The Sunday Times November 28, 2021 37
NEWS REVIEW
The first five years were full-on but fab-
ulous. I think we ticked off nearly every-
thing on the National Trust’s list of “50
things to do before you’re 11¾”. Seeing
how much they got from every activity,
from climbing trees to damming a
stream, was a joy. My mum said that our
boys were her only grateful grandchil-
dren. They would value every present
even if it was second-hand, and would
sleep with it under the pillow.
We could see that both of them
behaved differently because of the
trauma they had experienced before we
met them. The younger clung to adults,
and particularly me. Our eldest could
barely read, and learnt to tie his shoe-
laces long after his peers. More worry-
ingly, he would tell crazy lies, which per-
sisted even when the truth was
unavoidable. But we had a good relation-
ship with the primary school, and we
worked in unison to help him calm down
and catch up on school. We found that he
needed clear boundaries. He had come
from a world of chaos. Sometimes it
struck us how odd it was that the boys
weren’t being offered counselling or play
therapy, given what they had come
through, but we were managing, so we
didn’t give it much thought.
Children who are placed for adoption
have often experienced violence, sub-
stance abuse, alcoholism and neglect,
and need to be removed from their birth
family. These kinds of background are
not from the script of Annie or Anne of
Green Gables, but that is the reality of
adoption today. That start in life has long-
lasting repercussions, yet everyone still
assumes that they will trot off into the
sunset because that’s what happens in
the movies.T
he major difficulties started when
the elder boy started secondary
school. He was not offered the
“enhanced transition” arrange-
ments that are routinely offered to
children in foster care. Despite us having
a meeting with the school to explain his
background, it didn’t occur to them to
put him on their list of “care-experienced
children” for more than a year, because
he was adopted.
Their lack of understanding of his
needs contributed to severe repercus-
sions at home. His behaviour changed.
He cut up my clothes, he stole money not
only from us but his grandparents. The
lying became worse: lying not every day
but sometimes every hour.
He was desperate to fit in at school, but
couldn’t follow a timetable. He hid his dif-
ficulties while there, and took his frustra-
tion out on us. His school had rules, but
didn’t enforce them. We had rules and
did enforce them. He was determined to
create a chaotic environment where we
were all fighting, because that’s what his
past made him crave. Every night we
came home to a war zone.
Then he did something really terrible
involving criminal behaviour online,
which destroyed the last shreds of our
trust. That led to a few meetings with a
youth justice worker, who decided he
was at low risk of reoffending and dis-
missed our concerns by saying: “At least
he’s not doing drugs!”
He was doing a good enough job of fit-
ting in at school that the professionals
treated us as neurotic parents who were
over-controlling. When lockdown
arrived, we were dreading home-school-
ing but, to our amazement, his behaviour
improved. But as soon as he went back to
the classroom, the old behaviour
returned. The only support came from an
experienced social worker, who was
assigned to us not because we wereadoptive parents but because we were
also respite foster carers, taking in other
children aside from our two boys. She
suggested that he might have foetal alco-
hol spectrum disorder — in other words,
brain damage caused by his mother’s
drinking during her pregnancy. We were
reliant on the school to support us to get a
diagnosis. They said he was doing fine.
When the strain on our family became
severe, we asked for respite care for him
so we could have a break. It was declined.
Instead, the Children’s Panel said we
should get family therapy. Nobody
checked whether family therapy was
available where we live. It wasn’t.
The final straw was when a neighbour
invited our son into her home and gave
him all the things that we had restricted
because he could not control himself,
such as a smartphone. He immediately
used it to gamble online, and there was
another incident which put me at per-
sonal risk. We felt there was no alterna-
tive but to ask for him to be taken into
care. Even our son agreed
As soon as we made that request, a
well-oiled machine swung into action. He
was now a foster child not an adopted
child, and qualified for support. All of a
sudden we were invited to monthly meet-
ings with a panel of support workers,
from guidance teachers to mentors to
inclusion officers. But why was the sys-
tem so geared up to take him into care,
and not help us keep him at home?
According to a survey by Adoption UK,
of which I am a trustee, about a third of
families with older adopted children face
severe challenges. Half of adoptive fami-
lies say teachers do not have a good
understanding of their needs, and 71 per
cent cannot get the support they need.
We will always be his parents, but our
son is now living with the fourth set of
carers he has known. All the evidence
shows that the best outcomes are
achieved when children are in a stable,
long-term home. It’s a tragedy for him
and for us. If one foster carer’s salary had
been invested in a counsellor or teacher
trained in trauma, not only our son but
many other traumatised children could
have accessed support.
There is now an empty hole in our
home, but it’s not entirely a black hole. I
can walk in the door and leave my bag on
the table. Before, I had to lock away my
purse, hide the key and stash my bag
safely upstairs. Our home is a happy
place again.
We were winning at the beginning, but
when the elder boy started to struggle,
the cards were stacked against us. The
system recognises the support it needs to
give to children in foster care. Adoptive
families take on equally challenging chil-
dren, and for free. If they get through it,
they achieve the best outcomes. All they
require in return is a little support and
understanding.Eleanor Bradford is a trustee of Adoption
UK. Her fee has been donated to the
charityA journey to the
bottom of my
bin bag turned
up a dirty truth
Recycling might make us feel good,
but, as Will Self discovered while
making a new documentary, much of
what we chuck still goes up in smoke
Eleanor
BradfordHe was doing a
good job of fitting
in at school, so we
were treated as
neurotic parents
off bigging up Bluey, a joint
production between the BBC
and the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation.
Bluey quickly became the
most watched programme on
ABC’s on-demand service
when it began in 2018.
Bluey lives in a nice house
in the suburbs of Brisbane
with her little sister Bingo,
their sassy working mother,
Chilli, and — the real star and
the dog Johnson really needs
to sit up and pay attention to
— their dad, Bandit.
In his CBI ramble Johnson
did make one sensible point:
he criticised the writers of
Peppa Pig for being “a bit
stereotypical about Daddy
Pig”. An accident-prone
dullard, Daddy Pig has,
according to some, helped
fuel an epidemic of “studied
incompetence” among dads.
Society, via a cartoon pig,tells fathers they’re probably
rubbish at sorting the laundry
and ensuring there’s always a
spare tube of toothpaste in
the bathroom, so they
deliberately try to be useless.
Mum picks up the pieces.
It’s a different story in the
canine Heeler household,
where Mum often breezes out
of the house to meet her
friends, leaving Dad in
charge. Bandit may try to
make a work call or watch the
cricket, but in the end he
throws himself into, say,
pretending to be a “horsey”
at an equine-themed
wedding, leading and being
led by his daughters into
worlds of make-believe and
creative messing-about.
In a sense Bluey’s dad —
engaged, emotionally
available, imaginative — is a
traitor to dads everywhere;
but he’s also an inspiration.
Daddy Pig may make you feel
better about your parenting
skills; Bandit makes you want
to do better.
In one episode, Bluey finds
Dad asleep on the floor with a
rugby ball under his arm. He
is dreaming about playing
touch rugby with his mates as
he used to. It’s a flash of
honesty parents rarely get
from kids’ shows: children
simultaneously ruin your life
and become your life. You
probably need to grow up
and get on with it.
The main, heartening
moral of Bluey is that kids —
and especially one-year-olds
like Wilfred Johnson —
probably won’t really be that
impressed by a £147 family
ticket to Peppa Pig World. All
they really need is to feel safe
and loved. They don’t need
their dad to be perfect, but
they do need him to play with
them — and to have fun while
doing it.Watch Bluey on BBC iPlayer
and Disney+W
e probably don’t fit the
image you have in your
mind of people whose
child is taken into care.
We are not alcoholics,
or violent, or drug
abusers. We are well-
educated, middle-class
adoptive parents.
Adoption began as a
dream for us, but turned into a night-
mare.
We were introduced to our two boys
on my birthday. When we met them for
the first time, they greeted us by saying,
“Hello Mum! Hello Dad!” We became an
instant family, and they were perma-
nently placed with us just before Christ-
mas. When we realised we couldn’t have
children of our own, it seemed that the
adoption route was meant to be. This was
a way we could make a difference.
We were matched with two brothers
who were about to be separated. Aged
seven, the older brother would have
remained in foster care, while the three-
year-old would be offered for adoption.
The general desire among adopters forThe PM is right: Daddy Pig is awful. Luckily, tired
fathers like Martin Hemming have a new animated
parenting idol: a cool blue dog from down under
W
hen the prime
minister’s speech to
the Confederation of
British Industry (CBI)
went on a now
infamous tangent leading to
Peppa Pig World, he proved
himself as out of touch as
ever. Because, as far as many
parents are concerned,
Peppa is now pork chops, and
there’s a new, much less
annoying, first family of
children’s TV in town. If Boris
Johnson were seeking to
attract the “knackered mums
and dads” vote, he should
have told the captains of
industry about Bluey.
Bluey, for the uninitiated,
is a cute Australian cattle dog,
a six-year-old blue heeler.
Johnson praised Peppa Pig as
a great example of British
entrepreneurship. In our
post-Brexit, extra-EU trading
world, he’d have been betterBandit, right,
with, from left,
Bluey, mum Chilli
and sister BingoPass on Peppa, dads,
and be more Bandit
at least in my borough, if the
recycling is contaminated
with a single unrecyclable
element — errant banana
skin, or an old mobile phone
— the entire bin will have to
be discarded.
According to the bin men,
anything up to 30 per cent of
our recycling is “corrupted”
in this way — and thus goes
straight into general waste.
We all suspect this is the case,
just as we have the suspicion
that we expend more energy
(and hence generate more
damaging emissions) washing
out the yoghurt pot than we
save by doing so and dutifully
poking it through the right
flap. It hurts us to
acknowledge that our high-
consumption lifestyles can
never be meaningfully
“sustainable” in any sense,
but it hurts even more those
whose dirty business can
never be fully concealed by
this lexical fig leaf.
During the lockdowns the
waste management industry
sought, entirely reasonably,
to reposition itself as one of
the emergency services:
without us, they maintained,
you would be in yet deeper
shit. They have also argued
strongly for incineration
instead of landfill disposal,
despite the obvious impact of
the former on rates of
greenhouse gas emissions.
The bin men and other
manual workers involved in
the industry talked to me
about the human dimension
of detritus — their managers
about how they viewed waste
as “a commodity”, and
therefore just as valuable to
the economy as the high
levels of consumption that
bring it into being.
Personally, I thought this
was mostly a shadow play:
the reality is that London
recycles only about a third of
its waste (10 per cent less than
the national average), while
the latest findings suggest
that it is the large-scale
introduction of incineration
that may frustrate Britain’s
hopes of reaching the
greenhouse-gas reduction
mandated by last month’s
Cop26.
The most enjoyable stage
of my bin bag’s journey was
downstream on the Thames
from the waste transfer
centre at Smugglers Way in
Wandsworth, to the giant
incinerator at Belvedere. In
bright sunlight, out on the
deck of the tug that tows
downstream anything up to
ten massive steel containers
at a time, it was easy to forget
exactly what was inside them.
And indeed, the river men
told me that when they
questioned onlookers on the
subject, they seldom realised
that these were just a few of
those 750,000 tonnes of
compacted rubbish.
This seems bizarre: there’s
scarcely any freight traffic on
the Thames, while the barges
are a lurid orange, difficult to
miss. But then I suspect this is
just another form of our
denial of detritus: we want
our rubbish either to confirm
us in our role as virtuous
environmentalists, or skilfully
commoditising capitalists —
but above all, we want the
flap to click-clack, and to
forget about it altogether.Will-of-the-Dump is on BBC
Radio 4 on Tuesday at 4pmC
lick-clack goes the
kitchen bin flap and it’s
as if some definitive
barrier has fallen into
place in our minds and
we forget — we forget about
our rubbish. You may be like
me, and have a dedicated
recycling bin in your kitchen
as well, in which case where
you deposit your detritus
delivers you either a little
positive stroke — see how
virtuous I am, carefully
discarding this cardboard
packaging — or a tiny demerit:
perhaps I should have
exhaustively washed out that
yoghurt pot, so as to avoid it
going up in smoke?
Because that’s the reality of
what happens to our waste:
the days of extensive landfill
are over. The new solution is
to recycle as much as possible
and incinerate the rest, in the
process generating
electricity. I wasn’t aware of
this before researching a BBC
Radio 4 programme on the
subject, which is not to say
that I wasn’t conscious of my
own lack of awareness, if you
see what I mean.
On the contrary, I’ve
always been intrigued, good
Freudian that I am, by the
nature of the rubbish heap
upon which our civilisation is
built. For the discoverer of
the unconscious, it was the
desire to repress the reality of
our own organic nature — and
together with it, its
derelictions, defecations and
eventual death — that
resulted in the refinements of
society. But surely: as it is to
the individual, so it is to the
collective — if we didn’t forgetBluey’s
dad
makes
you want
to be a
better
parent
about that empty yoghurt pot
the second we discarded it,
we might not be able to get on
with our important economic
role as consumers, and buy
another full one.
Following the strange
odyssey taken by my trash
brought me into contact with
modern Britain’s
untouchables: the bin men
who collect our rubbish (and
recycling); the waste
managers who sort the
sheepishly sustainable from
the goatishly gone and
compact the latter — and in
London, where I live, the
river men who transport no
fewer than 750,000 tonnes of
detritus down the Thames
every year to Belvedere, in
Kent, where still others
operate a Brobdingnagian
array of cranes and grabbers
to load it into an incinerator
that makes Dante’s
conception of the inferno
pale in comparison.
I was shocked by the aggro
the bin men said they
suffered: yummy mummies
rounding on them because
their trucks “block”
residential streets, or
apoplectic householders
abusing them because they
haven’t emptied a recycling
bin. But in the first instance: if
the bin men don’t block your
road, your own waste will
back up until it’s overflowing
your bin, while in the second,We adopted
two boys. Eight
years later, we
gave one back
When Eleanor Bradford’s son started making
life hell, the system failed her family miserably
Will Self at the Belvedere
incinerator in Kent, where
London’s rubbish is burntbabies and young children means social
workers are forced to make tough deci-
sions. But a baby wasn’t on our priority
list, and we were more than willing to
take both boys and keep them together.
What’s more, we shared a love of the out-
doors with them, and they even looked a
bit like us. It was a perfect match.