Chapter Eighteen
Bad Practice

In the absence of a social worker, all I could do was carry on as I had been doing and follow the routine that I’d established in the first two weeks. I took Alice to nursery each weekday and on the days she had contact I collected her at 1.30 p.m., when I took her to the family centre. At the end of contact Alice never had a problem separating from her father and Sharon but unsurprisingly continued to have great difficulty in saying goodbye to her nana and grandpa, although it was never as bad as that first time, when I’d had to carry her screaming from the family centre.

At the next contact Mrs Jones gave me the photographs I’d asked for – one of her husband and her, and one of Alice with her mother. They’d been taken the Christmas before, at the grandparents’ house, and my heart ached each time I looked at their smiling faces. Alice was sitting on her mother’s lap, and they wore the party hats they’d pulled from the Christmas crackers. The Christmas tree could be seen glittering in the background, and Alice and her mother were clearly having a great time at what had turned out to be their last family celebration all together. I put these two photographs in frames and stood them on the shelf in Alice’s bedroom beside the framed photograph of her father and Sharon. I often found the photograph of her father turned to face the wall, while those of her mother and grandparents were at the front of the shelf, looking out over her bedroom – Alice’s little statement of her needs.

I pushed the two empty suitcases belonging to Alice’s grandparents to the very back of the cupboard under the stairs, for realistically Alice wouldn’t be going anywhere until a new social worker was in place, and then it wouldn’t happen immediately. Martha had said that the parenting assessment of Chris and Sharon was only half complete, so I guessed that it had come to a standstill and wouldn’t be complete until the new social worker was in post. Once the assessment was complete, assuming it was positive, contact between Alice and her father would be increased to include weekend stays, in preparation for her going to live with them. From my previous experience, I estimated all this would take at least six weeks, if not longer, from when the new social worker took up post, and there was no sign of that happening yet. It wasn’t good social work practice, but there always seems to be a shortage of social workers, so posts are left empty for far longer than they should be and cases are delayed.

Alice had been with me just over a month when Sharon phoned the social services, furious, demanding to know of the duty social worker what was happening and threatening to put in a formal complaint. I could understand her frustration, although I would have liked to hear the same commitment from Chris, who was after all Alice’s father. The duty social worker phoned me (not the same duty social worker who’d reported me) and, having admitted she knew nothing about Alice’s case and couldn’t find the case file, asked me if I had a copy of the care plan and could I tell her what was happening. Lost case files should be a thing of the past now, as all the files at the social services are held on computer at a central database. I told the duty social worker I was still waiting for a copy of the care plan and the essential information forms, and then I told her what little I knew of Alice’s case. She thanked me and went off to try to pacify Sharon.

The Easter holidays approached, and on the last day of term Alice’s nursery had an Easter parade. All the girls went to school dressed in long flowing skirts, and blouses, reminiscent of fashion in the 1870s when the tradition of the Easter parade had begun. They wore Easter bonnets they’d made in class, which were tied under their chins with brightly coloured ribbon. The boys went as Easter chicks, with bright yellow head-pieces they’d made in the shape of a chicken’s head, and long brown beaks jutting over their foreheads. There was much laughter and excitement as parents and children saw each other and met on their way into nursery. I was getting to know some of the other mothers now and we smiled and laughed with our children.

As I entered the school gates I happened to turn and look back over my shoulder. I don’t know why; possibly I’d sensed someone was watching me. As I looked, over to the other side of the road, standing half concealed behind the large oak tree, I saw Alice’s mother. I recognized her immediately from the photograph Alice had in her room. Even from a distance Leah’s slight frame, light brown shiny hair and big round eyes just like Alice’s were unmistakable. I was shocked and concerned. Leah would have known she shouldn’t have been there. But as our eyes met I sensed she hadn’t come to make trouble, just to catch a glimpse of her daughter going into nursery all dressed up.

I didn’t know how Leah knew it was the Easter parade; perhaps she had a friend with a child at the school who’d told her. Or possibly she didn’t know and had waited outside the school before, hoping to catch a glimpse of her daughter, and I hadn’t seen her. It crossed my mind to tell Alice her mother was there, so that she could at least see her and wave, or possibly even go over and say hello, for it was six weeks since Alice had seen her mother and she was missing her dreadfully. But I knew I couldn’t. It would have been unsettling for Alice to suddenly see her mother after all this time without any warning, and I couldn’t be sure Leah would be able to handle the meeting and act rationally – just saying hi, complimenting Alice on her outfit and then going. Added to which there were no contact arrangements in place for Alice to see her mother and I couldn’t take it upon myself to establish contact. Had Alice been seeing her mother regularly and we had bumped into her in the street it would have been a different matter and we could have spoken. But for now I followed the acceptable, sensible and very sad option of continuing into nursery without Alice being aware her mother was close by.

When I came out again I looked for Leah, with the intention of speaking to her and reassuring her that Alice was all right – which was acceptable, as Alice wasn’t with me. But as I emerged from the playground and looked over the road to the tree, and then up and down the street, there was no sign of her. It would be some weeks before I saw Leah again and then her situation had deteriorated badly.

I am not a great fan of football, but every Saturday afternoon I dutifully sat on the sofa with Alice and Brian the Bear and watched the football. Alice knew more about football than I did, and sometimes more than the referee, who she often felt was in need of her advice when it came to penalties. I guessed she’d learnt all this from her grandpa – they’d been watching the football together for as long as Alice could remember. So every Saturday Alice’s whoops of joy and groans of disappointment echoed round our house as goals were scored or missed, and teams won or lost. If a player performed well Brian the Bear jumped up and down on Alice’s lap and clapped his hands; if a player performed badly then Brian hid his head in shame. Lucy thought I’d totally lost the plot one Saturday when she came into the sitting room to ask me something and I hushed her and said unless it was an emergency she’d have to wait until the penalty had been taken.

‘But you don’t know anything about football,’ Lucy said, throwing me an old-fashioned look.

‘But I’m learning fast, and I know you have to be quiet when a penalty is about to be taken.’

Alice nodded furiously and put her finger to her lips to hush us both. Lucy hovered by the sitting-room door, and the three of us watched in silence as the penalty was taken, and missed! Alice and I groaned; Brian the Bear hung his head in shame; and Lucy raised her eyes skywards. ‘You’ll be taking up knitting next,’ Lucy said – the next most unlikely pursuit after my watching football, but if it made Alice happy of course I would.

At 6.00 p.m. on Saturdays when we phoned Alice’s grandparents, the first thing her grandpa always asked was, ‘Did you see the football, Alice?’ They then spent some time chatting about the pros and cons of the game, who had played well and which player hadn’t been on form. Watching the football and being able to discuss it was providing a positive link for Alice between the life she had left and was missing at her grandparents’, and the life she was now living with me.

One Saturday evening when I phoned, and before I’d put the phone on speaker so that Alice could talk to her grandparents, Mrs Jones said quietly to me: ‘Don’t put Alice on yet. I need to close the sitting-room door. Leah is with us, in the kitchen, and Alice mustn’t hear her.’

It was sad that Alice couldn’t speak to her mother and vice versa, but with no contact arrangements in place, Mrs Jones knew we couldn’t just take it upon ourselves to instigate phone contact and let Alice speak to her mother. Mr and Mrs Jones had previously been told by Martha that phone contact was for her and her husband only, although obviously as Alice was no longer living with them they could have Leah in their home whenever they wanted. Such constraints on contact are put in place to safeguard the child, but without a social worker in post I was concerned that Alice’s case wasn’t being reviewed as it should, and that phone contact could have been established between Alice and her mother, but hadn’t because there was no social worker to make the decision.

On Easter Sunday my parents joined us for lunch and we held our usual Easter egg hunt, which was confined to the house, as it was raining outside. We saw my parents every couple of weeks and Alice had immediately warmed to them and they to her. And while my parents were considerably older than Alice’s own grandparents, she had clearly found an added security in being with them and looked upon them as surrogate grandparents. For their part they were soon doting on their new grandchild.

There were four chocolate eggs hidden for each of the children, and one each for my parents and me. Alice had already been given two eggs at contact – one from her grandparents, and one from her father and Sharon – and would have happily eaten the lot in one sitting had I not explained that this was inadvisable, as it was likely to make her ill. Lucy, on the other hand, had panicked at the sight of so much chocolate and, when my parents had gone home, tried to give her eggs to me.

‘I won’t ever eat all these; you have them,’ she said, bringing her chocolate eggs into the kitchen.

I’d seen Lucy panic before when faced with too much food. When we went to my parents’ for dinner I always plated up Lucy’s food, giving her a little, which I knew she could cope with, rather than the very generous portions my mother dished out. Now, Lucy wasn’t able to delight in the prospect of unlimited chocolate, as most children and teenagers would have done, but saw it as an insurmountable hurdle, and just wanted to get rid of the eggs.

‘OK, love,’ I said, not making an issue of it. ‘Put your Easter eggs in that end cupboard and if you fancy a piece of chocolate you can help yourself. Otherwise I’m sure they won’t go to waste.’

As it was, gradually, over the next couple of weeks, bit by bit Lucy ate her chocolate, and enjoyed it. As with many people with mild eating disorders (as I thought Lucy had), when presented with too much food or the expectation to eat, she felt out of control and panicked, rejecting it all. Left to her own devices Lucy could manage food, a little and often; the problem came with mealtimes, when you were expected to eat enough to see you through to the next meal. And with so much socializing in our society centring around meals, mealtimes were a continual worry for someone like Lucy. Yet I felt that little by little we were getting there and although Lucy’s eating still worried me she was slowly improving.

We had a few warm spring days during the Easter holiday from school and we made the most of the weather by visiting parks and having an away day to the coast. Two days before the weekend and the start of the new term, on Monday, Alice’s health visitor phoned, having just heard that Alice had been taken into care. She was called Glenys and she said she’d visited Alice at her mother’s, and also once at the grandparents’. She was phoning because it was time for her to make a routine visit, so we made an appointment for her to come the following day at 2.00 p.m. I was looking forward to meeting her; she’d been involved in Alice’s life for the last three years, so I assumed she’d be able to fill in some of the missing background information which might help me better look after Alice, and also explain why Alice had been removed from her grandparents and was going to live with her father.

But the following day, once Glenys was seated on the sofa in the sitting room, with Alice being entertained by the girls in another room, she said: ‘So when is Alice going back to her grandparents? I assume she’s here on respite – to give them a rest.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Alice won’t be returning to her grandparents. She’s going to live with her father and his new wife, Sharon.’

‘What!?’ Glenys exclaimed, astonished. ‘I didn’t even know there was a father on the scene. There certainly wasn’t during the three years when I visited Alice. Are you sure? There must be some mistake.’