Four Waifs on Our Doorstep

by Trisha Merry

  ‘OK. Take me to court!’

  On the second Friday after the kids came to stay, we took them out to the zoo. Everyone enjoyed looking at the animals, except for me, trying to keep them all together and calm them down – an impossible task. As we left, I looked at my watch. It was much later than I thought and I remember worrying that they would all be starving and I wouldn’t have time to cook anything. Oh God, I thought, it will be manic when we get home and they find out there’s nothing cooking. You see, I always used to make sure, if they’d been out with Mike, that when they came back the kitchen window would be open and they could smell the food as they got out of the car. But not today.

  ‘Are you going to be able to cope with the kids while I start cooking their tea?’ I asked Mike as we drove home. ‘They’re going to be starving.’

  ‘Well, why don’t we have fish and chips?’ He grinned.

  ‘But we don’t want to give them junk food.’

  ‘Fresh fish isn’t junk food.’

  ‘Well . . . Go on then. Let’s have fish and chips.’

  ‘Do you want fish and chips, kids?’ he boomed into the back of the car, where they were all squabbling as usual. It brought them to a halt all right. Nobody answered, so I assumed that perhaps they’d never had fish and chips before. I turned round to face them.

  ‘You’ll like it,’ I said. ‘All golden and crispy.’

  ‘Yes please,’ said Hamish, and they all joined in, so that was that.

  I turned back to look at Mike. ‘So that’s five fish and chips please, and just chips for me.’ I’m vegetarian so I would find some cheese to have later at home.

  We pulled up outside the chippy and Mike got out, then stuck his head back in through the window.

  ‘Come on, Hame, I’ll need some help to carry it all.’

  So Hamish climbed out of the car.

  ‘I want to go too,’ wailed Anita.

  ‘And me,’ added Caroline, trying to clamber over her, until Anita shoved her back.

  ‘The chippy’s always full on a Friday night,’ said Mike. ‘So I can only take one of you in, and Hamish is the biggest to help me.’

  So I sat in the people-carrier that we had to buy to fit us all in safely, and the three younger ones sat in the back, Simon silently strapped into his car-seat and the girls starting off again with their squabbling. I just sat and looked at the door of the chippy, willing the boys to come out soon. It was before we had smartphones of course, but I did wish I’d had a video camera with me when Hamish emerged through that doorway.

  He came through first, carrying a big pile of wrapped packages of fish and chips. You could almost see the air waving as the steam and aroma came out through the white paper. He had this amazing expression on his face – as if he was in paradise, his lips in a beaming smile and his nostrils quivering with pleasure as he sniffed the delicious smell. He sniffed right in, then let out a long, satisfied breath, as he held the precious packages in his arms out in front of him, as if it was gold. Even the queen’s crown could not have been more precious to him than those fish and chips.

  ‘Do you want me to hold it, Hame?’ I asked him.

  ‘No, no,’ he replied quickly, putting his arm over to protect his treasure. ‘I can look after it.’

  When we got back to Church Road, we all went and sat down on our two church pews, one each side of the long kitchen table, as Hamish carried the white packages over. The smell of the fish wafted out, filling the kitchen before we even opened the paper. All their little noses were twitching. Of course, Hamish had seen the fish and chips being wrapped up, but the girls and Simon didn’t know what it would look like.

  I went to get the salt and vinegar and Hamish carefully lowered the pile down in the middle, then sat down himself.

  I could see the children were all desperate to look inside and tuck in.

  ‘Let’s not bother with plates,’ I said.

  They all stopped and looked at me.

  ‘But what about knives and forks?’ said Hamish with a shocked expression.

  I smiled at the irony of it. Of course, I’d been drumming into the four of them since the day they arrived that they mustn’t eat everything with their hands, and they had just got into the habit of using cutlery . . .

  ‘It’s OK with fish and chips,’ I explained. ‘You can eat those with your fingers, you know.’

  They all looked stunned for a second, as if this was some kind of trick I was playing on them. But then the unwrapping ceremony began. I watched them with amazement. It was as if they were all trying to keep up the suspense, slowly unravelling their paper, one corner at a time, sniff-sniff-sniffing as they did so.

  ‘Ooohh,’ gasped Anita dramatically, as if it was nectar.

  ‘Go on,’ I coaxed them all as I unwrapped Simon’s package for him, sprinkled on some salt and vinegar and handed him a chip. ‘Tuck in.’

  As everyone savoured their first mouthful, Hamish puffed out his little chest with pride. It was so lovely to see him like that, his face beaming, with no worries about anything, perhaps for the first time ever.

  All the portions of fish were huge and the chips were piled up high as well. As we all sat there, eating and enjoying it all, nobody spoke a word. When it was finally gone and the papers were all empty I could hear each of them take in a big breath and let it out slowly, one after the other. Four big fat bellies and four very satisfied children.

  Well, that was the start of a family tradition. The following Friday morning, I can remember Hamish coming down early and into the kitchen.

  ‘It’s our fish and chips night tonight, isn’t it?’ he said in an excited half-whisper.

  ‘But I was going to . . .’ I began.

  His face fell.

  ‘I know we had fish and chips last Friday,’ I said. ‘But it’s not every Friday.’

  There were only a few times that I ever saw Hamish close to tears. He hardly ever cried, but the lip was going . . . At that moment I’d have bought him a whole fish and chip shop.

  Just then, Mike walked in.

  ‘We’ll have fish and chips tonight,’ I said.

  ‘Oh really?’ he said with a quizzical smile.

  So that was it, our ritual. Every Friday from then on was fish and chips night. I’d have scrubbed floors if I had to, just to make sure Hamish could have his fish and chips on Fridays.

  Even when we took them on holiday we would take them all down to the quay and have a bag of chips and a Mr Whippy.

  From the very first evening they were with us, all of the three older children behaved badly towards each other and swore like troopers. Simon didn’t speak at all then, but even Caroline, with her speech defect, used all the swear words. With Anita, it was almost every word if she was angry. I do find children fascinating. As I watched and listened to them speak with each other, I soon noticed that both the girls only used the word ‘cunt’ to each other, but never to their brothers. And it was ‘fucking hell’ every time, in every situation. Especially Anita.

  They used every single swear word you can imagine. And the sad thing was that with the older two it was usually in context, though Caroline sometimes got it spectacularly wrong.

  It was strange for us, and upsetting or shocking for other people, but we had to remember not to show how we felt about the swearing at first. Of course, we’re all used to hearing swear words in the shops, in the park, on the television . . . but this was different. We couldn’t assume they knew these words were anything wrong.

  ‘These children have been in a worse mess than we realised,’ I murmured to Mike one morning, when the air was particularly blue.

  I mentioned the swearing to Carol, the social worker, the next time she came round.

  ‘Well, of course, your expectations might be a bit high,’ she said.

  I didn’t say anything back, but I did think: Oh yeah? All five- and six-year-olds can wipe their bottoms, and know what toilet paper is, don’t they?

  One day, I took Anita to
one side when we were in a shop and she swore loudly at Caroline.

  ‘You know, Anita, “cunt” is not an acceptable word when you’re with other people, especially with other children, because it’s what we call a swear word, and a lot of people don’t like swear words, so they prefer not to hear them.’

  She looked a bit surprised, shrugged and that was that. I’m not even sure she understood what I was saying. But I always had to be careful, because all these words were presumably the normal conversation they had grown up with, till now, and if I’d been too disapproving of them, it would have been a slur on their parents, and I couldn’t do that.

  I had to just say: ‘We don’t say that when other people are around.’ Or: ‘Please don’t use that language when we’re in the supermarket, because it’s not acceptable there.’ ‘If you want to use those words,’ I used to tell the children, ‘if you’re angry about something, go upstairs and use them in your bedroom.’

  They used their wide vocabulary of swear words all the time, whether they were angry with each other, or pleased with something they’d done. If Anita had completed a puzzle, it was: ‘Fucking Hell. I’ve done it!’

  I talked to Hamish one time when he shouted out a string of swear words at his sisters. ‘That isn’t a very nice way to speak,’ I said.

  I remember the way he looked at me. He was such a beautiful boy and he looked at me with his great big, brown eyes.

  ‘Sorry. What did I say wrong?’

  One day I sat them all down and told them that we were going to have a new chart.

  ‘Right. These are all your names and this is our stop-swearing chart,’ I explained. ‘And this is the tricky bit. You know about wiping bums and washing hands – the things that you should be doing?’

  ‘Yes,’ chorused the eldest three, nodding.

  ‘Well, this is about something you should not do – swearing. All the words you must try not to say. We don’t want to hear them any more.’

  ‘How do we know what words we can’t say?’ asked Hamish.

  ‘Good question,’ I nodded. ‘Let’s make a list of them around the chart so that you can try and remember not to say them. What word do you think I should write first?’

  ‘Cunt!’ yelled out Anita.

  I turned away to hide my smile and listed all the swear words they told me, plus some others I had also heard them use. Then I got out four big jam jars, labelled them with their names and I put a few 1ps and 2ps in the bottom of each jar.

  ‘What are they for?’ asked Hamish.

  ‘These are for your rewards.’

  ‘Rewards?’ Caroline tried to repeat the word as a question.

  ‘Yes, for when you manage not to swear.’ They all smiled and listened, so I carried on. ‘Right, we’re going to start with an hour at a time,’ I explained. ‘If any of you can manage a whole hour without saying any of these words, I will put a big tick under your name and 2p in your jar.’

  I think I was expecting them to protest a bit, but they all seemed keen on the idea, so off we went. It certainly seemed to work to begin with, though of course they slipped up quite often in between. In fact, it worked so well that soon we made it 3p for two hours, then upped it to 5p for half a day.

  Shopping and eating continued to be their number one obsessions, dominating our lives. But Caroline’s continuous diarrhoea was my greatest concern. She had it when she came to us and it hadn’t got any better. It was getting worse. No matter how often I changed her nappies, every one was badly soiled and the smell was repulsive.

  One day, when it was particularly bad, I took her down to the hospital, with all the others in tow as well. It was a nightmare wait, trying to keep the older two from terrorising the other patients with their shouting and rushing around. It was like trying to make fish stop swimming, but worse. I think this may have worked in our favour, because it wasn’t long before we were called through to be seen. I told the young man in a blue top why we had come.

  ‘What do you think it could be?’ I asked him, though he looked so young that I wondered whether he might not have done that part of the course yet.

  ‘Well, I’m sure it’s nothing to be concerned about,’ he said with a cheery grin at Caroline, while Simon sat on the end of the bed, fingering the air holes in the hospital blanket, completely oblivious to the mayhem across the room, where Hamish and Anita had opened a cupboard and were busily taking out trays of instruments.

  ‘Put those back in the cupboard and come over here,’ I said. ‘I’ve got some biscuits in my bag.’ That did the trick.

  ‘But surely there must be something wrong with her? Something causing this constant diarrhoea? Have you looked at her notes?’

  ‘Who is her GP? Do you think she would be on our system?’

  I told him and asked him to check her notes, which I think he did, but nothing came of it.

  ‘What do they say?’ I asked in exasperation.

  ‘She’s with you on a care order, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. They all are.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, Mrs Merry, but that means I can’t tell you what is in her notes without permission from the court.’

  After all my years of fostering, I knew he was right, but it was so frustrating not being allowed to know what might be wrong with a needy child in my care.

  ‘It will gradually get better,’ he said. But it didn’t.

  ‘I’m going to take Caroline to see Dr Ogden,’ I said to Mike a couple of weeks later. She’d been our GP for years and she had always been so good with our previous foster children, and not averse to bending the rules if it was in the child’s interests.

  ‘Good idea. Book her an appointment and I’ll look after the others while you take her.’

  So the following day I took Caroline down to the surgery.

  ‘This child has permanent diarrhoea. Permanent,’ I said before we’d even sat down.

  ‘How often does she go to the toilet?’

  ‘All the time. As you can see, she’s still in nappies, and I’ve never changed a clean nappy on Caroline, no matter how often I change her.’

  ‘Really? Have you given us her details?’

  ‘Yes. Her name is Caroline Mackay.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ she said, picking up her records and starting to sift through. ‘Mmm,’ she said as she stopped to look at something, then leafed on. ‘There’s a lot in here for such a young child.’

  ‘Yes, she’s had quite a few injuries I believe, and she has a speech problem, and this diarrhoea must have been going on for a while before she came to us. Does it say anything in her notes about it?’

  I waited while the doctor continued to skim through everything, until she came to one piece of white paper, which she unfolded. It looked like a printed letter.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said, turning to give Caroline a reassuring smile. ‘Now, let me see . . .’ She read through the details in the letter, then turned to face me. ‘Well, Mrs Merry, this is dated eighteen months ago. It’s written by a consultant at the family’s local hospital and it says that Caroline was diagnosed with an impacted bowel.’ She paused. ‘That is just what I thought when you described how continuous it is.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said when I heard the word ‘bowel’. ‘She’s not constipated. She’s got diarrhoea.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. You see, what can happen if the bowel is impacted is that the acids can make a hole in the middle, so that means constant diarrhoea, like Caroline has.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Is there anything she can take to make it better, or does she need an operation?’

  ‘No, I hope it won’t come to that. I’m going to give you a prescription for her and if you follow the instructions on the label, you should see a great improvement within a few days.’

  ‘Thank goodness,’ I sighed. ‘Thank you.’

  We went to a chemist on the way home and started her on the medicine straight away. That was a Thursday evening and we gave her three spoonfuls a da
y. I didn’t expect it to work immediately, but it did seem to be improving within hours, so I was really pleased. All through Friday the diarrhoea lessened, until it was barely an occasional trickle.

  ‘It’s amazing the difference that medicine is making to Caroline,’ I said to Mike when we got up on the Saturday morning. But for the first time, she didn’t eat all her breakfast. And she seemed quite listless and droopy. It wasn’t a very warm day, so I wrapped her in a blanket and laid her down on the settee in the study while I went to make her a drink. When I was in the kitchen I suddenly heard a great commotion, and somebody was shouting for me. I ran to the other side of the house, where they were all gathered round her, with brown froth coming out of her mouth. She was covered in it and the froth was everywhere.

  ‘Go and get the biggest towels you can find in the airing cupboard,’ I said to Mike. ‘Put her in that and I’ll pop round to the surgery.’

  ‘Take her straight down to A & E,’ said Dr Ogden.

  Half an hour later, I was in a cubicle, next to Caroline’s bed, holding her hand and soothing her as best I could. She’d had such a fright. We all had.

  ‘When did she come into care?’ asked a woman registrar. ‘Do you know anything about her background?’

  ‘Not a lot. But she was badly neglected and had a lot of minor injuries when she came, as well as a badly broken arm, which her brother told me was caused by a male visitor.’

  I saw the look she gave the nurse. Then they both left the room.

  I could hear their voices talking nearby, and a male voice too, but I only managed to pick out a few words. ‘Foster mum . . . can’t tell her . . . classic case . . . penetration . . . impacted bowel . . .’ It was enough for me to work out what they were thinking.

  Only a couple of days later, when I was talking to another woman I knew who had fostered children, I mentioned all this.

  ‘Yes, we’ve had children with that problem too. I found out later that the most likely reason for a young child to have an impacted bowel is sexual abuse.’

  I told Mike what she had said. ‘Do you think that could be the reason for Caroline’s impacted bowel?’