out of food before you came here?’ I asked gently. It was too early really to be probing for information of that kind, but he was so panicky I thought it might help him to talk about it.

  ‘We didn’t really have food,’ he said. ‘The social workers used to bring us nappies and money for food, but Mum sold some of the nappies and I don’t know what she did with the money . . . Dad was always being arrested, and he left when I was about four.’

  ‘Did anybody bring you food?’

  ‘No. We used to be left alone a lot, and if we had a bit of bread, I made the younger ones toast. Sometimes I found a potato or two and I used to cut them up and heat some oil to cook them in. But mostly there was nothing for us to eat, so I went out in the evenings.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you get out of the house without anyone noticing?’

  ‘I just opened the door.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone realise?’

  ‘No. Most evenings we were on our own anyway.’

  ‘So you let yourself out of the door?’

  ‘Yes. I went to Tesco’s, round to the back, and got food out of their bins. I always took it straight home for Anita and Caroline to eat.’

  ‘And for you too?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘Other days I used to rob some Pringles and stuff like that from a local shop, and take them back to the house to feed Anita and Caroline. Once we were so hungry that we sat down outside the shop and ate them all straight away. But the shopkeeper must have called the police.’

  ‘Did they catch you?’

  ‘No. We ran away, down the alleyways.’

  ‘How old were you when you first had to go and find food?’

  ‘I don’t know. As long ago as I can remember,’ he said. ‘We were always hungry, Anita, Caroline and me, so I had to find us food.’

  ‘And what about Simon?’

  ‘I had to tell Mum to feed Simon.’ He hesitated. ‘Have we had breakfast?’

  ‘Yes, when you got up.’ I smiled gently. ‘Are you hungry again?’

  He nodded.

  ‘OK, we’ll take some fruit juice and biscuits down to the playroom to keep you all going. Will that be OK for now?’

  ‘Yes.’ As we went back down to join the others, there was a knock at the door and it was Jane, our adopted daughter who lived nearby.

  ‘How’s it going?’ she asked, making a funny face.

  ‘Bedlam!’

  We followed Hamish and the biscuit tin down to the playroom. The noise was almost deafening and the scene was chaos. Anita and Caroline were fighting each other for the same toys, arguing, shouting and pulling each other’s hair.

  ‘I’m having it.’

  ‘Mine!’ grunted Caroline.

  ‘I saw it first.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I picked it up.’

  ‘Give me.’

  And all this was littered with words and expressions they shouldn’t have known.

  ‘Stop it!’ shouted seven-year-old Hamish . . . and they did. Well, for a few seconds at least. He was the one who looked after them, and he was the one they respected. He was in charge, but I could see that mentally he was desperate to be a little boy and to play with all these wonderful toys.

  ‘I hungry!’ wailed Caroline.

  ‘Can we have breakfast?’ pleaded Anita.

  ‘You’ve had breakfast,’ I said, ‘but Hamish has brought you some biscuits.’

  The toys were thrown to the floor and forgotten as the girls rushed to the biscuit tin. That left Simon still sitting where I had put him, and facing the corner. He seemed oblivious to everything.

  ‘Come on, sunshine,’ I said as I picked him up and gave him a biscuit. ‘We need to feed you up, so that you can play with the others.’ He didn’t fight me, but he was completely unyielding. There was definitely something not right with this child.

  Just then, the doorbell rang. I went upstairs carrying Simon. It was my old friend Marion popping in.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ she asked. ‘Do you want me to go to the shops for you?’

  ‘You’re an angel.’ I smiled. ‘This is Simon. Come down and meet the other three.’

  ‘Simon – that’s a nice name,’ she said, lifting her hand to stroke his cheek. He flinched and pulled away. I shifted him to the other arm, to help him to feel safer.

  We all sat in the playroom, watching the children and planning out what we needed to do that day.

  ‘Those clothes they’ve got on are filthy, Mum,’ whispered Jane. ‘And the kids desperately need a good scrub!’

  ‘Yes, I decided not to bath them until they’ve calmed down a bit and we’ve got some nice, new, clean clothes and pyjamas for them to put on afterwards. I was going to take them clothes shopping, but I don’t think that would be a good plan when they’re all so hyper.’

  ‘No,’ she smiled. ‘And they’ll look like they live in Little House on the Prairie if you go shopping for them, Mum. Why don’t you leave that side of things to me. I can see roughly what sizes they need.’

  ‘Thanks, love, that would be a great help. They are all older than they look, so get what you think will be best — they need one or two of everything, just to tide them over for a few days. We can go and buy some more things for them when they’ve settled in . . .’ — I lowered my voice — ‘. . . if we need to. They might not be staying for very long.’

  While Jane and Marion were at the shops, the children gradually began to wear themselves out a bit, and their high-spirited fighting turned into a mixture of manipulation and attention-seeking. If Caroline came towards me, Anita pushed her away; if Hamish wanted to tell me something, the girls shouted over him. Hamish hovered on the edge, between boy and surrogate parent.

  When Mike came back into the room, Anita and Caroline rushed towards him to vie for his attention.

  It was time for more food — almost a continuous feast. Jane and Marion got back at around lunchtime, along with Brett and Laura, and Marion’s girls, all laden with carrier bags.

  ‘We’ve spent about three hundred pounds,’ said Jane anxiously. ‘Is that all right? We did manage to get a lot of clothes.’

  ‘Of course,’ I laughed. ‘That’s not bad at all . . . as long as they fit!’

  ‘We’ve kept all the receipts,’ said Marion. ‘Just in case.’

  Hamish, Anita and Caroline were very excited to see other children arriving, but when we started to pull all the new things out of the bags, their excitement turned to frenzy as they held their new clothes up against themselves, like a speed-fashion show. They tossed one item aside to look at the next, and got everyone’s things muddled up in the process.

  ‘Look at me,’ demanded Anita, strutting about between the toys to show off a new outfit with a suggestive pose. ‘I’m a princess.’

  ‘No!’ Caroline cried. ‘Me princess.’

  ‘You can’t be. I’m the prettiest.’

  ‘No, me!’

  ‘You’re an ugly cunt.’

  ‘You a cunt,’ Caroline wailed, lunging at her sister.

  We had to separate them before they damaged each other, or their new clothes. It was bedlam all over again, with fists and swear words flying – no control unless we stepped in, and this carried on through the afternoon.

  ‘My God,’ grimaced Marion at one point. ‘This day will live with me forever!’ That broke the tension as we shared a laugh.

  Meanwhile, despite all our efforts to help him join in, Simon continued to sit on his own, detached and silent. I had to find a way to reach him.

  4

  Bath-time Blues

  ‘Caroline has sustained a recent fracture, about two weeks old, which has not been reported or treated and must have been very painful . . . On examination, she was also found to have multiple bruises of different ages over her trunk, scalp, arms and upper legs. Over forty bruises and injuries were docume
nted. The consultant declared that the pattern of these bruises as well as the number are in keeping with non-accidental injury.’

  Social worker’s notes while in A & E, 6 March 1997

  ‘You said we can go and get some food,’ Hamish said, tugging at my sleeve, as they all stuffed jam sandwiches into their mouths in their umpteenth mini-meal break, halfway through the afternoon.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You can help me to clear this lot up and then we’ll go.’

  He immediately picked up the plates, carrying them at an angle back to the kitchen and dropping crumbs all the way – very Hansel and Gretel.

  All our visitors left and off we went on our first expedition together, the four children, Mike and me, all squashed into our ordinary car. (If the children were staying, we would definitely have to change that.)

  ‘What do we need?’ asked Mike.

  ‘Everything,’ said Hamish.

  ‘Well, not the whole supermarket,’ I added. ‘We need to leave a few things for other customers. But if you see anything that you want, you can just tell me.’

  ‘Anything?’ repeated Hamish, with a look of wonder.

  ‘Yes, any food.’

  As we piled out of the car and went into the front entrance of the supermarket, Hamish’s face was a picture of wonder.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ He had never gone into a large supermarket like this through the front entrance, like normal people. For him it was always round the back to the bins.

  Mike took one trolley and I took another. I popped Simon into mine, while Hamish, Anita and Caroline ran off in all directions. It was like emptying a bag of ferrets – they went wild. I had to leave Mike with both the trolleys while I ran after them, trying to keep them in sight – an impossible task. It was bedlam, and of course you know what people are like. There were tut-tuts from some, and out-loud complaints from others.

  The children’s faces were alight, looking at all the food – rows and rows of wonderful things to eat. They all ran down the aisles, grabbing anything that appealed to them. Hamish went straight for the cornflakes – box after box of them. I had to stop him putting any more in the trolley after the fifth box.