Cathy Glass - I Miss Mummy - The true story of a frightened young girl who is desperate to go home

It wasn’t a question that needed answering. Lucy and Paula immediately took over, Lucy soothing Alice’s forehead as I had been doing, while Paula took hold of her little hand, which still lay against her chin.

‘I’m just going downstairs to speak to the man who brought you here,’ I said to Alice. ‘Lucy and Paula will stay with you.’ While it might have been obvious to us and an older foster child what was happening, it wouldn’t necessarily have been obvious to a traumatized four-year-old, who might have thought I was disappearing for good and that Lucy and Paula would follow me, leaving her alone in a strange room.

Alice’s gaze briefly flickered to me as I stood, and then returned to Lucy and Paula.

Downstairs I found the duty social worker already in the sitting room, seated in the armchair and using his briefcase to rest on as he completed a form.

‘What’s your full name, and postcode?’ he asked as I entered, his terseness returning. I told him. ‘And I placed Alice at ten twenty-five p.m. on 25 March,’ he said, glancing at his watch.

I nodded and sat on the sofa.

‘Who else is in the house?’

‘Just my children and me,’ I said, surprised.

‘I need their names for this form.’

‘Adrian, Lucy and Paula. Lucy is my foster daughter.’

‘And their ages?’

‘Fourteen, twelve and ten.’

He wrote, and then asked: ‘No husband or partner?’

‘No.’ Had Alice been placed during the day, all this information should have been available, supplied by Jill or the social services, but without access to the file I assumed he was completing a placement form for his agency.

He wrote some more, I didn’t know what, and then put the form in his briefcase and snapped the lid shut. ‘Alice’s social worker will contact you on Monday,’ he said and stood, ready to go.

‘Do you not have any other information about Alice?’ I asked quickly.

‘No. Don’t you?’

‘All I have is the original referral, which doesn’t say much. Do you know if Alice has an allergies or special needs?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said with a shrug, ‘so we’ll have to assume she doesn’t, although I should go easy on the peanut butter.’ I didn’t appreciate his stab at humour. Even if a child arrives in the middle of the night as an emergency I’m usually told of anything that could affect the child’s health like allergies or asthma. And given that Alice’s move to me hadn’t been an emergency but had been planned (although it had gone badly wrong at the end, with Alice being snatched), I’d have thought Martha would have had time to print out the essential information and leave it with the duty social worker – or was that expecting too much?

‘I’ve got to go,’ the duty social worker said, heading towards the sitting room door. ‘A runaway teenager has been found on the other side of the county. I’m the only one on call to collect him.’

I nodded, but while I sympathized with his obviously very heavy workload, my concerns were with Alice, and I persisted in trying to find out more about her background that might help me to look after her. ‘Who took Alice to the police station?’ I asked, following him down the hall.

‘Mum’s boyfriend, I think,’ he returned over his shoulder; then, hand on the doorknob, he let himself out.

‘Goodnight,’ I called after him as he went down the front path, but he didn’t reply. He was already taking his mobile from his jacket pocket and answering the next call.

‘Yes, I’m on my way,’ he snapped. ‘But I can’t be in two places at the same time.’ I thought that if I ever won the jackpot on the lottery I’d use some of the money to fund more social workers so they could do their jobs properly and didn’t have to be in two places at the same time.

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