Copyright

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the author’s experiences. In order to protect privacy, names, identifying characteristics, dialogue and details have been changed or reconstructed.

HarperElement

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First published by HarperElement 2020

FIRST EDITION

© Casey Watson 2020

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Cover image © Nicole Wells/Arcangel Images (posed by model)

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Casey Watson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008375577

Ebook Edition © May 2020 ISBN: 9780008375607

Version: 2020-03-20

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Contents

5  Dedication

6  Acknowledgements

7  Chapter 1

8 Chapter 2

9 Chapter 3

10 Chapter 4

11  Chapter 5

12  Chapter 6

13  Chapter 7

14  Chapter 8

15  Moving Memoirs eNewsletter

16  About the Publisher

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Dedication

Dedicated to my wonderful, supportive family and to all of my fellow foster carers out there. To these earth angels I say, keep on keeping on, you’re doing a great job, and even in those darkest moments I know that you will find something to smile about.

Acknowledgements

As always I need to thank my fabulous agent, Andrew Lownie, and the wonderful team at HarperCollins. We have two team members now, too. Our lovely new editor, Kelly Ellis, who has been so patient with us and such joy to work with (even when work at the coal face got in the way of meeting deadlines, Kelly gave me the precious time I needed in my real life, so thank you ever so much) and Georgina Atsiaris, who has been equally patient, waiting for me to find moments to read the proofs. Again, thanks! And no thanks would be complete without my eternal gratitude to my friend and mentor, Lynne – who also has the patience of a saint!

Chapter 1

‘You okay, love?’ I asked Mike, as the motorway spooled out ahead of us. He’d been silent for some time now. A good twenty minutes. I knew why, too. He was feeling the same way as I was. It was something we’d come to learn was an inevitable part of fostering, and which we’d come over the years to refer to as ‘happy-sad’. Mostly sad, but at the same time knowing we should, and would, be happy; the strange, bittersweet feeling we both often got when we’d just said goodbye to a child. Sad that they had left us, but happy that they were moving on to a safe, loving home.

We were both happy-sad twice over in this case, our most recent placement having been a sibling one. We’d spent a month now looking after four-year-old twins called Annie and Oscar, who we had just dropped off exactly where they were meant to be. The best place. Back with their loving parents, in a new home.

Mike glanced across at me and smiled. ‘I will be. What about you? Bearing up?’

I smiled back at him. ‘I will be too. Though I’m going to miss them big time. I hope their mum keeps her promise and allows us the odd visit.’

‘As if she wouldn’t,’ Mike pointed out, and he was, I knew, right, because Annie and Oscar were obviously not our usual kind of placement, having not spent their early years suffering from any kind of abuse or neglect. And not usual because during the time they spent with us, we took them to visit their mum and dad almost every single day, in hospital, where both were patients, after a horrendous house fire that had been caused by an electrical fault. They’d rescued their children – both of them, miraculously, unharmed – but had both suffered severe and widespread burns. It was our proximity to a dedicated burns unit as much as the fact that we were between placements that made us so well suited to the job.

Which hadn’t really felt like any kind of job. Far from it. Yes, the little ones were distressed and bewildered in the beginning, obviously, but we’d soon settled them into a reassuring rhythm, anchored by those daily visits to see Mummy and Daddy, and the knowledge that soon they’d be properly reunited.

Needless to say, it wasn’t just ‘Aunty Casey’ and ‘Uncle Mike’ who’d become besotted with them, either. They were so easy to love, and the entire family duly did. My mum and dad, especially, as just after Annie and Oscar had come to us, Dad had suffered a nasty fall and been unable to drive, which meant me spending a lot of time shuttling back and forth between our houses, with the little ones in tow of necessity. Mum and Dad were usually sanguine about these kinds of partings – they were usually the ones always telling me to buck up – but this time it was me having to hand round the Kleenex, because the pair of them were crying like babies.

But say goodbye we must, and we were all buoyed by the uncomplicated ‘happy ending’ – which in our line of work was never a given. So I knew we’d shake the blues off in no time. In the meantime, Mike’s stomach was already moving on.

‘I’m starving,’ he declared. ‘And in need of a large coffee. Shall we pull into the next services and grab some lunch?’

It had been a long drive – the family came from an area many miles away from the specialist burns unit – and I too was desperate for a coffee. Mostly because I’d forgone a cup earlier in the interests of not further irritating a bladder that was irritable most of the time anyway these days. The menopause, I’d been finding out, had a lot to answer for. Hot flushes, cold sweats, and now logistics too; as soon as I arrived in any public place these days, the first thing I did was always scope out the loos.

So I headed straight into the ladies while Mike joined the queue at the café, and it was there – not the most professionally well-appointed of environments – that I saw a text come in from my rather grandly titled ‘supervising social worker’ or, in old money, my link worker, Christine Bolton.

She wanted me to call her as soon as I was able, so my obvious first thought was that we’d forgotten to pack something that belonged to the twins, but running through a mental checklist, I was sure that we hadn’t. The next thought – equally obvious – was that she had another child for us, but I brushed that aside too, because there was no way it would be that. It had only been hours, after all, since we’d signed off on Annie and Oscar. No supervising social worker could want that much blood out of a stone, could they? Plus, she knew we had a lot on the family plate anyway, with a new Watson grandchild on the way.

‘She’ll be just checking in,’ Mike suggested when I joined him in the queue and wondered aloud what she could want to speak to me about. ‘Asking how it all went, and so on. Tell you what, here’s a good idea, Case. Why don’t you phone and ask her?’

With no tea towel immediately to hand, I couldn’t flick him with one. ‘That’s exactly what I was about to do,’ I huffed, and duly did so.

Even Christine’s soft, relaxed Liverpool accent couldn’t disguise the urgency in her voice. ‘Casey, you’re going to have a few choice words for me,’ she guessed correctly. ‘I mean, I imagine you’ve not even had time to strip the beds yet, but—’

‘Seriously?’ I asked, re-visiting my thoughts on blood and stones. ‘We’re not even back home yet. You need us to take someone else? Like right now, tonight?’

Mike stared, open-mouthed, eyebrows arched up into his hairline.

‘I’m so, so sorry,’ Christine said, ‘and you know I would never ask if there had been absolutely anybody else.’ Hmm, I thought, where had I heard that before? Was the ghost of John Fulshaw (very much alive but no longer my colleague) wafting around somewhere in the motorway services? ‘But, Casey, we are stuck, and I must tell you that this is no ordinary request. It’s a definite twenty-eight-day placement.’

The emphasis was very much on the ‘definite’, I noted. I pursed my lips. I was becoming increasingly familiar with twenty-eight-day placements and I wasn’t at all sure that I agreed with the increasing regularity of them, almost as if they were a must-have fashion trend. There was a place for them of course, and they were ideal in certain situations, such as when parents phoned social services and demanded that their children be taken into care immediately, or they would be out on the streets. The twenty-eight-day placement gave the local authority the opportunity to look deeper into the dynamics of the family situation and then decide whether to seek a care order, or to put the children back with the family, opting for putting home-based support in place instead.

Because the option existed, however – and here was where the ‘increasing regularity’ part came in – it was very easy for some social workers, in our ever more financially strapped service, to ask a carer to accept a twenty-eight-day placement, for no other reason than that they were struggling to find the right foster family to take them and that precious month gave them an extra month of wriggle room. (Not that the term ‘wriggle room’ was ever used, obviously. You couldn’t have a term for something that ‘didn’t happen’, after all.)

One thing I did know, however, was that this wouldn’t be a case of that. I knew Christine felt the same way as I did about the way such orders were increasingly being ‘repurposed’. So, there would have to be a good reason and she quickly provided it. It turned out that a thirteen-year-old girl called Harley was, even as we spoke, waiting in the day room of a mental health facility, for someone – anyone, it seemed – to go and collect her, as her time there was done and her bed was sorely needed by someone else.

‘And she can’t go back to her family,’ Christine explained, ‘because they can’t keep her safe. And when I say “family”,’ she added, ‘I use the term loosely, as I’m not sure there’s much of one. Before Harley was sectioned under the mental health act, she’d been living with her mother, a Kayleigh Brown, who has problems of her own. There’s also an older sister, Millie, but she left home just under a year ago, and is no longer in contact. It appears her leaving was the catalyst for Harley’s emotional deterioration.’

‘So, she was sectioned?’ I asked. ‘What exactly did she do?’

‘From the paperwork I’ve been sent,’ Christine continued, ‘it seems that after a self-harming episode was discovered, she made several suicide attempts and had been told she could no longer attend school – they were worried for her safety and felt they couldn’t police her sufficiently there – and then six weeks ago a member of the public found her about to leap from a bridge above a busy motorway. Thankfully, they were able to grab her and restrain her until police arrived. That’s when she was sectioned. Because it was apparently a very genuine attempt; not just a “cry for help” type scenario. She’s been in the same hospital getting treatment ever since. Though I have to tell you,’ she added, in a tone that suggested she wished she could skim over it, ‘they say they have done all they can for her, as she doesn’t have a defined mental health issue.’

‘So they’re not saying she’s better?’

‘Not quite that, no. Maybe more that she’s bet-ter. Which I appreciate is not the same thing, ‘but they’ve obviously made progress. And now she’s coming out of an institution and able to see her mum again and so on, well, it sounds positive at least, doesn’t it? And I’m sure great strides can be made now …’

I could tell that Mike was frustrated hearing only one side of this two-way conversation but given the nature of the call, I could hardly put my phone on loudspeaker in the middle of a service station restaurant. Instead I told Christine I needed a little while to discuss it with him first. ‘As I said, we still have quite a drive before we even get home from dropping the twins off,’ I told her. ‘But I do see the urgency. Fifteen minutes, I promise. We’ll discuss it in the car.’

‘I am so, so, sorry,’ Christine said. ‘I feel terrible dumping all this on you two right now. But, look, please rest assured that I can promise you this. Whatever the decision, this isn’t one of those times where we would ask you to extend. It’s twenty-eight days and that’s that. End of. The mother is on board with it, and is happy to accept some intervention work during the time we have, and wants her daughter back home just as soon as she feels confident that she can keep her safe. Which is not how she feels right now, obviously.’

‘Twenty-eight days, fifteen minutes – this is beginning to sound like the plot of a disaster movie,’ Mike observed, as we finally sat down to eat our lunch.

He had a point too, because just as I was running through the details of what Christine had told me, so my mind was running through the plot of a different story altogether. What if the mother decided she couldn’t keep her daughter safe at the end of those twenty-eight days? Christine had already said that Harley was determined to end her life; that it wasn’t a cry for help. She had also hinted that the mother had her own difficulties of some kind, and I wished I’d asked her to elaborate on what they were. What if social services deemed her unfit to have her daughter back? There were a lot of uncertainties around this and I knew that at any minute Mike was going to point out something I was already acutely aware of.

‘What about Kieron and Lauren?’ he said. And there it was. Our daughter-in law, Lauren, was heavily pregnant with her and our son Kieron’s second child, and we had both agreed – no, promised – not to take a new child on around the time the baby was due to be born, even as an emergency measure. We were effectively ‘on annual leave’ for a couple of weeks and that had been tacitly agreed by everyone. We had an exact date too – Mother Nature notwithstanding – a booked-in Caesarean section, various risk factors having been taken into account.

Our help was non-negotiable too. Set in stone. As Lauren’s family lived too far away to be able to help out with the practicalities, I had promised that I would be around to look after Dee Dee (our beautiful granddaughter) for the first week or so and to be on hand while they settled into their new routine. And also because Kieron, although he was such a fabulous dad to Dee Dee, still had his challenges, related to his Asperger’s, which included his anxieties about change. And this was, of course, going to be a big change. Perhaps not as big as becoming parents to Dee Dee, but still, it was back to newborn-baby stage, which could challenge the most calm, relaxed and stoic of people, none of which my lovely son generally was.

‘I’ve thought about that,’ I said, because I had. Had counted it up even as I’d been speaking. ‘We’re okay on that score. The dates will work out. Twenty-eight days with this new girl, then we’ll have a couple of weeks’ break until the baby comes. Don’t worry about that, Mike,’ I said, even though my own doubts were already niggling. ‘I’ll just have to make it absolutely clear to Christine that it can’t be extended under any circumstances. That after the four weeks, we are no longer available. Nada. Non. Niet. Come hell or high water.’

‘What about on the other score, Case? The one where you say all that but when it comes to it …’ He looked at me pointedly. ‘Come on, you know what you’re like.’

‘And you know what you’re like as well,’ I pointed out. Because the bottom line was that someone had to take this poor kid on and to turn her down on the basis that we wouldn’t have sufficient about us to stick to our guns about the deadline would be, well, pretty pathetic. Plus, I knew if we said no we’d both feel pretty bad. Whether she was crying for it or otherwise, this girl clearly needed help.

‘Okay,’ Mike said, ‘and you say this poor thing is actually right now sitting in a waiting room, waiting to hear where she’s going next?’

I nodded sadly. ‘It’s bloody awful, isn’t it? The psychologists have obviously decided she doesn’t have a mental health issue and she’s all good to go. Just like that. She must be so scared, poor thing. Imagine being in hospital for six weeks, then being told you can’t go home to your mum because she isn’t ready for you. Can you imagine? Bloody awful.’

So that was us decided. Once we’d finished our sandwiches (cheese and pickle, also apparently well-travelled), we popped the lids back on our coffees and headed back outside to the car, so I could call Christine back in relative privacy.

Where, again, she made all the right noises. And I could tell she meant every word she said as she promised that she understood the non-negotiable nature of our commitment to Kieron and Lauren, and would have a plan B in place to be effective from day twenty-eight, just in case.

‘Much as I hate the idea,’ she added, ‘I will even have another twenty-eight-day placement set up to run on straight afterwards, just in case of a worst-case scenario – you know, if Mum doesn’t come through, or isn’t considered up to it. It will just give us a chance to do some more work with her if need be. I will be very clear with the looked-after children team that this will happen and the care plan will reflect this. If the mother says no to a return, or even if the girl refuses to return, you and Mike don’t have to worry about it. At all. I absolutely promise. I know how much it means to you both to take that time off with the newest member of the family, and that’s exactly what you’ll do, rest assured.’

‘You mentioned the mother having problems of her own, Christine,’ I prompted, ‘I don’t suppose you know what they are, do you? I mean, if it’s bad, then mightn’t it have contributed to the daughter’s problems?’

Christine was silent for a moment. ‘Sorry, I’m just scrolling back through my emails. There was definitely something about Mum. Ah – here it is. “Somewhat reliant on alcohol, though nothing diagnosed, and the possibility that she may have used drugs as a crutch at some point.” Again, no concrete evidence, just suspicions and reports from a neighbour. And that’s all there is, I’m afraid. But, as I say, you can rest assured about this,’ she said again. ‘Twenty-eight days, then it’s no longer your problem.’

Rest assured. Very easy to say, but not so easy in practice. As we turned out of the parking lot and re-set the sat nav for the hospital, we were both silently contemplating possibilities for the next twenty minutes of what looked like being a twenty-five-minute journey. I’d no idea what was going through Mike’s mind (same as what was going through mine no doubt – here we go again) but I was also once again questioning the validity of these types of placement. They gave no security to a child – not if there was no certainty that they would be going home at the end of it – but almost of equal importance was that it made normal life extremely difficult for a foster carer.

Respite and emergency placements aside, of course, when Mike and I took on a new child, during the early days and weeks we spent the time learning slowly about their personality and needs. We started with the basics. A list of rules, a mutually agreed list of expectations (bed making, teeth cleaning, language, etc.) and tackled all the smaller problems first (not least any recalcitrance when it came to rules and expectations). This set up a routine, a pattern and a rhythm to daily life that allowed the major things to reveal themselves over time and our subsequent goals for helping a child take back control of themselves. By then, hopefully, we had built up a sufficiently close relationship with the child that would better help us understand what made them tick and support them to work through their problems. This was key, because it was a system that gave us the opportunity to be ‘parents’ above all else. To create a nurturing environment, enabling the child to start to relax a little, and, crucially, hopefully, to place some trust in us. They would hopefully by then see that we were a safe place to be and that’s when the real work would begin.

A twenty-eight-day placement made almost all of this impossible. The carers were expected to do only very prescribed types of work with the child and it was made clear to the child from the outset that they were not making a home with you. Yes, you were expected to teach them about family dynamics, and house rules, and how they could best manage their behaviour so that they could operate effectively within their own home, but this was part of a package that was rather hands-off for the foster family and included visits by various professionals, on a twice-weekly or even daily basis, to do similar and/or complementary work with them. But whatever the actual work involved, the problem (at least to my mind) was the same – it was a structure that didn’t allow time to build trust, to nurture, or to explore the root of a child’s problems. To be perfectly honest, I hated it. It made me feel more like a B&B owner than a carer.

As the now more familiar scenery rolled on by again, I shared my thoughts with Mike. ‘Oh gawd,’ I said. ‘I’m wobbling a bit now. Have we just made a mistake?’

He grinned. ‘You are a case, Case,’ he told me. ‘All this thinking! This is a job we’ve agreed to do. And do in the way we’re supposed to do. Can’t you, just for once, just accept this as a piece of work with a child that’s going to last twenty-eight days? You know, we’ve only ourselves to blame if we make it more than it is.’

‘You mean more in time? No way, Mike! I’m firm about that.’

‘No, I don’t mean in time – I mean in emotional investment. I mean more in the sense that, when it comes to day twenty-eight, you’ve become so emotionally involved that if things don’t work out with the girl’s mum, you get so weighed down with guilt and your usual “only I can see this through” mania that you can’t give her up, and I have to speak very, very sternly to you.’

‘That’s a long speech.’

‘Remember it. We can’t be everything, to every child, every time. Best we keep in mind that we’re just a step on the journey.’

‘Your destination is ahead,’ said the sat nav.

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