If Only He’d Told Me: A foster family pushed to the limits

Lottie showed me a photo of his bedroom at home, which was so filthy it would make most people retch. Brody shared a two-bedroom flat with his parents and six siblings. His room was tiny – not so much a box room as a matchbox room – and he shared it with two of his six siblings. The other four children shared the second bedroom, while his parents slept on a sofa bed.

In his tiny, filthy, airless room there was a small window with no blinds or curtains and a frame that was black with grubby finger marks. A metal bunk bed stretched from one end of the room to the other and a camp bed was folded up and propped against the wall. How there was room to open it out I will never know. The mattresses on the bunk beds were bare, and although there were covers on the duvets it looked as though they had not been washed for a while. The saddest thing, apart from the pink carpet that was covered in unidentified black stains, was a discarded Winnie-the-Pooh toy and a sad-looking rag doll, crushed under the rungs of the camp bed.

Brody’s parents were both alcohol abusers, I learned, and his mother had special needs. She was from Ghana, and any character she’d once had had been knocked out of her by Brody’s father, who subjected her to domestic abuse. Not surprisingly, she had tried to kill herself several times with overdoses, and the kids had been in and out of care while she recovered in hospital, as the dad was unable to cope. His father was British, small (like Brody) and had a big mouth – one of those little men who need to be heard by everyone to give them status. Brody was his only child; the other kids who lived in the flat all had the same mother but belonged to three different men.

Along with the alcohol abuse and domestic violence, there had been allegations from the three older girls that Brody’s uncle had been abusing them.

Brody was the youngest child and had been born into this chaos. It was no wonder he was bouncing off the walls.

The family were well known to social services and had been for some considerable time. There had been twenty-seven reports of concerns raised by teachers, neighbours and police. People were looking out for Brody and I was told that one of the teachers at his school made sure that he had a shower when he arrived at school in the mornings.

Social services had tried all the usual interventions with the family and all of them had failed. Brody was finally removed just before his third birthday, but by then a lot of damage had already been done. I knew that to have a real chance of a normal life Brody should have been removed as a baby. His brothers and sisters had been removed at the same time, so the whole family had been separated, which saddened me beyond belief.

The reality for large families is that not many people have the room to take groups of siblings. Whatever their parents have done and however horrific their home lives seem, to the children it is normal and they want to stick together. Their brothers and sisters are usually the only family they have left to cling to, and leaving them, as well as their parents, is a double trauma.

It was fate that brought Brody to us, although I had no idea of that when I took the emergency call. I was stunned to discover that I had been on the brink of being involved with his family on a couple of other occasions. The first was when I was pregnant with Alfie and Isabella. I got a call from social services asking me if I could look after a two-day-old girl called Destiny, but as I was about to give birth I couldn’t take her. Her name was so unusual that I’d always remembered it. I didn’t know then that Destiny had an older sister called Fifi. Fifi became pregnant aged fifteen, and social services called to ask if I could take a mother-and-baby placement. I couldn’t at the time and it wasn’t until Brody came to stay that I discovered that Fifi and Destiny were related and that they were Brody’s half-sisters.

Lottie wouldn’t have the full facts about what had happened with the previous carer until she’d had a chance to visit, but she warned me, looking subdued, that I was enjoying the honeymoon period with Brody.

‘His behaviour can be extreme,’ she said. ‘He’s already broken a teacher’s arm and smashed up his classroom, and he has caused serious damage in all his foster carers’ homes.’

I poured more tea and looked out of the window at this tiny little kid jumping up and down on the trampoline. I felt uneasy and wondered momentarily if I should refuse to keep Brody.

‘Just look at him,’ I said to Lottie. ‘Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Who would have thought someone that small could cause such havoc?’

‘Lottie!’ Brody shouted. ‘Watch me! Watch me!’

Lottie stopped and looked just as Brody executed the perfect back flip. He stood up, waited for the applause and wasn’t disappointed.

Lottie sipped her tea. ‘You’re an experienced carer, so I’m sure you will be fine,’ she said. And I thought she was probably right, so in that split second I decided to welcome Brody into our home.

Chapter Two (#ubeabbed0-caf6-5781-8b26-c690d6a7e4e5)

Just over four months had passed and Lottie had become part of our family. The children absolutely adored her and her visits were like a ray of sunshine. Screams of excitement would always fill the room when Lottie arrived, and we talked often of Brody’s family. I was beginning to fill in the gaps.

Those first few months were relatively smooth, and to outsiders it was like he had always been there. His family visited once a month and Brody was always pleased to see them, but you could tell that he was disappointed too. He had his own fantasy of what family should be like, and he could see that his fell short.

When I finally met his parents I tried hard, but I never built up a relationship with either of them. To be honest, I was struggling to be civil to Brody’s dad, knowing what he was like. I found making polite conversation with them difficult and they never seemed that interested to hear about Brody’s achievements. No wonder he always craved attention, I thought. Their visits seemed like box ticking to me, something they had to do if they were to have a chance of getting him back, but there was no real concern for his welfare. The truth is that they didn’t seem to think much of me either. To Brody’s mum and dad, I was always going to be the enemy – the reason their son was no longer living with them.

School was always an issue for Brody and he found it hard to fit in, but I believed I would be able to work closely with all his teachers to make it a positive experience rather than a negative one for him. Success at school is partly about teachers’ and pupils’ expectations, and Brody seemed to be stuck in a vicious cycle of being labelled the worst-behaved boy in the class.

We all know from experience that school does not suit every child, and the way the system currently stands it will fail some children from the very start. It was failing Brody, and to turn that around was going to be a massive task. We needed him to be seen as a positive role model in class, and I could see this was going to take a lot of work, with nurturing at home as well as at school.

Although Brody found school a problem, at home he had found a soulmate in Alfie. They became so close they were almost like brothers. Alfie was so used to being surrounded by girls it was a breath of fresh air for him to have someone to play football with, build dens at the bottom of the garden with and ride his bike with in the local wood. It all seemed pretty perfect, a match made in heaven, a proper bromance.

A carer’s children are key to helping a foster child settle in, which not everyone realises. Quite often when new children arrive the older ones are withdrawn and sullen, while the younger ones can be screaming, spitting, kicking, throwing themselves on the floor and making themselves sick. It’s all fear about what will happen next, but you can see them calm down really quickly once they realise that there are other children in the house.

It’s not nice for my kids to see another child hit and kick their mother, so when there’s an ‘incident’ I make sure they’re out of the way and always explain why children are acting in this way. It is still frightening, as life is sometimes, but I know my son and daughters are prepared.

I have no doubt that the fact there was a boy of a similar age to Brody in the house gave him confidence and helped him feel at home. I had seen it a hundred times before and thought back to the time when we had a two-year-old girl here called Bethany, who was very uncomfortable around bath time. Most toddlers reach up to you to be lifted in and out of the bath, but she would freeze if I tried to touch her. My girls instinctively sensed that they could help and, without me saying a word, one of them would lift her out of the bath, wrap her in a towel and give her a big cuddle. She felt comfortable with them doing it rather than me. Bethany had been badly abused by her mother, so why should she trust another female adult? But why should she miss out on one of the best things about being a child – being cuddled in a towel after a nice warm bath – because of this trauma? For weeks Francesca or Ruby would gently lift Bethany out of the bath until one day, without thinking, Bethany lifted her arms towards me. At that moment I knew we were making progress. I smiled at Francesca and Ruby to let them know that this breakthrough was thanks to them and that it might never have happened if it wasn’t for their caring.