Free Little Prisoners by Casey Watson Page A

other way to communicate.
    I stepped in to untangle the now tumbling mass. ‘Whoah, there!’ I said. ‘Now just stop all this silliness. And “pissy” is a swear word, so we won’t be using that. And, no, if you do what’s on the chart, you won’t get called names any more, which is why we’re doing it, okay? You both got that?’
    It was over in a flash, as I was beginning to understand now. They both straightened their tops and beamed back happily.
    But in reality, it was a tedious process. Each day, between us, Mike, Kieron and I would painstakingly go through the same three routines of how to wash, how to dress, how to brush your teeth properly. And every day it felt, though we were surely making progress, that they had forgotten theskills were had taught the day before, and we’d have to go through them all again. It was beginning to feel like Groundhog Day in our house; tedious, but absolutely necessary. If they were to have any chance of integrating and making friends in their new school, then we needed to teach them these basics, and fast. But it was slow going; if you left them to their own devices – particularly with the dressing – they’d appear with their clothes on back to front, wearing odd socks, and their shoes invariably on the wrong feet. It really was clear they’d never been taught anything .
     
    Anna arrived, bearing the promised school reports, a few days later. And as she warned as she handed the folder over to me, it made for some pretty depressing reading. In fact, it was terrible, really, to think that a school could have all this information to hand, and yet no action appeared to have been taken. The children hadn’t even been given formal statements of special educational needs, which really shocked me. They’d only been classed as ‘school action plus’ which simply meant that because they might be lacking emotionally or intellectually, they needed an extra eye kept on them. Nothing more.
    The report then went on to list the obvious: that the kids were always filthy, and infested with head lice, that their clothes were dirty, smelly and un-ironed and often wet with urine. It also noted – as we’d heard at the first meeting – that the children often complained of having had no breakfast, and would often steal from other children’s lunchboxes. Pitifully, it was also noted that the kids appeared to befriendless, and that other children refused to sit near them in class. Predictably, it finished by commenting that academically both children were way behind their peers.
    I tossed the report back to Anna. ‘This is disgusting! Why the hell didn’t they do anything if they knew about all this?’
    Anna confessed to having as little clue as I did. She tried anyway. ‘I think the whole family had been known to the school for years,’ she said. ‘Two or three generations of them – parents, aunts and cousins. I think they were just classed as one of those unfortunate extended families. Underprivileged, more than anything. Just a bit chaotic. And there was never an issue with attendance for them to feel bound to investigate. One hundred per cent attendance, by all accounts.’
    ‘I’m not surprised!’ I almost snorted. ‘School must have been like sanctuary – the only place they’d find some food and interaction!’
    It beggared belief but, at the same time, it felt all too believable. They turned up every day, just like clockwork, so they weren’t truants. Just ‘unfortunates’. Not Anna’s fault, I know, but still infuriating.
    But if I accepted that Anna wasn’t personally to blame for the welfare of these children having been overlooked for so long, to the kids themselves, she was very much the enemy. Keen to connect with them before she left, she had me take her in to see them, where they were sitting in their now habitual huddle, on the sofa, flicking listlessly (the effect of that morning’s Ritalin) through comics.

    At the very sight of her, they bunched