Around 3,000 children arrive in the UK alone every year seeking asylum, and unfortunately an estimated 5,000 young people – almost all of them girls – have been trafficked here since the late nineties. Our government then struggles to navigate ‘complex and adult systems’ (i.e. those designed for adults, as no one imagined children would migrate alone) to get them the support they need. They are sometimes known as ‘hidden children’.
January
There is a grandparenting moment – and it’s one of the best ones – when, after a great deal of patience and fortitude, not to mention finger-crossing, you realise that you have finally got the baby off to sleep. And, though you love them (and with an intensity that can take your breath away), you are mighty glad that you can do the proverbial, and give them back to your offspring again.
It was into one such moment that my mobile exploded into life. My mobile that I’d forgotten I still had on me.
‘Bloody hell, Case!’ hissed Mike as I scrabbled to try to silence it. Which was a case of frantically slapping both hands over the offending cardigan pocket to muffle it, and beating a hasty retreat, backwards, from Dee Dee’s bedroom.
And by some miracle, despite the shocking cacophony, she didn’t stir. I missed the call, though, having clattered down the stairs before attempting to answer it, and gone back into the living room. And shut the door, for good measure.
I finally pulled the phone out, long after it had ceased warbling at me, while Mike relocated the baby monitor to the coffee table, glaring at it as if willing it to remain silent. It had been a long, fraught hour getting the baby off, to be fair.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘it’s John. As in Fulshaw. Wonder what he wants.’
Mike flumped down on the sofa beside me. ‘Well, if it’s “Would you mind taking in another ten-month-old baby?”, that’ll be a no.’
‘Oh, hush,’ I said. ‘Go and make some coffee and stop moaning. She’s down now, and she’ll stay down. You know what she’s like.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Mike, with feeling. ‘What is it about flipping babies? I’ve never really got that. When you’re tired you go to sleep. Problem solved. Easy. Why do they have to make it so difficult?’
I grinned at him, already pressing the return-call button on my mobile. As a veteran of two kids, four grandkids, and the various little ones we’d fostered, he knew that was one of the great unanswered questions precisely because there would never be an answer to it. An overtired baby was a simple but complicated beast; she was overtired, but the reasons could be myriad, from colic, to teething, to being too hot, cold or stimulated – it could even be the smell of my new perfume. But we’d got there and could relax now … well, after a fashion. And possibly not for long, given the call.
‘Hi there, John,’ I said moments later. ‘So. To what do we owe the pleasure?’
‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to be calling you so late.’
‘It’s only eight, John. It’s fine,’ I reassured him. Though, while doing so, I was already taking stock of why he’d be calling. It was outside of office hours, so nothing routine or training-related, clearly. Which presumably meant a child he wanted us to take in.
Mike had picked up our coffee mugs but still lingered in the living room, obviously thinking the same thing.
‘We’ve got a teenager on the way,’ John explained, and I mouthed the word to Mike, who nodded. ‘Coming to us via a rather circuitous route. Not from round here – well, to be precise, not from anywhere remotely round here. She’s a Polish girl, apparently – not been long in the country, and all out of options.’
‘What’s happened to her?’ I asked John as Mike headed to the kitchen.
‘We’re not entirely clear yet. She doesn’t speak a lot of English and the details are sketchy. Very sketchy. So, to be truthful, I have no idea what we’re dealing with yet.’
John not having any idea what we’d be dealing with was the case more often than not, so this, in itself, didn’t faze me. Nor did what he did know – that she was 14, and had turned up at a social services building earlier, very distraught, in Hull, some 100 miles away. And, with no room at the inn via the local out-of-hours service, the ‘problem’ had eventually made its way to our fostering agency, and, as John was the supervising social worker and manager of our local office, to us.
‘I’m expecting her within the hour,’ he explained. ‘Are you and Mike able to take her in? More to the point, are you even around? I did try the house phone.’
I explained that we were round at my son Kieron’s house, babysitting his and his partner Lauren’s baby daughter. ‘But that’s no big stress,’ I added. ‘They’ve only gone to the cinema. They’ll be back in less than that, and then we can shoot home.’
‘I’d be enormously grateful,’ John said, and he sounded it. ‘As I say, I’ve no idea what the deal is. The girl’s apparently quite distressed, says she has nowhere to go, and has obviously been sleeping rough for a while. But I’m told she’s otherwise healthy and seemingly sane; says she’s not been harmed in any way.’
‘D’you know any more than that?’ I asked him, already forming a mental picture. Otherwise healthy and seemingly sane. I wondered what it must be like to be a 14-year-old girl all alone in a big, scary city.
‘Not really. Only assumptions. You know what it’s like. She says she has no parents, and nowhere to go back to, but that’s probably questionable. We’ve seen it before, to be honest; parents sending their kids over here when they can’t support them, with little more than a note with their name and age. And the kids are usually savvy enough not to give any details. But we shall see, eh?’
Indeed we would, I said, feeling the usual first stirrings of intrigue. ‘So, what’s her name?’ I asked him.
‘Adrianna. Or so she said. Anyway, thanks for stepping in, Casey. Doubt you’ll have to have her long.’
I smiled at that as I disconnected. Or so he said.
The previous year had been a rather different one for us. We still had Tyler, of course, who we’d taken on permanently, and who was now a lanky 14-year-old. And he was so much a part of the family now, the ‘foster’ part of ‘foster son’ no longer even passed our lips. But after several intense years of fostering – and some harrowing experiences – we’d stepped temporarily off the hamster wheel as far as new long-term placements were concerned, and, having seen our last long-term foster child into her new forever home the previous March (a little girl with foetal alcohol syndrome called Flip), we’d begun a short fostering break.
Mostly, this was to support our son, Kieron. With him and Lauren’s first baby, Dee Dee, coming along shortly after Flip left us (she who was currently not troubling the baby monitor, thankfully), we’d decided to focus on helping them as much as possible, as we had no way of knowing how well Kieron would cope with the upheaval in his life. Kieron had Asperger’s syndrome, which was a mild form of autism, and though we were confident that, between them, he and Lauren would manage as well as any other fledgling parents, there was always this thought in the back of my mind that a safety net would be no bad thing at all.
So, since Flip had gone, we’d only agreed to accept short-term emergency placements, and had had only three, although each had lasted considerably longer than had originally been planned, which was often the way with short-term or emergency placements. We’d taken in an eight-year-old handful (to say the least) called Connor, then a little lad called