Four Waifs on Our Doorstep (3 page)

Daniel was away in Russia at the time, so I couldn’t tell him till much later. But when I rang the youngest, Jane, it was like déjà vu.

‘Mum, you must be crazy! Absolutely bonkers.’

Finally I spoke to Anna, our teenage foster child who was only with us at weekends now.

‘Yes, I can understand why you want to go back to it,’ she said, without a glimmer of surprise.

Social Services knew us well and had a lot of information about us already, but they needed to do a new assessment, to make sure we were still suitable. We should be too old
really, but we knew they had very few people willing to take sibling groups and the most difficult children. We went to meet a panel of professionals who consider: Are you experienced enough? Yes
– tick. Have you enough space? Yes – tick. And are you young enough? No – a big cross! Would that be a barrier? Apparently not.

‘Yes, you can have sibling groups up to four children,’ they said.

It had all happened very quickly, but I assumed it would be some time before a family group would come up.

First thing the next morning, the phone rang. ‘Hello, Mrs Merry, it’s the ODFA, the fostering agency,’ said a young voice at the other end. ‘We’ve got this sibling
group of four children arriving today, on an emergency protection order. Will you take them?’

‘Yes, all right,’ I gulped, stunned that it was all happening so quickly. We hadn’t even thought about getting the house ready for fostering.

‘They should be with you this afternoon.’

Well, I prepared as best I could, not knowing anything about these children, their ages or their needs. I just remember thinking, we don’t have cereal and we don’t
have nappies or babies’ milk. How old are they? Will they come with any clothes? So many questions . . . and not one answer. We’d soon find out.

I did some food shopping, put it all away, then wondered again about clothes. I had some of my grandchildren Brett and Laura’s things, which they kept here for weekends, and I found a bag
of young children’s clothing – bits and pieces left over from our fostering days.

I made the beds and put some cuddly toys out in their rooms.

Our house and our lives were about to be taken over but, not knowing anything about these children, it was impossible to have a foolproof plan. We just had to be ready for anything. That’s
how Mike and I had always approached it, with an open mind and a warm heart . . . and more than a little apprehension.

As four o’clock approached and I sat down for a break, my thoughts went right back to the days before all this began. I’d been a nanny when I left school, which I
loved, looking after a baby boy called George. But his parents went bankrupt, so that ended sooner than expected. Next I went to work in a shop, but that definitely wasn’t for me!

Neither was my next job in Kay’s catalogue office. It was very regimented there. The supervisor walked up and down between the desks and you couldn’t look up, you couldn’t stop
writing. Definitely the wrong job for me. After six weeks I moved to the office of a factory making metal boxes. Why I thought I could cope with that any better I don’t know.

‘I don’t like this job,’ I moaned when I got home from work that first evening.

‘Well, first day. You know . . .’ said Mike. ‘You’ve got to give it a go.’

‘No, I’m giving in my notice,’ I said.

He sighed and went to do the washing up.

The next day, when I walked into town, I saw a big poster, advertising for childminders. My eyes lit up as I stopped to read it. I asked around and it seemed the Council were desperate to have
more day-care provision.

Well, I thought, let’s weigh this up. Childminding or sitting in an office? No contest!

‘Would you mind if I worked from home?’ I asked Mike that evening. Poor man. We had only been married for a year and he was still adjusting to my wacky ideas.

‘Doing office work?’

‘No, childminding.’

He paused, with a quizzical look on his face, which turned into a long-suffering smile. ‘If that’s what you want to do,’ he replied. ‘Why not? Give it a go if you think
you’re up for it. We’ve got the space.’

That was true, with the two of us rattling around in a four-bedroom house, so that was it. We changed the living room into a playroom and jiggled everything about. Then I put out some adverts
and within days I had all these children in.

In my last proper job I had earned £3 and 10 shillings a week, for work I hated. Now people were paying me £2 a week for each child and I had ten children – £20 a week
for staying at home and playing, which I loved. I could barely believe it! I started at seven and finished at seven, washing nappies, making breakfast, dinner and tea, having fun and finally I put
them into their pyjamas to be collected. I was never without children and I loved it.

One day a social worker came and looked around. Then she sat down for a cup of tea with me, in the middle of the playroom.

‘We need to place two children with you to look after daily,’ she said. ‘But these siblings may have to come into overnight care as well for a short while. Do you think you
could manage that?’

‘Right,’ I gulped. ‘OK.’

‘Their mother is expecting another baby,’ she added. ‘And she has toxaemia.’

‘Oh dear. Yes, we can do that.’

‘But the thing is, you’ll have to become foster parents.’

‘That’s fine,’ I replied. ‘I love looking after little ones.’

These two became our first foster children. Next came a newborn baby girl, then more babies, followed by several sibling groups. I’ve loved every day of it . . . well, nearly every day.
I’ve played and played. All my life I’ve played. And the best bit is when you have young children who understand what you are telling them – about all the things that are on offer
for them, all the opportunities ahead of them. I used to think: I want a bit of that. I loved being able to open their doors to life.

Now, here we were, hundreds of foster children later, recently retired, only to start all over again, waiting for our next big challenge. A family of four on an emergency
order.

Over all those years, I had learned the hard way. Don’t leave any jewellery about. Don’t leave the car keys and definitely don’t leave any drink out. I found out by trial and
error what worked for foster children and what didn’t, but I could never be sure if I was right. I never had the chance to go and see what other carers did, or talk about different ways of
dealing with things. That’s why John’s idea of foster carers’ meetings sounded so appealing.

As the afternoon wore on, I was beginning to get a bit edgy, for the children’s sake. What had resulted in their emergency removal? I could only imagine the terrible impact their
circumstances might have had on them, especially if they were very young and nobody explained anything to them, as often happens.

At about four o’clock, the phone rang.

‘It’s the ODFA here, Mrs Merry. I’m afraid it’s going to be a bit later than we thought.’

‘Right. Any idea why?’

‘All we know is that one of the children was in hospital, and it’s a full care order.’

I went and told Mike. ‘They’ve been delayed. They’ll be here this evening, and it’s a full care order.’

‘So that means there are problems!’

‘Yes, it’s usually major problems with the parents, isn’t it?’

And of course the children finally arrived, late that night, looking like workhouse paupers. As I lay in bed, with their occasional wails and moans echoing in the darkness, I
felt so helpless. Yes, major problems seemed an accurate judgement. I wondered what tomorrow would bring.

3

I
t was about half-past seven when the children woke each other up, and right from the start it was bedlam. Absolute bedlam. There was nothing, and
I do mean nothing, stopping them – no boundaries at all. Hamish looked shell-shocked. The clues from last night suggested he was used to being in charge of his younger siblings’
welfare, but in our house he felt lost. He didn’t know whether he was in control, or not, yet he couldn’t let go. He didn’t quite know what to do.

Their bed was soaking wet and soiled. Nobody had warned me that neither Hamish nor Anita were dry at night. There was going to be a lot of washing in this house!

I took them all into the downstairs bathroom, almost dragging Caroline in behind the others.

‘No, I not want to.’ She stamped her little foot. ‘I not.’

‘Everyone has to wash their hands before breakfast,’ I said. ‘Here’s the soap and there’s the towel.’ Blank faces, so I washed my hands to show them.
‘It won’t take you long, and when you’ve finished you can come and have some breakfast.’

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?