Four Waifs on Our Doorstep

by Trisha Merry

  ‘And she wants to know how the children are getting on.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She would like to see them again.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but a) the children don’t want that, and b) I don’t know whether I do.’ I was quite adamant in not letting this happen, so I changed the subject. ‘Why is she having another baby to be taken away?’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Next you’ll be asking for them to see the paedophile too . . . and then Mrs Mackay’s first husband who they didn’t even know until the freeing-order meeting.’

  ‘There’s no need to take that tone, Mrs Merry.’

  ‘Well, I think there is. If the children don’t want to have any contact, it’s not going to happen.’

  ‘You signed the letterbox form.’

  ‘Well, take me to court!’

  19

  Christmas Capers

  ‘Carrie was the one inclined to go to her mum. But mum pushed her away.’

  Extract from my diary

  Every school holiday, all four of the kids were off the walls with energy and mischief, not to mention the bickering and spitefulness that went on every day, sometimes all day. Anyone with children will identify with this to an extent, but these four won the gold medal for family infighting. And it was even worse when we took them anywhere.

  There were four holiday play centres in town. I can’t remember what the first one was called, but they enjoyed their days there. The trouble was, all the other children suffered the effects of their invasion. I don’t think any of the staff were used to handling children like ours, so they ran riot and took everything over, pushing all the other kids out of the way, taking their toys, getting paint all over everyone, knocking kids over by coming down the slide with arms and legs outstretched, spitting at them, swearing, snatching their food, scribbling on their colourings – everything you can think of . . . and more.

  Every day the play-leader rang to complain about one or other of the children’s latest misdemeanours and I had to go up there and remove them for the rest of the day. After two weeks I had their final call.

  ‘Your children really are very, very difficult, Mrs Merry.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t know that!’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry, Mrs Merry. But we are just not able to cope with them any longer, so I’m afraid we will have to exclude them. We’ve tried to do our best with them, and on occasions we have enjoyed their lively company, but we are now losing other children because of your four.’

  I looked up the local listings and found another play centre. I think it was called ‘Bridge House’. I took them there for a while, but it was a similar story. So now they had all been banned from two play centres.

  Right, I thought. I’m going to try the church children’s club and play centre. Perhaps they’ll be more patient and forgiving there. So off we all went with high hopes . . . and high spirits too, of course. This one was run by members of the congregation. Most of them, being more mature, were very kind and rather more tolerant than the youngsters that ran the first two play centres, so I was optimistic that this would be different.

  Well, it did seem to go better for the first few days. Nobody phoned me, but I did notice the increasingly frazzled expressions on the helpers’ faces each time I collected the kids. They were more long-suffering than the previous two places, but in the end the phone call came.

  ‘So they’re all banned?’ I asked. ‘Permanently?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. But you could try St Mark’s sports centre,’ added the woman. ‘I believe they have spaces in their holiday scheme.’

  So I booked them into St John’s and the first morning I took them everyone was very welcoming. It was a bright and airy place with lots of space and several sporting activities on offer, as well as a large play area, with a number of smiling helpers, so I hoped it would work out this time.

  ‘Would you like to buy a raffle ticket?’ asked a sports coach, standing by a child’s bike on a stand – a beautiful, big, sporty, shiny yellow bike.

  ‘Can we have a ticket each?’ asked Jamie. They were all looking at it enviously, and eight-year-old Sam couldn’t take his eyes off it.

  ‘Why not?’ I said, smiling at the coach and giving him the £4.

  Sadly, things went downhill from there. The looks from other parents when I dropped them off there in the mornings, the phone calls for me to collect them early, the stories of complaints . . . I knew the day would come, and it did.

  So now, all four of the children had been banned from every play centre in the city, and the eldest was still just twelve years old.

  ‘We were only naughty,’ said Sam on the way home.

  Fortunately, it was near the end of the holidays, and the weather was good enough for them to run wild in the garden. Then they all went back to school and things moved on, so I was surprised one day to receive a phone call from St Mark’s.

  ‘Is this Mrs Merry?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you have a son called Sam Merry?’ I could tell from the way he spoke through gritted teeth that he wasn’t comfortable making this call.

  ‘That’s right. I’m really sorry that my children were so naughty you had to ban them,’ I said, assuming this was a belated call from him to explain what happened.

  ‘No, I’m not ringing about that, Mrs Merry.’ I could hear him take in a sharp breath. ‘Sam’s won the bike.’

  Well, I’d forgotten all about that. But Sam hadn’t. He was thrilled when I told him later – the most enthusiastic I think I’ve ever seen him.

  I could tell this was probably the last person they would have wanted to win their raffle, but at least they were honest enough not to draw it again.

  I couldn’t face the embarrassment of collecting the bike myself, so I had to send Mike. The irony was that because Sam had been banned, he couldn’t go with Mike to collect his prize.

  Christmas always had a long lead-in at our house. It started at the beginning of September with making the mincemeat, then later in September we had fun making the Christmas pudding. They all helped me weigh and measure the different ingredients, taking turns to stir the mixture and make a wish.

  The first week in December is when we put the Christmas trees up. This is when Mike and I almost come to blows, every year.

  ‘Why does it have to be so early?’ he always asked, as if it was a new question.

  ‘Because it’s our family tradition. It’s good for the children to have traditions, and it gives us a longer time to enjoy it all.’

  ‘Well, why can’t we just have one tree?’

  ‘Because that would only be in one room.’

  We always had one tree in the breakfast room, one tree in the sitting room and one in the dining room. And the children decorated them all. We used to have a competition to see who could decorate theirs best. They had boxes and boxes of decorations to choose from, but they usually all ended up fighting over one length of tinsel!

  These are the things I used to do with my grandmother when I was little, and you never forget that. I think it’s important to offer children traditional things – all the things they had never experienced before.

  For these children, it was two extremes. The environment they came from, they had nothing – no toys, no decorations, hardly any food. They couldn’t remember Christmas before they came to us.

  ‘Oh, we used to send packages in for them at Christmas,’ Steve told me once. ‘With toys and crackers and food.’ I asked Jamie about that and he made a face.

  ‘Dad used to sell them,’ he shrugged. ‘And even after he went, all the things that Social Services gave us got sold by Mum or her boyfriends.’

  To come from that level of deprivation, into a household where there seems so much . . . Perhaps I made the mistake of thinking that, by overcompensating, it would make things better for them. Now, looking back, I don’t think it did. It just confused them, and possibly made it even harder for
them to cope.

  I remember once hearing a psychiatrist talking about ways to handle a child’s bad behaviour.

  ‘You may find,’ he said, ‘that by taking some things away from the child, it might stop the temper tantrums.’

  On one occasion, when Jamie had just thrown a very big wobbly that frightened us all, I calmed him down and told him about that.

  ‘There are various ways I could deal with your anger, and one of them is that I might have to take something away from you.’

  ‘OK,’ he muttered, kicking the chair leg and avoiding my gaze.

  ‘How would that make you feel?’

  He shrugged. ‘All I had when I was young, was my mum, and they took me away from her,’ he said. ‘So what can you take away that beats that?’

  He was right, of course. Good, bad or indifferent, she was his mother. I mulled it over for a minute or two, as we sat in silence.

  ‘Right, Jame,’ I said to him. ‘I’ve thought about it, and this time I’m not going to. But next time there will have to be some action. If I don’t take something away, I might have to keep you in, or stop you watching television, or . . . There has to be a sanction, something that will help you see how important it is not to get so angry that you frighten everyone like you did today. OK?’

  With his head down, he gave a slight nod.

  ‘If you lose control like that at school, you might have all kinds of people coming in and what we don’t need is all the Social Services and everyone playing the heavy with you or with us.’

  I’ve often found that children can say things which absolutely knock you off your perch, just like Jamie did that day.

  He’s never grown out of that sensitivity to anything someone might say to him, at home or at school, which he mistakes as a personal criticism and it sets off a tantrum. He always had to be the leader, the father figure to his siblings, so it’s understandable that he doesn’t take criticism well. But despite everything, I still really love him. Funny boy. He wants to get things right.

  Something I had always done with foster children as well as those we had adopted, was to put up a photo of their parents, or at least their mother, somewhere in the house. Usually it was a positive thing, but occasionally it had quite the opposite effect.

  I had scanned and printed a photo of Jill and pinned it up on the drawing board where they could all see it. It had been up so long that I didn’t think they were taking any notice of it, until I saw all the little pinpricks where they had been stabbing her eyes. I quietly took down that photo and replaced it with another and within hours they had stabbed her eyes out completely. I didn’t see whether it was one or all of them doing it, but each time I just replaced the damaged photo with another copy. In the end it stopped. I suppose they got fed up with stabbing it every time.

  I did ask Stacey about it once, when we were chatting in the kitchen.

  ‘Well . . .’ she replied in a cold voice, ‘she was a prostitute . . .’

  That silenced me for a moment. I had no idea she even knew that word. ‘Well, how do you know she was?’

  ‘If a woman goes upstairs with different men, what is it?’

  I realised how slow I had been to see how attuned these children’s perception of their mother could be. They may not fully understand what they witness . . . but they take in enough to process it in their own immature way. And from that, they are taken into the care system, where everything is sanitised – their history wiped clean. This is now your new home; like it or lump it. So forget how bad that was because you’re going to be OK now . . . Well, it doesn’t work like that.

  Despite everything, Carrie’s feelings towards her mother still niggled at her. It was about three years since the freeing-order meeting, and I think she was the only one who had been concerned that she might never see her any more.

  ‘I think I’d like to see my mum again,’ she said to me one day.

  ‘Do you really want to see her?’

  She pondered for a moment. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ It worried me that of all the children, it should be Jill’s least favourite child who had changed her mind. ‘You haven’t seen her for quite a while now.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you want me to ring up and ask?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  The following morning, I asked her again. ‘Do you really want to see your mum?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  So I called the letterbox contact line and told them.

  ‘Oh,’ said the familiar snooty voice. ‘I’ll ask Jill if that’s what she wants.’

  ‘Not long ago you told me she wanted to see the children.’

  ‘Yes, she wanted to see all of them.’

  ‘But maybe not Carrie on her own?’ I didn’t like the way this conversation was going. I feared for Carrie and wished I hadn’t acted on her wish, but I couldn’t ignore it.

  ‘I will ask Jill and let you know.’ The line went dead.

  Only a few minutes later, the phone rang.

  ‘I asked Jill and she said no, she didn’t want to see Carrie again.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘That’s all I can tell you, Mrs Merry. Goodbye.’

  So now I had to think how I was going to break this news to Carrie.

  ‘Mummy feels that her life is OK at the moment,’ I explained to her later that morning. ‘And she doesn’t feel it’s a good time to meet at the moment. She thinks it would upset you and upset her.’

  But this was a child with learning difficulties and a very young cognitive age. It was all too much for her to take in and cope with. She was distraught and I could do nothing to console her.

  20

  Knitting with Fog

  ‘A lot of troubles.’

  Extract from my diary

  We had lived in our house since before we adopted the children. But my fostering agency became so successful it grew out of its first basement offices in Victoria Road and now needed to take over the whole house. So we looked around for another large house, this time without any neighbours to complain about the children’s noise and their various antics.

  As soon as we saw this beautiful old farmhouse at the end of a long drive, in rolling countryside a few miles out of the city, we knew it was the place for us. We were surrounded by fields and a long way from anywhere, but there was a bus that plied the country lanes and passed the end of our drive, on the way into town, so we felt it was perfect. Somewhere for the children to breathe fresh air and run riot to their hearts’ content.

  It came as a complete surprise to me when people expressed criticisms and suspicions about our move.

  ‘Why are you bringing the children here? It’s very remote,’ sneered one health visitor.

  ‘Because it’s such an idyllic place to bring children up in,’ I replied. ‘And because of their background, they can be quite difficult, so it gives them the freedom to be themselves without having to worry about annoying the neighbours.’ But I saw what she wasn’t saying and I’d have loved to tell her: No, we’re not going to beat them up, we’re not going to sexually abuse them, we’re not going to torture them!

  ‘Well, if they’re that difficult, why did you adopt them?’

  ‘Because we wanted to, and because we love them.’

  ‘Who chooses to live so far away from anywhere?’ asked a teacher.

  ‘We chose it as a family,’ I replied, as sweetly as possible, wanting to ask why it mattered to him. ‘We had a family meeting and everyone agreed.’

  I suppose that it might have looked a bit odd to some people. But it was right for us.

  The move had come at a time when all four children were being bullied in school, and three of them were causing various degrees of mayhem as well. After a period of relative calm, I was constantly in demand again.

  Carrie, aged ten, had a superb support worker at her school, but her attention-seeking led her to making unfair and usually untrue accusations against me, her support worker Tra
cey or anyone else, pitting us all against each other, to gain any kind of attention to herself. Mrs Harris fully understood Carrie and did everything she could to smooth out all these situations.

  ‘My mum beat me up last night,’ she would tell her support worker one day, and then that evening she would tell me, ‘Tracey hit me today.’

  ‘Oh,’ I’d say. ‘I had better come into school and see Mrs Harris about that then.’

  So the next morning I’d go into school and see Mrs Harris. Carrie was called in to join us and confronted with the things she’d said.

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ she insisted. ‘Mum didn’t beat me.’ And later: ‘Tracey didn’t hit me.’ But she was now in the head teacher’s study, with all our attention on her. Just what she wanted.

  The next day, and every day, it would be something else. ‘Mum smacked me,’ she told them one time, and another time, ‘Mum wouldn’t let me out of my room’, or ‘Mum didn’t give me anything to eat’. Whatever it was, I’d be called in.

  The same happened when she came home from school. If her support assistant so much as looked at another child, Carrie would be enraged that she wasn’t focusing entirely on her, so she always tried to make trouble. It would be ‘Tracey pulled my hair today’, or ‘Tracey stabbed my arm with a pencil’, or ‘Tracey wouldn’t let me have my lunch’ . . . I became a constant visitor in poor Mrs Harris’s office, and she was always so calm and so patient about it all. That woman was a saint. Tracey was very long-suffering too.

  I tried to explain to Carrie at home. ‘If you say things that aren’t true about Tracey, she might leave and then you won’t have anyone to help you. You might even have to leave the school yourself, for telling lies about people.’ But I could see that, with her learning difficulties, Carrie just didn’t understand that actions have consequences.

  Fortunately, Mrs Harris and Tracey agreed with me that there was no malice in her. Everything she did was a claim for attention and we rode the storms together.

  This was the best school the kids went to and Mrs Harris was the best head teacher. She organised speech therapy, reading tests and all sorts for them. Sam made four years’ progress in his reading in one year there.