Four Waifs on Our Doorstep (19 page)

‘Right. All put a backpack on please. Put in your pyjamas, your toothbrush, your flannel, your toothpaste and one small toy. I want you back down here in five minutes.’

The look of confusion on their faces! But they knew I was cross and, for once, they meekly did as they were told.

During the couple of minutes they were packing their bags, I told Mike what I intended to do.

‘I don’t think I’ll be able to keep a straight face,’ he said.

‘OK, then you stay here and I’ll take them down on my own.’

‘Have you got everything?’ I asked them as they lined up again. ‘Now, into the car.’

They all piled in and off we went.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Hamish in a little voice.

‘The police station.’ In the mirror, I saw them giving each other sideways glances, with apprehension on their faces, but nothing more was said.

We pulled up in Middle Street, outside the police station, and went in.

‘Can I speak to the policeman please?’ I said to the woman behind the counter. ‘The policeman in charge of Tesco’s stealing.’ I gave her a wink, unseen by the
children.

‘Oh, dear me,’ she said with a serious face, looking at all of them in turn. ‘Right. Are you the ones that have been stealing in Tesco’s?’

‘Yes,’ they all said in unison, their heads bowed.

‘Right, OK,’ she went. ‘Go and sit down.’

They all looked petrified, so I knew it was having the desired effect. But I was slightly concerned, thinking: I hope I haven’t gone a bit too far.

As we sat in silence in the foyer, a security door barrelled open and two big policemen came over to us and stood, jangling their keys.

‘Are these the children?’ asked one of the policemen.

‘Yes,’ I nodded.

‘What is your name?’ they asked me.

‘Mrs Merry.’

‘Your names?’ he asked the children, and they said all their names in turn.

‘Right, come with us.’

I thought, oh, he is just going to have a word with them, you know. So we all followed him back through the door, which he locked behind us.

‘Right,’ he said, giving the children a stern look. ‘If you steal again, this is where you’ll be having your fingerprints taken. This is where you’ll have your
photograph done.’

‘Are we allowed to smile?’ asked Anita.

‘Do you have a number?’ added Hamish.

Quite interested they all were by this time. Curious about the details. The officers could see something more was needed, so they led us all down the corridor until we got to the overnight
cells.

‘Cor, it smells of wee,’ sniffed Hamish.

‘Yes, it does,’ said the main officer. ‘Prisoners have to stay in overnight.’

‘Oh,’ exclaimed Caroline.

So the policeman said: ‘Right, I’m going to open the door.’ He looked at the children and pointed at Hamish. ‘You’re the oldest, you can go in first.’

I was a bit worried now, watching Hamish going in and the cell-door clanging shut behind him. He couldn’t bear to be enclosed in small spaces. Maybe this was going a bit too far.

Anita went into the next cell, quite gingerly, and then the policeman shut the door. I was beginning to panic now. That’s enough, I thought. It seemed ages, but it wasn’t more than a
couple of minutes, with Caroline and Simon waiting next to me in the cold corridor, looking as anxious as I felt.

When the police officer opened the doors, Anita was very pale, and Hamish couldn’t get out of his cell quickly enough. Next he put seven-year-old Caroline in and he just shut the door for
two or three seconds and Simon swapped places, but without the door being shut. Even so, he was near to tears. I felt like Cruella de Vil for having put the younger ones through that. I
hadn’t expected this dose of medicine to go so far.

‘Did that frighten you?’ asked the officer.

‘Yes,’ sniffed Simon. ‘You haven’t made a space for the food to come under.’

The officers laughed and the second one turned to me. ‘I think he’s been watching too many old films!’

Finally, the first officer gave them a good pep talk about the perils of stealing.

‘Even if it was for Red Nose Day,’ added the second guy.

‘Right,’ said the first one. ‘Do not let it happen again.’

When we got back home, my grown-up daughter Jane was there with Mike and she greeted us at the door.

The children couldn’t wait to tell her and Mike what had gone on.

‘I hope you’ve learnt your lesson,’ said Jane.

‘Yes, we have,’ squeaked Simon, near to tears. ‘We have, because we’ve been banned now from Tesco’s and we’ve got to go to Sainsbury’s and we
don’t like Sainsbury’s.’

That broke the tension at last and we all had a good laugh together. Even the children saw the funny side of it.

It wasn’t quite true, but we kept up the pretence for a while, to stress the seriousness of their actions. For quite some months after, Mike would pull up in the car park. ‘You
can’t come in,’ he would say. ‘You can’t come in. I’m just popping in to get the papers.’ And of course they would knock seven bells out of one another when they
were left together in the car. Then Mike would come back and have to sort them out.

I think in the end it was Mike who absent-mindedly said one day: ‘Oh come on, we’ll all go in.’

‘No, we can’t go in,’ said Anita.

‘We’re banned,’ Hamish reminded him.

‘No, it’s all right. You can come in,’ explained Mike. ‘We only said that.’

‘Oh, can we really?’ asked Simon. They couldn’t believe we had been teasing them all this time, but they took it very well.

Anita was now stealing from school on a daily basis. If it was there, she would take it. She’d steal clothes, money, whatever she found; it didn’t matter what it
was, anything, hair clips, make-up . . . She had boxes and boxes of stolen property upstairs, and when I discovered it I asked her about it.

‘Why do you take all these things, Anita?’

She just looked at me and shrugged.

‘There must be a reason. Some of these things belonged to your friends. Why did you steal them?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It just happens.’

I think half the time she just took it because it was there. And, nine times out of ten I think she threw it away after she’d taken it, because she knew she didn’t need it, and often
she didn’t even like it. I was always being called up to the school and the head was always as patient as she could possibly be with Anita, but we were at a loss to know how to stop her.

One morning, about two hours after seeing Mike drive all the children off to school, the phone rang. Here we go again, I thought. Another problem at school. Who was it this
time?

I picked up the phone.

‘Mrs Merry, can you come up? Anita’s set fire to the school.’

Of course I had an immediate vision of flames rising up through the roof. I dashed out to my car and drove as fast as I safely could.

As I rounded the last bend, I expected the school to be in ashes, but I couldn’t even see any smoke. What an anticlimax. So perhaps Anita hadn’t caused too much damage. In fact, when
I got there I found she’d just scorched some floor-tiles and the door jamb in the toilets.

After a fireman gave Anita a stern telling-off, during which she looked suitably subdued for once, we had to see the head teacher, who told her off again and banned her from swimming for a
week.

‘I hope you have learned your lesson, Anita.’

I agreed to take Anita home for the rest of the day, till everything got back to normal. We had a silent drive home. I needed her to realise how serious this was.

‘Tell me exactly what happened,’ I said to her as we sat opposite each other at the kitchen table.

‘Well, I was in the front of the car, on the way to school,’ she began. ‘When I saw a lighter in the space between the seats. I remember looking at it and wondering how it
works. Something in me was saying: “If you ask Dad, he won’t let you.” So I thought I’ll just take it, right?’

‘Didn’t Dad notice?’

‘No, he was looking at the road, so I sneaked it into my school bag.’

‘And then what did you do?’

‘I remember sitting in class with this niggling feeling – I wanted to go and light this lighter. I really had this urge. And I didn’t know why. So I made an excuse to go to the
toilet and I set light to some of the toilet paper. But it was like tissue and it caught fire too fast. I didn’t like it burning so quickly. It only lasted a few seconds before it died
out.’

‘So how did it burn the door jamb?’

‘I was really annoyed that it didn’t stay alight, so I went out and got some leaves.’

‘A lot of leaves?’

‘Two handfuls. I didn’t really think of the fire burning anything else except the leaves. I piled them up together on the toilet floor and set fire to them. It made a
psshhh
sound. The flames suddenly shot up. I panicked and ran for it, through the outside door, chucking the lighter behind some bushes.’

‘Wasn’t that the lighter with Mike’s name on it?’

‘Yes, but I forgot about that. Then the fire alarm went off. It rang really loudly. I thought crap, what if they find out it’s me? We all lined up across the playground and then we
were told the fire was out and we could all go back to our classrooms.’

‘Did somebody find the lighter?’

‘Yes, because twenty minutes later, the head teacher walked in, holding it up. My heart nearly stopped. I thought crap, Mum’s going to kill me!’ She gave me a look. ‘You
won’t, will you?’

‘I might,’ I said. ‘I’m cross enough. But it was Mike’s lighter. What do you think he will say?’

‘He won’t be as cross as you!’

‘You’re quite right. I’m angry that you took his lighter in the first place, and I’m even angrier that you were stupid enough to use it like that.’

She sat and waited for the fireworks.

‘I’m very disappointed in you, Anita. Do you realise how dangerous this was?’

‘Yes.’

‘You could have caused thousands of pounds of damage. And, even worse, you could have killed somebody.’

‘Yes, I know it was stupid. I’m sorry.’ She hung her head. I think she really was quite shocked, but I needed to do something to make her see how important this was.

‘There’s only one thing I can do with you, young lady. You’re coming with me down to the police station and you’re going to apologise for setting light to the
school.’

At the police station, Anita was quite subdued. She did apologise and they gave her a very serious telling off. I think that was more of a frightener to her than the first time, after the
Tesco’s theft.

‘What a day that was!’ I said to Mike as we sat after dinner that night. ‘I really thought the school would be a gonner.’

‘Even Anita couldn’t have talked her way out of that one,’ he said with a grin. ‘It will be something to laugh about in years to come.’

And it has been.

16

A
s foster parents, we were always the last to hear anything, and we were rarely consulted about any potential change of plan. But I suppose the
signs were there.

The children had been with us for two or three years now and they were costing Social Services about £6,000 per month. They paid the agency and the agency paid some of that over to us.
Because they had been such a hard-to-place family with so many problems, we were given a good fostering allowance, well above the norm, but of course our bills were huge. Food alone cost more than
£300 per week. And we’d had to buy all of them several sets of new clothes.

The washing machine and tumble dryer were on permanently with all the nappies and almost daily changes of sheets, and I couldn’t begin to tell you what the electricity bill came to. We
needed to swap our previous family car for a people-carrier, which consumed petrol at an alarming rate, and of course there were all the outings Mike took them on to keep them occupied and give me
time to get things done.

We were called to attend a review meeting and, as usual, I went on my own. Mike was deaf and his hearing aid wasn’t discerning enough to help him cope with round-table discussions, so he
left all that to me. I think I was in shock when I drove back home that afternoon, but I had to go and get the children from school and do all the usual things, so I didn’t have time to sit
down and really think about it until after the children had gone to bed.

‘I need to explain what might happen,’ I said to Mike. ‘From what they were saying at the meeting today, I think the time has run out for the children, financially.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Social Services can no longer afford to pay that much and they are now looking for cheaper options.’

‘How can they do that?’

‘Well, they say that the children will have to come out of the system because they cost too much to foster for any longer.’

‘But that’s ridiculous.’

‘Yes, they’re pulling the plug, or trying to. They’re pushing to get the children adopted.’

‘Oh. Did they ask you what you thought about that idea?’

‘Of course not. I soon realised I wasn’t there to contribute to the discussion. Their decision had already been made in some anonymous office where they don’t know anything
about children, or care about their needs.’ I paused. ‘To be fair, I can see it’s a very high cost to the local authority.’

‘But they should have thought about that years ago,’ said Mike. ‘When they could have intervened and avoided the children having so many problems.’

‘Well, we always knew their time with us might be limited.’

‘Yes, but they need more than two years for us to set them on the right road.’

‘They might need a lifetime for that!’

‘So what will they do?’ he asked.

‘I suppose they will try to have them adopted.’

‘Together?’

‘I can’t see that happening.’

‘But they have to stay together.’

‘We know that, but try telling the accountants!’

‘I can’t see anyone adopting them separately either,’ said Mike. ‘Aren’t they too old already?’