It’s been a while since I’ve managed a book review. Because I’m always too absorbed in the job.

I bought this book a couple of months ago, having read a review somewhere, and have been carrying it around in my backpack ever since. Unopened, naturally. There is always something more important.

Last Saturday was spent travelling to our holiday location in France. On Sunday I sat under a palm tree and read this book in one sitting. I wept all the way through. That possibly tells you something about how much I needed a holiday, but it tells you more about the power of this book. We do this job because we care about the children at the heart of the system. but we sometimes (often) become disconnected from the reality. Partly to cope, and partly because for most of us in the job our lived experience is nothing like the experience of a child in care (care experienced lawyers are few and far between).

Whilst we need our protective shell to survive, sometimes its important to reconnect with the reality.

What struck me most about this account of Ashley John-Baptiste’s childhood, was that his narrative was filled with well intentioned adults trying to do right by him, but somehow (with one or two exceptions) they failed either to really connect with his world or to make change for him. Compared with some of the horror stories we see and read about, Ashley endured comparatively few placement moves – each one of those moves in a different way contributed to a breaking of his trust in the adults who were in control of his life – to a lawyer like me, used to seeing chronologies showing children bouncing from placement to placement, becoming more and more dysregulated and disengaged, it would be easy to think ‘actually, he got off comparatively lightly’. Which on one level is true – on paper, few moves, relatively long lasting placements, limited overt complaint from the child. And yet. This book tells us that even this comparative stability for a child in foster care is really not good enough. Ashley learned to suppress his wishes and feelings, in order to avoid another move, to survive. And nobody seemed to notice, head down, tick, tick go the boxes. But a child isn’t a box to be ticked. And there is a sense (which I think the book occasionally acknowledges) that some of the adults did see more, and did go above and beyond box ticking, even if they struggled to bring Ashley along with them or to explain the whats and whys to him.

For all the things that adults got wrong for Ashley though, a few key actions made all the difference to him, ultimately getting him back in education, keeping him more or less on the straight and narrow and facilitating his escape to university. It’s clear that Ashley himself is the one that deserves the most credit for persevering and achieving the success and happiness that he now has, where many others would simply have foundered or spiralled.

Ashley John-Baptiste’s account of his life as a child in foster care reminded me of some important lessons I had forgotten, about the little things that make a difference to kids who can’t be with their parents. But it also made me think about a whole load of things that had never occurred to me before – the unintentional messages, the inadvertent but lasting impact of things said, done or not said and not done by the grown ups. The sense of never really belonging or being loved.  The sense of voicelessness and powerlessness – the realisation that nobody listens, so you might as well just say what they expect or want you to say.

The need to get by rather than to demand or expect better. None of these are things we can say we didn’t know about – we know, intellectually. But once you read this book your theoretical, extrapolated knowledge will come off the page, and you will begin to understand what a childhood in care really means. Now the trick is to hold on to that thought when I’m back in front of my desk, but to do so without crying all over the next social work chronology you read.

Great book, Ashley. Recommended.