Kids in care often bond with each other in ways that are charming and, more to the point, useful.
I remember the first time we had more than one foster child in the house. We already had one who'd been with us about six months, a teenage girl who had endured a rotten childhood at the hands of adults who…
You don't want the details.
Actually, I know you really do want the detaila but the child's privacy is all important, so you'll have to take my word for it… a rotten childhood.
Things had been going along okay with her, and we (Blue Sky, the Local Authority and myself) had worked up a timetable to get the child back to her real home. The thing was this; the child wasn't much of a chatterbox. I'd learned to read her mind to some extent, but there's no substitute for a good heart to heart.
Then Blue Sky's Placement team telephoned me; "Would I consider taking a child who…"
The new child needed a foster home asap, and we had a spare room.
If Blue Sky judge that a carer is up to more than one foster child, then that carer is up to more than one foster child, that's how I pitched it to myself. I made the necessary phone calls to the family, our answer was yes.
The second child was much younger, and no more talkative than the older girl.
Everyone connected with her case (social workers, the police, the Crown Prosecution Service) were desperate to get as much information as possible about the goings-on in the child's life. But she'd clammed up. Possibly under threat from certain adult perpetrators not to blab.
Then something wonderful happened.
It was all down to the fact that I now had a double school run to carry out. Each morning I'd load both girls into the back of the car and drive the 20 minutes to the school gates of the elder child. I'd drop her off, then take the younger one to her school.
One morning we're all in the carin the car. I was driving, Terry Wogan was on the radio (remember? the 'gob on a stick' as he called himself?). The girls sat in the back in silence.
Suddenly; a magic moment. Eldest foster child said to youngest foster child;
"So what happened to you then?"
Little one:
"What d'you mean?"
"Like, how come you're in foster?"
"Dunno…"
"Somebody must have screwed up, else you wouldn't be?"
"The police came and took my mummy away."
On and on they nattered, me all ears and glowing inside.
They bonded - no mean feat for two children who were strangers to each other. They were years apart in age, but equals in their circumstance.
I gleaned more by eavesdropping on that car ride than any one-to-one could ever unearth. I couldn't wait to log it all in my report. When they visited, my social workers told me I'd done a great job.
I politely spurned their praise. The hero was the power of human cameraderie.
The girls were both in our house for about six weeks, and although neither were any the more chatty with me or social workers than they had been before, those shared car rides were often hilarious and always eye-opening.
When the elder girl was returned to her real family, the younger girl seemed to need a substitute buddy to chat in the car.
She talked…to me.
I became her pal.
Until one day, out of the blue, from the back of the car, she called me "Mummy".
And believe me, on the rare occassion that such a moment occurs, it is the reddest of red letter days in fostering.