Louise Tickle · @louisetickle
28th May 2017 from TwitLonger
For @survivecourt and her lovely son, who died suddenly yesterday
On 1 June 2015, almost exactly two years ago, I met 'Annie' - or as some may know her, Surviving Safeguarding, or @survivecourt – when she made her first ever conference speech telling people how she had fought her local authority to get her baby son returned to her care – and won. She was quaking and sassy and measured and passionate and brilliant, all at the same time.
Annie is, as so many people who've heard her speak at events and done training with her since then know, an extraordinary, courageous, fiercely intelligent, even more fiercely witty and fabulous woman who has suffered too much and overcome stuff that would sink most of us. When I heard her speak I knew instantly that I wanted to tell her story, and still count myself incredibly lucky that she agreed to let me.
Annie and I worked together, in a way I never had before with any subject of a feature, for the next nine months until the piece was finally published in the Guardian. (Link here: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/feb/20/children-taken-into-care-mother-fighting-to-get-baby-back-louise-tickle?CMP=share_btn_link)
During those months in which I learned the painful details of her growing up and came to understand more about how her adult life had at times unravelled, I also met and interviewed her eldest son in the home they shared. He was 18, and an absolute sweetie.
In the article he was known as Peter, and because of reporting restrictions that still obtain, I will continue to call him that here. (I'd be grateful if anyone who wishes to comment and who knows the family would not use his or Annie's real names, please).
Peter was gentle and wry and sometimes sad and sometimes hopeful. And one afternoon, sitting on the sofa in their living room, he told me he was bitterly angry with the way he felt his family and he had been treated by children's services. He said that in his experience, social workers took no account of the detrimental effect of care proceedings on older siblings who were left, essentially, to fend for themselves. He was under no illusions as to the immense pressures that his mum had lived under and the difficulties that had sometimes overwhelmed her. He had always been, as the eldest, the one to support her through the worst times. But he was furious at the damage done by the extended care proceedings, and furious that his family had been split up. He had lost his siblings, and had to endure trauma, stress and deep anxiety over a period of well over a year.
By the time I met him, Peter had left school and knew he wanted to be an actor. He worked really hard going for acting jobs, doing stints as an extra on film and tv sets, working for nothing on plays he loved, working for peanuts as a children's entertainer. He was brilliant with his youngest brother – the baby whom Annie had managed to have returned to her care – and was the only person she trusted to look after him (she paid Peter for this, respecting the childcare he did as proper work) when she started building up her training business, traveling to children's services departments and universities around the country.
Peter was always her rock.
Yesterday morning, Peter died suddenly. Annie is devastated. I am distraught for their family who have come through so many difficulties in the time I've known them, let alone what they endured before.
Annie is a woman with insight, resources, intellect and gifts that her family cannot afford to lose, and what she needs now is support, as a friend put it, from people with strong shoulders and big hands to help hold her over the coming weeks, months and years.
It took such immense courage for Annie to come off benefits and go self employed just a few months back – the anxiety about whether this risk was too much to take on was and is ever-present – but clearly, she won't now be able to work for the forseeable future.
To help in a small, practical way, I've set up a JustGiving page in the hope that we who have known her – and through her, Peter, of whom she was so incredibly proud – will be able to help her with the costs of his funeral and also, importantly, with ongoing financial support for the next few months so that money is the one thing she doesn't need to think about.
https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/survivingsafeguarding
Thank you so much for anything you're able to contribute.
Louise