A Boy Without Hope

A child might want a cinema visit, for example, or a weekly trip to the leisure centre. Or they may enjoy having a particular takeaway meal, or like a certain weekly comic or magazine. In order to get these things they would have to earn points for doing chores, or getting off to school on time, or keeping their rooms clean.

But this all assumed I had an idea of what ‘inducements’ might work for Miller, and since all I knew for sure was that he liked to park himself in front of a computer game 24/7, it would require a huge upheaval to adopt a new regime where his access to that reward became something he’d need to earn rather than assume was his right. In short, I badly needed to know what I was dealing with, and, ideally, before the pattern set in. Three days was one thing – a period of acclimatisation was obviously necessary – but more than that and we would be making rods for our own backs.

So when I opened my laptop and saw Libby’s email had arrived, I decided to leave Miller to bask in his ‘one–nil victory’ for the moment, and try to find out what else made him tick.

The body of the email told me little. It was really just a bullet-pointed summary of the dozen or so attachments that ran like a blue ribbon along the top of it. But at least there was plenty for me to read. So I plunged straight on in, clicking on and opening the most obvious. The one marked ‘Initial Care Plan Reports’.

As the name suggests, this was the first report, logged when he’d entered the system, which, as John had said, had been almost seven years ago. So Miller would have been four or five. Only just school age. Still a baby. And if I knew anything about warming to a ‘difficult to like’ child, it was that it helped to be mindful of the journey they’d been on, and to remember the child they might have become, had their circumstances, and their life chances, been different.

The report had been written up by the first social worker on the scene – presumably whoever was on call with the emergency duty team. It was a simple Word document, dated, but with no other details in terms of time and location; clearly just the notes they’d written up after attending the scene.

The day that changed one little boy’s life forever. I scrolled down and got stuck in. The report began:

Having received numerous phone calls from passing motorists, two police officers drove to where it had been reported that a young boy was playing dangerously close to a railway line. It had also been reported that he was dressed in nothing more than a nappy, and people were obviously very fearful about his welfare.

When the officers arrived, it was to find the child – who’d presumably slipped underneath a fence – was about fifteen metres below them, down an embankment. Initially, though he saw them, he didn’t respond to their calls, so, given the danger the child was in, the female officer climbed part of the way down to the embankment, and eventually persuaded the child to climb up and join her. He still didn’t speak, answering questions with unintelligible sound and gestures, and appeared to be agitated and afraid.

As the child was reluctant to take the officer’s hand, the other PC went down to help, but when the male officer attempted to grab him to pull him up to safety, he began hitting himself repeatedly on the side of the head, and kicking out when they tried to restrain him.

He then ran away along the embankment, managing to evade both officers, to a hole in the fence some way down the line, which led to the rear garden of what appeared to be the only property in what was a mostly rural area: a dilapidated and abandoned-looking detached house. Both officers followed, catching up as the child began banging on a rear door, and were surprised to hear adult voices shouting from within.

Coming up alongside the boy, who was still banging repeatedly on the door, the male officer knocked as well, and the door was then opened by a man who appeared to be in his mid- or late fifties. The man grabbed the child roughly and ordered him inside then demanded to know what the officers wanted.

The police officers explained that they needed to go inside and, despite the male initially trying to shut the door, and then barring the entrance, eventually succeeded in persuading the male that they needed to go into the house.

They described the scene as being ‘filthy and chaotic’. It appears the family (a 25-year-old female, a 58-year-old male, and the young boy, called Miller, who was four) were all living in something resembling a large conservatory, at the rear of the property. The house itself was derelict and abandoned. There were faeces covering the floor, dirty clothes lying everywhere, and takeaway cartons littered on every horizontal surface. There were also overflowing ashtrays and alcohol bottles everywhere.

The female officer noticed the child had now disappeared and asked the female where he had gone. She replied with ‘to bed’ so the officer asked her where, and was led into another area – a former utility room, which also housed a toilet and wash basin. There were no utilities – just a single mattress along the back wall, with various coats, curtains and other clothing items strewn across it. The boy was apparently huddled beneath all of this.

The woman, who seemed inebriated and/or under the influence of drugs, seemed to already understand that the officers would want to remove the child. ‘If you come to take him,’ she said, ‘you’ll need a few nappies. The filthy little savage still shits himself.’

She apparently laughed as she said this and then picked up a half-pack of nappies and tried to hand them to the officer. Having established that the adults were the boy’s parents, the male officer explained that he was phoning a social worker, as the living conditions were clearly unsuitable for a young child.