Little Girl Lost: The true story of a broken child. Mia Marconi

Kira? I think she has had a hard time.’

      ‘You’re right. We need to sit down and go through it all.’

      When we got home I went through my calendar and offered her some suitable dates. ‘Twelfth of January looks good to me,’ I said.

      ‘As well as her background, we need to discuss Kira’s day to day routine, her likes and dislikes, and to complete the paperwork,’ Roz said.

      This preparation is essential because without it you might as well be wearing a blindfold trying to care for a child. In some cases there is very little information available, but in Kira’s case there was lots of detail. Roz said that she had been placed on the at-risk register since birth. After I heard that, I knew that Kira would have a desperate story, but I wasn’t prepared for just how desperate.

      It’s a comfort in some ways that when I hear the awful truth about the lives of some of the children I’ve cared for, I realise that my imagination would never be able to conjure up the horrific tales I hear, even if I tried to imagine the worst thing someone could possibly do to a child. This was certainly the case with Kira.

      Roz arrived on 12 January with her face red but healthy-looking from the bitter weather. ‘Tea?’ I asked.

      ‘Yes, please. Lovely,’ she said as she began removing endless layers of clothing. ‘You have already met Kira so that makes it a bit easier. There’s a lot you don’t know about her. I’m sure we don’t have all the information but I’ll tell you what we have found out so far.’

      So over our steaming cups I learned that Kira had come into care six months earlier. She was the product of an affair. The word ‘affair’ paints a picture of illicit romance, secret meetings and love. But this affair had nothing to do with love, it was just two desperate people looking for affection and having sex. The result was Kira, so calling her a ‘love child’ was just all wrong;

      ‘Kira’s father Hafeez was from Pakistan, a married man with two young sons. To the outside world he was a good man from a close-knit family who worked hard. The family supported each other; although a large part of his family was still in Pakistan, those who were in the UK were all involved. Kira’s mother Mary was English and she was also married with children. Her family was far larger and she had eight children altogether. She was blonde and blue-eyed while Hafeez’s appearance was typically Asian.’ That explained Kira’s dark eyes and Asian colouring.

      The fact that Mary had eight children was a signpost in itself. There are only a few reasons why people have large families these days and they are either because they absolutely adore children, they’re religious and don’t use contraception, or they’re chaotic and don’t take proper precautions. Quite often chaotic parents start out thinking children will fill a hole in their lives, providing them with love that’s missing, but it rarely works out like that.

      Mary had grown up in a dysfunctional family herself so had married young to get away, hoping to find the love she had never had at home. But finding happiness was a pipe dream, because no matter how hard she tried neither a partner nor her own children could fill the void left by her rocky childhood. There would be no fairy-tale ending for Mary, and she found out the hard way that she was never going to be Cinderella and her new husband was no Prince Charming.

      ‘Mary’s husband Bob had his own issues,’ said Roz. He was violent, he drank and he beat Mary, and before long, alcohol was playing a big role in both their lives. They are very needy individuals and similar in many ways. That was the attraction, but it was a recipe for disaster.’

      Neither had ever been parented so they had very little chance of making a success of parenting themselves. They had nothing to give their children other than rejection because that was all they had experienced.

      ‘How many times have we heard this story?’ I asked Roz. ‘I know,’ she said.

      We had seen this scenario a hundred times before, and I wondered what and who would eventually fix this destructive cycle in people’s lives. I would happily have given up my job as foster carer if someone could have solved this problem. Would I ever see the day when my services as a foster carer would no longer be needed, I wondered. Unlikely, I thought.

      ‘So Mary had an affair with Hafeez?’ I asked Roz.

      ‘Yes. And Kira is the result. She was born prematurely, but we’re not sure how premature she was because Mary didn’t go to any antenatal classes and tried to keep her pregnancy a secret. The hospital estimated that Kira was about five or six weeks early so she spent her first four weeks in an incubator.’

      I learnt that those four weeks were the first four weeks of rejection that Kira experienced. Mary rarely went to the hospital so the hospital staff contacted social services. ‘She had told the nurses that she was too busy looking after her other children, but they weren’t convinced.’

      ‘She probably had a point,’ I said.

      ‘I know, but anyway, the nurses discovered that Mary was already known to us, as were the other children in her family.’

      After hearing Kira’s history, I realised why I felt an affinity with her. The rejection she’d suffered wasn’t dissimilar to the rejection my dad had suffered as a young boy. I thought back to how his mother had been cast out by her family after she became pregnant with him, how he’d always thought his grandparents were his parents, how after they died he was sent to live with a mother he’d never known and never knew he had. She rejected him and, years later, when he found his real father, his dad rejected him too. I’d come to realise over the years that part of the reason I wanted to foster children who had families who hurt them was because of my dad. If someone had been prepared to care for him and love him, maybe his life could have been happier.

      In Kira’s case, the authorities were alerted and the system moved into action. Unfortunately for Kira, it was another three years before she was taken into full-time care. Three long years in which Kira suffered more than any child should ever have to.