Precious Read Free Page A

Sierra Leone. Yet at nine days old I am despatched to my first foster home, in the West Country, where my mother fails to visit me for the next two months.
     
    By the time I reach Nanny, aged ten weeks, I am a withdrawn, watchful baby with a mysterious past. Nanny tells anyone who asks that she thinks I am a Biafran.
    Throughout my infancy, I have a number of aliases. When I arrive in Fernmere, my mother introduces me as Anita-Precious Achaba. Three months later, my mother has changed my name to Precious-Anita Eze. Later I find that – according to my birth certificate – my name is actually Precious Anita Williams.
     
    Back in the days when I’m called Anita-Precious Achaba, my mother visits once every three weeks, usually arriving with the man named Rupert, who sometimes refers to himself as my father.
    When I’m eight months old, my mother appears in Fernmere with a new man and says she’s taking me ‘home’ to Nigeria. Nanny cries and pleas with my mother to let me stay but, ignoring her, my mother sweeps upstairs to pack up my toys and clothes.
    Nanny’s family is used to this sort of thing happening. Her grown-up son, Dave, who’s married and has his own kids, tolerates Nanny’s private-fostering but certainly doesn’t encourage it.
    Nanny grieves for me and, several months later, begins scanning Nursery World magazine for a new foster child. And there I am, advertised once again in the magazine’s back pages.
    Shortly after my return to Nanny, West Sussex Social Services despatch a social worker with cheddar-coloured hair to see what we’re all up to. In her report the social worker observes:
     
    July 1972: Visited and was introduced to this coloured child, Precious, by Mrs Taylor. The child has so far not cried and is no trouble at all. A most attractive child.
    Mrs Taylor has fostered children for a number of years. Now that she has an invalid husband to look after, she seems to derive pleasure and light relief by caring for small children, particularly Nigerian children.
     
    A couple of years later, I am reclaimed by my mother once more. Again this reunion doesn’t last long and my mother decides to return me to foster care. This time she does not advertise me in Nursery World but instead rings Nanny up and says, ‘I’m bringing her back tomorrow. I am leaving her with you now until she is old enough for boarding school.’
    Nanny greets us at the door weeping tears of joy. ‘God has sent my little darling back to me,’ she says.
    But Nanny, having thought that my mother really had taken me for good the last time, had replaced me with a little girl from Ghana. This new girl, Effua, sleeps in my bedroom under my silky pink eiderdown. She drinks her Ribena out of my special cup with the built-in curly straw.
    I watch in disbelief as this tiny stranger with the charcoal skin and close-cropped hair sits in Nanny’s lap and follows Nanny around and eats Wagon Wheel after Wagon Wheel, just like I used to. She even has the nerve to constantly talk to and pester my beloved Gramps.
    Effua and I won’t play together nicely, the way Nanny wants us to. We either ignore one another or we scratch, pinch and scream. Nanny doesn’t know what to do. At her age, she can’t cope with two little girls, especially as she has an invalid husband to look after. One of us little coloured girls will have to go. I feel so threatened by Effua, so afraid Effua will become Nanny and Gramps’s new little angel, that I run around the house screaming, and then I begin kicking at furniture, and at people.
    Nevertheless, Nanny chooses me. I hear her telling the grown-ups she feels an ‘affinity’ to me. I don’t know what the word means but I feel like the most important little girl in the world. Nanny begins making arrangements to get rid of Effua and I am moved back permanently into my pink bedroom.
    Effua is sent to live with Aunty Wendy. A new social worker is dispatched to check up on us.
     
    October 1974: I visited