Mummy’s Little Helper: The heartrending true story of a young girl secretly caring for her severely disabled mother. Casey Watson

      ‘Listen, winter,’ declared Riley, peering miserably out of the kitchen window. ‘We’ve had enough of you now. Go AWAY!’

      It was Saturday lunchtime and the rain was coming down in stair rods, bouncing off the garden furniture that sat huddled on the patio, and turning the whole of our pretty new back garden into a bog. Right now there was such a big pond on the sagging trampoline that I wouldn’t have been surprised to find ducks sitting on it. Not to mention frogspawn and a pair of koi carp.

      I didn’t mind the rain myself – it was what made Britain so green and pleasant, after all – but if there were two things that were often incompatible as bedfellows it was rain and stressed mothers with under-fives to keep entertained.

      ‘It’ll stop,’ I reassured my scowling daughter, as I joined her at the window. ‘You wait. Look. That’s a patch of blue up there, isn’t it?’

      Riley snorted. ‘Mother, what are you like? Blue? Come on – that’s just a very slightly different shade of grey. Even your positive mental attitude doesn’t have the power to change that.’ She turned around. ‘So, what shall we do then? Play shops? Make some fairy cakes? Take to the bottle …?’

      ‘Er, go down to the woods?’

      ‘What, as in swim there?’

      We might have moved house, amassed two grandsons and taken on a new foster child, but some things in the Watson family never changed. Riley and I tended to spend our Saturdays together, while Mike and Kieron did their weekly bit of father–son bonding. Of all the routines Kieron loved (and he loved his routines) having his dad watch him play Saturday league football was his favourite. If Mike wasn’t on the touchline it would thoroughly spoil his day. So, come rain, shine or hurricane, Mike would always be there.

      Though one thing, it occurred to me, had changed. Now Kieron was living with his girlfriend Lauren, in a self-contained flat above her parents, I was at least spared the Herculean task – and it would be Herculean, on a day like this – of trying to get the mud out of my son’s kit. And we’d half-planned, Riley and I, to take the little ones on an adventure. It had been such a whirlwind moving into the house, and what with Christmas and New Year, there’d been little opportunity explore the place yet. And it was an area I hardly knew, so I’d been itching to get out and about to investigate our surroundings properly. I’d also spotted that there was a footpath off the green in front of the house, which the lady in the shop had said led down to a little patch of woodland. Perfect for little ones, she’d said (I’d been in there at the time with Levi), as it even had a little stream, where we could go pond dipping.

      I’d also fancied getting out because I thought it would be good for Abby. The weekend had started badly, with the early morning news from John Fulshaw that Sarah had contracted some sort of viral infection. We had planned to go and visit her again early evening, but this was now out of the question, both because she was too poorly, and because of the risk of spreading the infection. John could only pass on the news that they’d update us on Sunday.

      With her mum already so unwell, I knew Abby would be really traumatised about the news and I’d dreaded having to tell her. Once she’d got over her upset after school the previous evening, she’d talked of little else other than seeing her mum again, and making sure the hospital were looking after her properly.

      She’d reacted as I’d expected, her eyes filling once again with tears, and I felt dreadful that I couldn’t even promise her she’d see Sarah on the Sunday either, because, no matter how much I reassured her and plied her with that positive mental attitude of mine, I knew all too well the sort of thoughts that must have been going through her mind.