Precious Read Free

hair down to her waist? Chance would be a fine thing.’
    ‘She did. She is coming, Nanny.’
    The truth is, I need Mummy Elizabeth to come. She petrifies me, but my need to believe that my mother loves me and wants me is even greater than my fear of her. It’s vital to me to be able to tell my friends at school, with pretend casualness, ‘My mum’s coming down to take me out at the weekend.’ Then, when one of the bullies on our estate corners me and sneers, ‘Even your own mum don’t want you, you little nig-nog reject,’ I can hold my head up and think, You’re wrong. You’re wrong about me .
    ‘I’m sorry, darling, but she’s not coming,’ Nanny says and her voice has a finality to it that keeps my mouth shut. ‘We’ll have to let Wendy know, love. Go and get your shoes on, darling.’
     
    Aunty Wendy doesn’t have a phone. The only way to relay news to her is to nip round to her house, a two-minute trot away. It’s dark and the trees look like black skeletons. But it’s still so hot that the tarmac warms my heels where they poke over the scrunched backs of my plimsolls. As I run someone says ‘Oi, oi’ and I see a big boy called Wayne standing in front of me, blocking my path.
    He pokes out his elbows, pretends to be scratching inside his armpits, his huge mouth forms into an O and he goes, ‘Ooo-oo-oo! Look at this fuckin’ little chimp runnin’! Where you off to in such a hurry then, you little nig-nog?’
    ‘Nowhere,’ I reply.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    I run and don’t stop running until I reach Aunty Wendy’s front door, which opens before I can even ring the doorbell.
    ‘Aunty Wendy!’
    ‘All right, love? Don’t you look smart! What you all worked up about then? Your mother been already, has she?’
    ‘She hasn’t turned up again. My mother! She’s not coming!’
    ‘What? Again ?’ says Aunty Wendy. ‘It’s a bloody disgrace. Ought to be ashamed of herself! You coming in then, love?’

The Kid Factory
    FOR A WHILE, I am the only coloured girl in the town, but I’m not the only coloured child the town has ever seen.
    Since the 1960s there’s been a little stream of African babies and toddlers being dropped off at the homes of white strangers in West Sussex. Both Nanny and Aunty Wendy have had many private foster babies – almost all of them African and most of them Nigerian.
    Those of us not advertised in Nursery World are advertised on postcards in shop windows. Anyone can send off for us and we begin popping up in white homes throughout the country, especially in Hampshire, Kent, Surrey, Middlesex, Essex and Sussex.
    Few questions are asked of birth parent or foster-parent. Social Services are supposed to be notified, but often aren’t. When alerted, social workers do have to call round periodically to check the coloured foster-kids are being fed, clothed and sent to school – but the foster-parents don’t have to be registered, trained or checked by the police.
    Later, in the 1980s, our numbers in West Sussex will mushroom as more and more local white families catch on to the trend. A boy at my secondary school will brag, ‘We just got one of your lot. Got a bigger knob than a grown man, he has. Made him flop it out for my gran because she wouldn’t believe us till she saw it.’
     
    Private fostering is supposed to be strictly temporary. The birth parents are often recent immigrants from West Africa. Typically they are full-time students by day, struggling to make ends meet by working one or even two night jobs, striving to create a secure home for their children. Once their studies are completed and their financial situation begins to ease, most of them take their babies back.
    My case is a little different. My mother is not, as far as we can tell, a student. She doesn’t appear to be hard up and in fact she says she is from a well-heeled and titled Igbo family in Nigeria. According to her, my father is a civil engineer from a privileged Krio family in