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Nov 2021

Last Updated: 13/11/2021

Harrogate Grandmother's story of unbreakable love of neglected granddaughter

by Nina Meads Lifestyle Editor

| 13 Nov, 2021

Six days before Christmas in 2006, Elizabeth's four-year-old granddaughter came to live with her. She was wearing clothes that were too small for her and was a shadow of the little girl who had once been full of life.

Six days before Christmas in 2006, Elizabeth's four-year-old granddaughter came to live with her in Harrogate.

She was wearing clothes that were too small for her and was a shadow of the little girl who had once been full of life.

Two weeks earlier Elizabeth was contacted by a social worker and asked if she knew Grace had been put into care.

Shocked and devastated, she demanded that her granddaughter came to live with her.

She invited me to hear her incredible story of heartbreak, sacrifice, resilience, but most importantly the unbreakable bond between a grandmother and her grandchild. In this article I have changed all the names to protect their identities.

When I met Elizabeth, I instantly warmed to her. I could tell she was tough, but also incredibly kind, by the way she told me to relax as I perched stiffly on the edge of her sofa.

As she started to tell me her heart-wrenching story, the raw emotion of the trauma both she and Grace had been through was etched on her face.

She said:

"I was contacted by social services to say that Grace had been put into care because her mother had wanted to put her up for adoption.

After a bit of toing and froing I said she could come and live with me, and on December 19, 2006, along came Grace.

She was four-and-a-bit. She was very introvert, which is a sad thing because when we were together, before she went off with her mother and this person, my granddaughter was beautiful and was full of life."

Elizabeth explained that her daughter and Grace had come to Harrogate from Reading to live with her in 2003 after her daughter had left her partner, Grace's father.

Her daughter eventually got her own flat, but Elizabeth regularly looked after Grace, who was born in 2002.

She said:

"Every day I used to pick them both up. Before I went to work I'd take my daughter to work and my granddaughter to nursery and then at the end of the day, I'd do it all again in reverse."

Controlling

However, when her daughter met her new wealthy partner on the internet, she began to distance herself from her friends and family as he became more and more controlling.

And when she eventually married the man, who lived just outside Scunthorpe, in 2005, Elizabeth was completely cut out of their lives.

She said:

"The day of the wedding, the agreement was I was going to bring Grace back with me so they could go on their honeymoon. I had Grace with me and we were on a flight of stairs and I reminded him to get his rings back, as they would need them.

"It was a different person completely, he totally blanked me. He gave Grace a look that if it could have killed, it would have done. And he turned his back and walked away. Up until that point he had been fine with me. It was like Jekyll and Hyde."

Elizabeth didn't want to stop seeing her granddaughter and would stubbornly tell her daughter and new husband that she was going to pick Grace up.

Maniac

But when she rang she wasn't allowed to speak to anyone and was forced to accept that she would have to close the door, as the inconsistency was doing her granddaughter more harm than good.

It later emerged Grace had been told her grandmother had moved to Spain, which was why she could no longer see her.

Elizabeth said:

"He didn't want somebody else's child basically. The man was a maniac. He took all of my daughter's things. For example he gave her a very expensive leather purse for Christmas and told her to go and get her old purse so she could transfer everything into this beautiful new purse he had bought.

"Later that afternoon he took the old purse and some other items and set fire to them. So he was burning and getting rid of her past.

"She had a lot of friends in Harrogate as she was quite an easy-going girl, so he tried to rub out her past. And the only way he could see to do it was to ignore a situation or burn things."

After a year of not seeing her granddaughter, Elizabeth received a call from a woman called Jackie Crawford, from child services in Scunthorpe. She had been given the wrong spelling of Elizabeth's name and an old address.

'Bring her to me'

However, Jackie, who Elizabeth described as "worth her weight in gold", persevered and got in touch with North Yorkshire County Council to help track her down.

Elizabeth said:

"In October 2006 I was sat at my desk, I got this phone call saying 'do you know your granddaughter is in care?'. And we went from there.

"I was shocked, angry, horrified and didn't know what had happened as I had no background to this.

"Jackie asked if she could come and meet me and we chatted. She told me Grace was not a happy child or in a happy place and she needed to have something solid.

"And I said bring her to me, just bring her to me, I'll look after her."

At this stage, Grace had been put into foster care, where sadly she was not given the love and support the little girl so desperately needed.

When her grandmother went to pick her grandaughter up, she was wearing clothes and shoes that were too small for her and she had no coat.

Instant connection

Elizabeth said there had been an instant connection between her and Grace, from the moment she first met her in the hospital after she was born.

She said:

"So when I went to pick her up from the foster home she had been sent to, this poor little thing had come home from school and it was a different child. She seemed smaller.

"She had a couple of Asda bags with some stuff in it and a backpack and that was it. I had to buy her shoes and a coat as she had nothing that was decent. She came to me in her school uniform.

What soon began to unfold was that Grace had suffered at the hands of her mother and stepfather in the year Elizabeth had not been in her life.

Excluded

Elizabeth said:

"She was excluded. She wasn't allowed to partake in family life, for example she would have to sit in a different room on her own with a sandwich and crisps while they had a family meal. If they went out she wasn't allowed an ice cream, yet her half-brother, who was born in 2005, was allowed one.

"A lot of the toys I had given my granddaughter ended up being given to her half-brother.

Elizabeth said Grace was frightened of everybody and everything.

On Grace's first night at her grandmother's, after an evening playing and a bedtime story, Elizabeth was sitting in the lounge watching TV when she heard a tap at the door.

She said:

"I opened the door and she's standing there, saying 'I'm lonely'. I took her back to bed, read her another story and from that day on it just grew and grew.

Inseparable

From this moment, the pair were inseparable and eventually Grace started to regain her confidence and self-worth thanks to the support of her grandmother.

The little girl went on to join a local stage school, where she flourished and won all sorts of competitions.

Fighting back the tears, Elizabeth recalled:

"When Grace was five or six, she did a performance at Harrogate High School. It had to be something they wrote themselves. We wrote a poem between us called 'what did I learn today?'.

"It was a big, dark stage with dark blue curtains. Over the speaker came ''and next is Grace with her own poem".

"She was wearing a top with sparkles on the shoulder. The curtains opened and the light hit her. She took a deep breath and she did the poem. I just fell apart. I was so proud of her.

"These are the things the mother never saw. She will never know. The things that little girl has achieved, it has been through sheer determination.

"Her determination to prove to herself that she is worthy.

"Some of the things that the stepfather would say is "you're not worth anything". If she walked into a room, he would walk out.

"So she began to feel she wasn't worth anything. And you have to build that back up again."

Grace attended a primary school in Harrogate, where she received the headmaster's shield for resilience, which Elizabeth proudly keeps in a display cabinet.

Resilient

She said:

"I've always thought Grace is very resilient. Very stoic.

"I never had any drama with her at all. She's also had her problems. She suffers from a thing called Gastroesophageal Reflux (GER), which is when the body makes too much acid. So when she was doing her A-levels she was also attending the hospital and having cameras stuffed down her throat and she still came out with an A* and As and Bs."

Grace, now 19-years-old, did four A-levels at a Harrogate secondary school and is now studying English Literature at university in Newcastle.

Amazing bond

Elizabeth said:

"My idea was to get her up and out and move her on because I'm an old lady and very stuck in my ways.

"She's had to live with my rules and regulations.

"She is now sharing a house with two other girls and just loving the freedom of it."

At this point Elizabeth's phone started ringing and it was Grace. Even just listening to the affectionate way they spoke to each other on the phone, I could sense their amazing bond.

Sheepdog not a sheep

Elizabeth said:

"One of the things I tried to teach her, because she was so vulnerable, is you are a sheepdog not a sheep. You have a voice. Use your voice. Don't go in antagonising everybody. Don't go in shouting. But if something is wrong explain clearly and precisely what you expect them to do about it.

"And bless her heart, she has managed to do all sorts of things. This is the one who would stand behind me when people would stop me in the street to stay hello.

"And slowly slowly she has grown and developed. She has got her problems, like all teenagers do. Although apparently she's an adult now!

"The upside is all the lovely times we have had together, learning to ride a bike, playing football on The Stray and her shouting "gandma [sic] gandma get your legs out. Doing all sorts of outrageous things, having picnics in the rain and, as things got tight financially, finding things we could do that didn't cost a lot of money."

As Elizabeth didn't officially adopt Grace due to her being a family member, she didn't receive any financial support from social services. Support that she would have received if she had adopted or fostered a child.

Precious time

It meant that Elizabeth eventually had to sell her car and move to council accommodation. This was after she made the decision to cut her hours at work as she didn't want Grace to be in nursery full-time, as their time together was so precious.

Elizabeth said:

"I had no time with her. Where is the point in having a child if you spend all your time saying 'I'll be with you in a minute. I haven't got time. We're doing it later'? I wanted to enjoy her. She wasn't something pretty to sit on a shelf. She was alive and full of mischief and full of fun.

"All that loveliness that was there when I first knew her got knocked out of her the year she lived with her stepfather. And then to come back to me, to get that back again was wonderful."

Best friends

Elizabeth said she lost quite a few of her friends when she started caring for Grace, as she was unable to socialise with them as often.

However, this didn't bother her as she felt her granddaughter was her best friend.

She said:

"We could sit in the room side-by-side and read books or watch a film and not say a word. Because we didn't need to. We were just comfortable. She said one of the things she misses now being away at university is curling up with a box of chocolates and a DVD. That's not a bad relationship to have with your granddaughter.

"I think it's the most wonderful thing I ever did. Every morning when I opened my eyes and she had either climbed into bed with me, or I knew she was pottering around or when she was in her room, was just wonderful.

"The biggest wrench was when she went off to university to find an empty room.

"She's such a lovely child. It sounds like I'm blowing my own trumpet, but the pleasure and joy you get from this is phenomenal.

"Yes it's hard, but oh my God the rewards. To see a child grow and develop and get rid of all that clankiness that was hanging on them when they first arrived. To stand on a stage, to sing a solo, to paint a mural on a bedroom wall, to sit in a car when its pouring with rain, eat your sandwiches and have a laugh at what's going on outside. Just stuff."

Grace's mother and stepfather, who had a second child together, a daughter, in 2007, have since moved to New Zealand and neither her, nor Elizabeth, have any contact with them.

'Grace is my daughter'

Elizabeth said:

"I don't want a relationship with my daughter. I'm afraid she is one of the few people I would quite happily punch. I always thought we were good friends, but apparently not.

"I think it has skipped a generation. Grace is my daughter. She calls me mum.

"So this creature of mine that I thought was my daughter, isn't. I've been asked if I feel sorry for her. Sorry for a woman who packed a small bag and put it in a car and watched her own flesh and blood get into that car and be taken away by strangers? The reason she gave was there was no bond."

We finished the interview talking about Grace's cat, Marmaduke, who sat on the arm of Elizabeth's chair throughout. I liked to think the pet was a source of comfort to Elizabeth and watched over her while Grace was away.

She is truly a remarkable woman, a strong, determined woman. I couldn't help but be moved by her story and her incredible relationship with her granddaughter.

Amazing achievements

Elizabeth said:

"I think the thing that makes me pat myself on the back is seeing all of the amazing things my granddaughter has done. Her achievements.

"Everything we have done together has been phenomenal. And that stacked up is higher than all of the grief, the sorrow and the pain."