Maria is in her early thirties now, works as a teacher and is a very proud mum to two young boys. She keeps in touch with Jonathan and me regularly, never forgetting our birthdays and always making the effort to come to the reunions we hold from time to time, to which we invite all the foster children we have stayed in touch with over the years. At a recent reunion – a garden party at our home – it was wonderful to see Maria interacting with her children, especially when the youngest had a tantrum because he kept losing in a game of hoopla.
‘You can do it,’ Maria encouraged. ‘Don’t give up. Keep trying, and the more you practise the better you’ll get.’
‘Can’t!’ he snapped. ‘I’m rubbish. Everyone’s better than me!’
‘That is not true at all,’ Maria said firmly but kindly. ‘You are a very clever little boy and you can do it! Come on, I’ll help you.’
I can’t tell you how rewarding it was to witness that scene, and I was taken back to that day on Maria’s university campus, when she reminded Jonathan and me that we used to tell her, ‘It’s worth putting the hard work in. You’ll see, when you get the rewards.’
Maria never talks to us about her past, although over the years I have found out some more details about her childhood. Babs, inevitably, was the person who filled in some of the blanks. She is no longer with us, but before Babs passed away I spent many hours chatting to her, usually around my kitchen table, as she continued to visit for many years after Maria went to university. Some of the information Babs shared came from Colin, who occasionally witnessed Maria’s mistreatment first-hand, and other details came from things Maria told her grandparents. Apparently, she used to talk to Stanley quite a lot, which surprised me at first, until Babs quipped one day, ‘I think Maria liked talking to Stanley because he didn’t answer back and kept looking at the telly!’ I imagine Stanley’s indifference made him the ideal person for Maria to unload on.
Gerry was a worse bully that I feared. At mealtimes, he sometimes decided Maria was not allowed to use a knife and fork like everybody else, and she had to eat with her hands or sometimes lick food off the plate. Then Gerry told her she was ‘disgusting’ and he made her move around the house on all fours, ‘like a dog’. Apparently, her mother decided to change the rule, so that Maria could walk but was not allowed on the carpet.
As for the physical abuse, it seems it was a miracle Maria did not suffer more broken bones or injuries to her body. She was thrown down the stairs on many occasions, made to balance on one leg on top of the garden shed and was hit with Gerry’s snooker cue and Christine’s heated curling tongs. On top of this there was a sustained campaign to ‘spook’ Maria by playing mind games and creepy tricks on her, such as playing the soundtrack of horror movies from a hidden tape recorder. When she was really small, the boys and Gerry also managed to convince Maria that ‘ghosts’ her mother had connected to on the ‘other side’ were living under the floorboards. For years she believed that not only could Gerry see her every move, even when he was miles away, but that her mum’s ‘ghosts’ might be watching her too, and that they would talk to her mum about what she was doing and saying.
Christine still lives abroad, and to my knowledge Maria never spoke to her from the day she vowed not to, after the angry phone call at our house. Stanley passed away a few years before Babs and, other than Maria, Colin was the only member of the family I recognised who went to Babs’s funeral. We never did find out what the historic issue was that prevented Maria from living with her grandparents, although on one occasion Colin made a reference to the fact Stanley had once ‘served time’, when he was a young man. We can only assume his criminal record meant it was impossible for Social Services to allow Maria to stay with her grandparents, although from everything Jonathan and I saw over the years, it appeared to us that Maria would have been better off there than with her mother.
I’m happy to say that Colin seems to have settled into a good life, and is also the father of two young children who get on well with Maria’s boys.
Tom and Dillon, incidentally, are also doing well. It was Tom, not Dillon, who turned out to be the entrepreneur, and he runs his own online business. Dillon, meanwhile, put his artistic skills to good use and works for a graphic design company. Neither have married but both have steady girlfriends and have bought their own homes. They both came to one of the reunions, and I have a very precious photograph of them from that day. They are standing either side of Maria, all three of them smiling broadly.