Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
1 Family Affair
2 Different
3 Friends Indeed
4 A Bad Reputation
5 This Isn’t Right
6 Taking Action
7 Dark Days
8 New Discoveries
9 Diagnosis
10 Something’s Got to Give
11 Gone Too Far
12 A Memorable Winter
13 The Only Way Is Up
14 This Isn’t Working
15 Magical Dogs
16 One Very Special Dog
17 Happy Ever After?
18 A Dog Called Sox
19 Back to School
20 Home at Last
21 An Epic Day Out
22 The Last Word
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Adorable Labrador Retriever Cross Sox truly is a dog in a million. When Toby Turner, a withdrawn and anxious 6-year-old with autism, was excluded from school for the third time, his family hit rock bottom. Toby felt so upset by his own aggression, he told his parents they would be better off without him. Then Toby was introduced to Sox and they immediately connected. Sox gave Toby a reason to live and brought colour and light back into his world.
This is the heartwarming story of one amazing little boy and a very special dog.
Vikky Turner worked as a nursery nurse at her local school until taking time off to help support her son, Toby, who has autism. She lives in Oxfordshire with her husband, Neil, who is an IT manager, and their children: Lauren, 18, Joe, 16, Toby, 11, and Ollie, 8. They also share their home with Sox the dog. Vikky now enjoys volunteering as a speaker for the charity Dogs for Good, sharing Toby and Sox’s story and the amazing work the charity does for others around the UK.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473528666
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Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing,
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Ebury Press is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © Neil and Vikky Turner 2016
Cover photography © Ben Langdon/Dogs for Good
Jacket design by Two Associates
Neil and Vikky Turner have asserted their right to be identified as the authors of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Extracts From Dogs For Good website copyright © 2015 Dogs For Good formerly Dogs for the Disabled
First published by Ebury Press in 2016
www.eburypublishing.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781785032004
For Sox, for changing our lives
The summer I was sixteen, I fell head over heels in love. The object of my affection had a fine set of white teeth and an affinity for ball games, and there was something in the way he stared at me with his deep-brown eyes that told me he would never let me down and would always be there for me. He was gorgeous, athletic and fun-loving, with glossy blond hair I could have stroked for hours.
His name was Dusty, and he was a Golden Retriever.
He belonged to a young man named Neil Turner and – in the beginning, at least – it was probably fair to say I was more interested in the dog than the man. But without that loyal and faithful hound, Neil and I might never have got together.
That was the first time a dog changed my life – saved my life, in a way.
It wouldn’t be the last.
‘You remember Neil, don’t you, Vikky?’
I looked up from where I was sat on the sofa in Mrs Turner’s living room. I had the Turners’ cat, Sophie, nestled on my lap, and was fondling Dusty’s golden ears with my fingers as he sat faithfully by my side. The Turners were old family friends – a friendship forged when Mrs Turner, who had been my primary school teacher when I was eight, once put me on detention for talking too much, and she and my mum had met after school to discuss my chatterbox tendencies. From this unlikeliest of scenarios a friendship blossomed, and as a child I’d sometimes played football with the Turners’ son, Neil, in their back garden, as our mothers talked. But Neil was a few years older than me, and it had been several years now since I’d seen him properly. I remembered him as the bus monitor from my lower school – a kind, gentle boy, who, when a girl was once injured, had stepped up and immediately said, ‘I’ll carry her home,’ and he did. He had a heart of gold, but since he’d moved on to the upper school and his A levels, I’d hardly seen him.
I barely recognised him now. At eighteen, Neil Turner was a man. That summer of 1988 he walked into his parents’ lounge dressed in his tennis kit, all long-limbed and athletic, and somehow seemed to bring the glorious sunshine glowing outside in with him. He had brown tousled hair and a boyish grin that reached his green eyes. He grinned at me as I sat on the sofa, and seemed to be as taken aback as I was at the transformation before him. I was sixteen then, and looked rather different from the gawky schoolgirl he used to monitor on the bus. These days I had bobbed brown hair and teenage curves, and for a beat or two we just smiled at each other, before I ducked my head and turned my attention back to Dusty’s floppy ears. I could feel my heart hammering suddenly in my chest. I’d felt a connection, immediate, like love at first sight, and its power was somewhat disconcerting.
Dusty, meanwhile, panted by my side, beaming at me with his doggy teeth and lolling pink tongue, and seeming to encourage me with every breath he took.
Nonetheless, if it wasn’t for my little brother, Nicholas, that fleeting glimpse of Neil in his tennis kit might have been it. It was the summer I’d completed my GCSEs, and the empty, long hot months stretched before me, with all their potential for lazy days and lie-ins. But I was an attentive sister, and I got up early every day to walk Nicholas to his school bus stop. My brother was four years younger than me, and his learning difficulties meant he attended a special school. He didn’t have a ‘label’ as such – there weren’t really labels back then, the way there are today – but he’d always struggled to succeed in a mainstream school and so from a very early age he’d received special educational help. And help from me, too; I was often the only one who could get him to do some schoolwork as we sat together at the kitchen table, him battling to form his letters and do his sums. Walking him to the bus stop was just another way I could help.
As it turned out, Neil had noticed my daily sortie to the bus stop. And so, that summer, after our acquaintance had been renewed in his parents’ lounge, I suddenly found that he and his dog happened to be out for their daily stroll whenever Nicholas and I were walking to the bus stop. We would ‘just happen’ to meet. (Neil later confessed to me that he and Dusty walked in circles – lots of circles – that summer in his effort to cross our path.)
It would always go the same way. Dusty would bound up to me, with his tail wagging and his doggy mouth grinning, like Cilla Black in a blonde fur coat. He was a truly lovely dog, just adorable. In his mind, the world was full of 53 million friends he hadn’t met yet, but every walk gave him an opportunity to try. After I gave him lots of fuss, my eyes would travel along the lead attached to his collar, to where Neil stood behind him, patiently waiting for me to finish greeting his dog, a shy smile playing over his lips. And then he’d ask if I wanted to come with him to walk the dog, and the two of us would fall into step, with Dusty leading the way. We’d walk round and round the small village we lived in, Scraptoft in Leicestershire, until we knew every path like the back of our hands, talking nineteen to the dozen as the summer sun warmed our skin.
That connection I’d felt in the living room was still there. It really was love at first sight; there is no other way to explain it – that’s just how it was. As we talked, we discovered we had the same aims and values in life. And we got on really well; we never argued. When we were apart, we missed each other like crazy – and when you miss being with someone, a lot, then you know you’re meant to be with them. For me, from the moment we started walking that wonderful dog together, I didn’t think there was any question that we were going to be anything else but together. Forever. It was a done deal, just like that.
And so, that summer, for all those glorious weeks, Neil asked me out on dates and we courted, in an old-fashioned way, and I watched him play tennis and cricket and all kinds of other sports too. I told him about the Youth Training Scheme I was going to do, come September; I had a placement at an all-girls’ school as a teaching assistant, the first step in a career I was hoping to forge in child development. The thing I knew above all else was that I wanted to work with children – I loved everything about them, and I think helping my younger brother had probably inspired me too.
In turn, Neil told me all about his plans: he would be off to Leeds University at the start of the academic year to study electrical engineering as part of a three-year degree. Three years seemed an awfully long time, and Leeds an awfully long way from Scraptoft. But we made it work. Every other weekend I travelled up to Leeds to see him, and we kept the flame of our budding relationship burning bright. Nevertheless, it was hard, and I missed him desperately.
One wintry weekend in the early months of 1989, during the second term of Neil’s first year, my latest visit to Leeds drew to a close. As all Sundays were back then, it was a bleak evening. I turned to him, somewhat in despair at the thought of another week apart.
‘I don’t want to go home!’ I cried.
Unexpectedly, Neil looked straight at me with an oddly serious look on his face. ‘Marry me, then,’ he said, deadpan.
The proposal was a surprise, and we left it at that, almost as a joke – but his words fogged in the cold air, like promises you could reach out and touch. And so I asked him about it a couple of days later when I rang him.
‘Did you really mean that?’ I said to him on the phone, the hope catching in my throat.
‘Yeah,’ he said, as matter-of-fact and down-to-earth as he always was.
I took a deep breath. ‘The answer’s yes,’ I told him.
We went ring shopping the very next weekend. I was seventeen, which seems so young now, looking back, but I was sure about this man – and I have never been so sure of anything, before or since. He gave me a beautiful engagement ring, a pale-blue sapphire surrounded by diamonds, and for the rest of his time at Leeds we were engaged to be married. While Neil completed his degree, I finished my one-year YTS placement, and then did a two-year course in child development, just as I’d planned. We both graduated the same summer, in 1991, and spent four and a half weeks of the long holiday in France, living on a shoestring and a prayer.
Moving in together after the summer was an obvious next step. And it wasn’t just a financial decision, or even necessarily to do with us as a couple, if I’m being completely honest. I came from quite a difficult background, you see, as my father was an alcoholic. He was depressed, and often suicidal. Neil was aware of everything that was going on at home, and he was in many ways my protector, taking me away from it all. Things were very, very tough at home at that time, and I knew Neil was keen to get me out of that situation. I had grown up with it, so I always thought of myself as tough and resilient, but he could see that the softer side of me was getting hurt. We both felt our own place would offer sanctuary not only to me, but also to my mother and little brother, should they need it. Moving out became a priority.
Neil had been sponsored through university by an electronics and software company and, as it happened, as well as offering him a job post-uni, they also offered him a relocation package, where they would cover many of the costs of buying a house. It would have been looking a gift horse in the mouth not to take them up on it. Neil’s dad pitched in to help with the deposit, and my parents bought us a bed, and some friends of the family gave us a dining suite and two chairs. There was so much generosity that, in the end, the standing joke was that we moved into our house for the £15 it cost us to buy a secondhand fridge-freezer.
The house was a bay-fronted, three-bed semi in Leicester and it was a DIY dream – or nightmare. We moved in just before the Christmas of 1991, and the cold was like nothing I’d ever known. There was no heating, and the toilet was outside. We would have to sit in bed with a hairdryer, running it under the bedclothes to warm them up, and there would be ice on the inside of the windows. But it was home – it was our first home – and for that reason it will always be special.
Because family is really important to me, right from the off I was thinking, I’ll either have a baby or some cats … As Neil put it: cats it was. Two ginger girl moggies, Meg and Tarragon – whom we nicknamed ‘Taz cat’ – joined us in our new home. They were sisters, but you’d never have known it to look at them; I think we got the largest and the smallest kittens from the litter. Meg was a skinny little thing, and Taz cat was huge. They were both almost feral when we got them – they were rescue cats – and they spent most of their time hiding beneath the telly. But one day, when I’d had some time off work from my job as a nursery nurse and had devoted it all to coaxing them out from their hiding place and giving them some love, I managed to persuade them to soften. Neil came home to find them both on my knee, and from that point on we were inseparable.
Both the cats were bonkers. I’d have to eat my breakfast in the middle of the room because, if I went anywhere near a counter or a wall, the cats would scale the surface and leap onto my shoulder to nestle there – and they wouldn’t want to get off when the time came for me to go to work. Neil and I did loads of DIY in that house – knocking down walls, putting a bathroom into one of the bedrooms so we didn’t have to use the outside loo and so on – and Meg would sit on my shoulder through it all; I’d literally be power-drilling holes in a brick wall with the drill in one hand and Meg on my drilling shoulder, like some kind of piratical parrot. They were a great team, too: Meg used to go out hunting huge moths, and she’d bring them indoors to show off to her sister, who would promptly eat the sacrificial offering and send Meg out for another. Taz cat was always eating. She got so large at one point that we had to buy a small dog flap for her to get in and out of the house. We put her on a diet, dry food only, but then she’d go off exploring and come in smelling of canned cat food, having charmed her way into some stranger’s home. Oh, they were wonderful cats! Dusty lived with Neil’s parents, so the cats were our only pets, and all the more beloved for it.
In January 1993, a few months after my twenty-first birthday, my dad committed suicide. It wasn’t unexpected, but it was still a shock. It meant that he wasn’t around when, on 22 May 1994, Neil and I finally married. We had wanted a small wedding, but Dad had always been keen on a big family knees-up, and in the end we compromised and used some of his inheritance to stage the day he’d wanted for us. He had always said it was his dream to walk me down the aisle; it was my mum who did.
I saw a fortune-teller in the run-up to the wedding. She was based way up in Yorkshire and didn’t know anything about us, yet she described my wedding dress to a tee – even though only Mum and I had seen it – and she also told me: ‘Your dad will be there.’ And so I still believe he was, to this day. As I walked down the aisle of the village church in Scraptoft, in my cream silk Ronald Joyce dress and ivory veil, watched by all the villagers, who’d crammed into the church till there was standing room only, I believe he was with me. I believe he was there as Neil and I exchanged our vows in the sunlit vestry, with Neil dressed in a handsome burgundy waistcoat and a dark morning suit. I believe he was there as we lit a candle just for him, after the ceremony. All the family were there, wishing us well. It was one of the happiest days of my life.
Neil and I always planned a large family; it was something we often used to talk about. Even though both of us had only one sibling each – Neil has an older sister – we wanted a bigger family than that for ourselves. I was sure I wanted an even number of children, and Neil began negotiating from a starting position of five kids, so four seemed a good compromise even before we got going …
Given these large-scale plans, it was perhaps just as well I fell pregnant when I did, in the autumn of 1996. It was an ‘oopsie’ pregnancy, as we later termed it (I was on the Pill and only just twenty-five, and babies weren’t supposed to be on the agenda quite yet …), but from the moment we found out, we were both dead chuffed. I guess you can always sit there and say, ‘We can’t afford it, we haven’t got time, it’s not the right time …’ so then that ‘decision’ was taken out of our hands, which was actually perfect. All three grandparents-to-be were thrilled, as this was to be the first grandchild for all of them.
During my pregnancy I used to lie on the sofa in the evening and Taz cat would lie heavily across my bump, like a warm ginger blanket. If the baby kicked, she would jump off and gaze quizzically at my bump. She would always climb back on, though. From the word go, we all felt a lot of love for the new little life growing inside me.
Our daughter, Lauren, was born on 13 August 1997. She was three weeks late, and it wasn’t an easy birth by any means – I was induced, spent an entire day in theatre, endured a Ventouse not once but twice, as well as forceps – but after it was all over, when I held my newborn baby in my arms, I turned to Neil and said, ‘I could do all that again.’ (For the record, he looked at me with utter astonishment!) But she was worth it. She came out screaming her head off – and no wonder, after all that – but the moment they laid her on my chest and I said, ‘Come on, Lauren, that’s enough,’ she just stopped crying. She was calm and went straight to sleep for 12 hours. You could almost hear her thinking, when I spoke, I recognise that voice, and then she nestled into me and dropped off.
I remember looking down at her as she lay peacefully in my arms, sleeping such a sound, sound sleep. She had a mop of jet-black hair and was just gorgeous. I remember telling her her name: Lauren Turner. We chose it because we thought it was a strong name. We’d envisaged it on a name plaque on an office door, and we thought – whoever she might become – that Lauren Turner sounded like someone who could take on the world, and win. That was my little girl, all 7lb 13oz of her.
I loved being a mum. I absolutely loved it, from the very start. As Neil had changed jobs to become a freelance software engineer in the airport industry – which basically doubled his income – I was lucky enough that after the birth I didn’t have to go back to work, so my entire focus was on my baby. With my child-development background, I was aware of the usual milestones and Lauren hit them all dead on the dot, if not ahead of the curve. She was always smiling and giggling, and I used to talk to her all the time, as Taz cat curled around my legs, fascinated by the newest member of our family. Meg, sadly, wasn’t around by then – tragically she’d been hit by a car when she was only a couple of years old – but Taz cat, in all her enormous girth, was an ever-reassuring presence for me as a new mum. She seemed to nod sagely at all I did, and was always available for a cuddle on the sofa after Lauren had gone to bed.
In the spring of Lauren’s first year, I told our baby all about the new house we were moving to. Daddy and I had fallen in love with it, I told her animatedly, and I described the beautiful, four-bedroom, red-brick detached home that would soon be ours – and Taz cat’s. We moved in on our fourth wedding anniversary. It was on the other side of Leicester, close to the biggest Marks & Spencer in Europe. (No wonder we had fallen in love with it!)
Lauren continued to flourish in our new home. She spoke early, and by eighteen months was speaking in fluid full sentences. She was very chatty – just like her mum – and extremely independent. It wasn’t long before I had some more news for her: she would soon have a baby sibling to play with.
Joe was another ‘oops’, but another welcome surprise. He was born on 26 January 2000, when Lauren was two and a half. He was huge, a big biffer of a baby at 9lb 10oz, and, like Lauren when she was born, had a head full of thick dark hair. And he was hungry. Oh my, was he hungry! He ate all the time, and when he wasn’t eating, he was screaming. To say he was hard work as a baby would be something of an understatement …
To be honest, though, I think he just wanted to move. Because, as soon as he hit three months and could roll to where he wanted to go, he was much happier – and quieter! A couple of weeks after accomplishing the roll, he was commando-crawling, and once he was up, he was off, and he was happy. He was a very active baby – he had been in the womb, too; he never stopped kicking and rolling – and one of his favourite pastimes was chasing the cat. Taz cat was pretty docile, so she endured all his attentions, even letting him tickle his face with the end of her tail as the pair of them curled up under a table together. Joe reached all his physical milestones super-quickly. Like Lauren, he spoke early too. It is with some amusement that I recall his first word, as it says a lot about me and my house-proud nature. Not for Joe the likes of ‘Mummy’ or ‘Daddy’ or even ‘Lauren’. Oh no! Joe’s first word? ‘Hoover.’
Lauren was a major part of his life, nonetheless. She was an ideal toddler, and had a nurturing nature from day one of her little brother’s life. I could leave Joe on a playmat while I nipped upstairs to get something, and I’d come down and Lauren would be talking to him or singing to him – it was so sweet. She was such a caring child. I remember her nursery calling me in once to discuss a problem. Instinctively, I was worried – What’s she done …? – but it turned out their concern was that, if someone snatched something from Lauren, she’d just say, ‘It’s OK, you can have it.’ She had to be taught to make others wait their turn.
By the time Joe was born, Lauren’s hair had become platinum blonde and curly – Joe’s would later follow the same way – and she was the cutest little girl you can imagine. She learned to write and draw from a very young age and she would write little Post-It notes to us and stick them near our bedroom door: ‘I love you Mummy’ – things like that. We were a very affectionate family.
As Joe grew older, one thing I really noticed about him was his desire for eye contact. He used to pull my face – anyone’s face – towards him to talk. I remember Neil’s sister Helen saying, ‘He always looks straight at you; it’s almost as though he looks into your soul when he’s talking to you.’ Joe always had a need for cuddles too, almost a physical need. He’d be sitting in his pushchair and say, ‘I need a hug,’ and you’d have to give him a hug there and then and he would just melt. Then he’d say, ‘I feel better now,’ and carry on with his day.
The only cloud in our lives was that Neil’s job in the airport industry meant that he often had to work away from home, and would be absent for long periods of time. As I had done the first summer we fell in love, I missed him like crazy whenever we were apart. And, no wonder, the children did too. All this came to a head in the summer of 2001, when Lauren, Joe and I walked past a factory one evening. There were no vehicles in the car park and Lauren turned to me in confusion and said, ‘Where are all the workers?’
‘They’ve gone home,’ I replied.
‘Why?’ she said.
‘That’s what people do when work has finished,’ I explained.
She looked up at me, her fiercely intelligent green eyes intensely puzzled. ‘My daddy doesn’t come home,’ she said bluntly.
Well, how could we ignore that?
We started house-hunting for somewhere between Leicester, where the kids’ grandparents lived, and Neil’s work, which was based at Heathrow. Bicester was the answer, and we ambitiously took on a huge mortgage on a beautiful five-bedroom detached property. We moved in September 2001 and the future seemed rosy. But ten days later, due to the tragic events in America on 9/11, Neil lost his job.
It was a stressful time, to say the least. Aside from our shared horror and shock at what had taken place in the US, both the kids got chickenpox, Lauren missed out on a school place, we were financially under a lot of pressure, and every single day Neil was job-hunting without success. Having essentially lived apart for the past few years, we were also suddenly thrust into each other’s pockets in a kind of hothouse situation, where all the stress was magnified. I went back to work for a bit to help out, doing a term of supply as a nursery nurse at a local school, and then more cover for them after that. In many ways, it was make-or-break for us as a family. But we made it. After six hard months, Neil managed to get another job and, slowly but surely, our fortunes started to improve again.
While we had struggled to get ourselves back on an even keel, our plans for a large brood of children had naturally taken a backseat. But as the Christmas of 2003 approached, I felt confident enough to broach it with Neil once again. As our little family of four sat around the dinner table one evening, Lauren and Joe chattering away happily to each other, I turned to Neil and said quietly, ‘Do you think we can have another one?’
My husband’s lovely green eyes rested on our two angelic-looking blond-haired kids; I didn’t doubt that he couldn’t help the smile that came easily to his face. He looked back at me with such love in his eyes.
‘How can we say no?’ he told me. ‘How can we not want any more like that?’
I came off the Pill that same night. Two weeks later, Neil and I went to his office Christmas party, and two weeks after that, I found out I was pregnant.
Toby Turner was on his way.
‘You’re looking positively blooming, Vikky!’
I laughed and rubbed my burgeoning belly, swollen with pregnancy. ‘Well, thanks very much,’ I said to the other mum at the school gates, accepting the compliment with a friendly smile, which she returned in kind. ‘Three kids are certainly going to keep me busy, come October.’
As if in agreement, Toby shot out a foot and gave me a gentle kick. I loved playing with his kicking feet so I stroked my bump affectionately. He’d only recently started sticking his foot out; I would tickle it until it went back in, and then he’d stretch it out again and we’d do the whole little routine from the top.
My friend and I got chatting about other things as we waited for our children to emerge from the school – the weather, the upcoming school fete, everything and nothing. It was always so sociable at the school gates and everybody talked to everybody. For a chatterbox like me, it was a real highlight of the day.
I saw Lauren emerge from her class guided by a cover teacher, Pam, and gave her a wave. She’d settled in brilliantly after a shaky start as a youngster, when she’d been quite clingy, and was now flying high in Year Two. Both she and Joe were great readers – somewhat academic pupils even at their tender age – and I knew Joe, who was now attending the pre-school attached to Lauren’s school, was just itching to join his sister in the main classes. He would start reception that coming September of 2004 and already I could tell he would take the whole thing in his stride.
I strolled over to collect Lauren, Joe running ahead of me as usual, sporty as ever, and yelling his head off, ‘Lauren! Lauren! Lauren!’ Pam looked up at our noisy approach and gave me a broad, genuine smile. She was a really warm woman, with dark curly hair and glasses, and was someone you immediately felt at ease with. All the staff at the school were nice – and I knew many of them as colleagues, as I was still doing the odd bit of supply cover for the school as a nursery nurse – but Pam was particularly lovely. The very first time I’d met her, earlier in the year, she’d showcased her generous nature, and I’d never forgotten it. One lunchtime Lauren had told me that she wasn’t feeling very well and needed to go home; I’d replied that was fine but we’d need to walk because I didn’t have the car. It was only a fifteen-minute stroll for us, but Pam had overheard and the first thing she said to us was, ‘I’ll drive you home.’ I thought that was a very special thing for her to do, in her lunch hour, and I’d always found her a very giving lady. She always had time for everybody.
‘Lauren! Lauren! Lauren!’ Joe yelled again, at his typical ear-splitting volume, and both Pam and I burst out laughing at his exuberance. Ever since he had learned to talk, Joe had turned into something of a motor mouth. Very, very talkative, he never, ever shut up! He was very short, and very loud, and pretty much what you got with Joe was a mouth on legs. No wonder his family nickname was Gobby the Hobbit.
‘Lauren! Lauren! Lauren!’ he called again, and I guided the two of them slowly out of the playground, simultaneously shaking my head at Joe’s chattiness and giving Pam a cheery wave goodbye, as Joe yakked nineteen to the dozen at Lauren, telling her all about his day. Lauren, to be honest, struggled to get a word in edgeways. I called time by asking each of them what they’d like to do with the weekend ahead.
‘Swimming!’
‘Soft play!’
‘Safari park!’
‘The zoo!’
The answers came thick and fast. I liked to keep the kids really active, giving them every opportunity I possibly could, and so our weekends and half-terms and holidays tended to be crammed with days out and themed activities and special events. It wasn’t unheard of, during a holiday, for me to take the kids out every single day, so that come the Thursday of the half-term week, when I excitedly asked the children, ‘What shall we do today?’ they simply replied, ‘Can we not just stay at home, please, Mum?’ The three of us – along with Neil when his work schedule allowed – would spend hours visiting museums and libraries and local farms and more. It was part of what I loved about being a mum: showing them the world, letting them discover who they were through what they liked and what they could learn. I was determined that the new baby wouldn’t slow us down one bit.
And he didn’t. Toby was born on 14 October 2004 and he was a dream. I remember holding him for the first time, utterly adoring this new baby, and the midwife saying to me, almost in surprise, ‘Gosh, you’re on your third child and you still look like you’re so in love!’
Frankly, I was. We joke now that Toby looked a bit like a chicken when he came out – he was late, and his skin hung off him in a scraggly way, as though he’d been a big baby but then lost a bit of weight towards the end; maybe because he was late and things weren’t working quite so well – but I didn’t really see it, skinny and wrinkled as he was. I just saw this beautiful baby with a scattering of rosy blond hair and a funny platinum white stripe down the middle of his head, made up of brighter hair than the rest.
I’d had a Caesarean, and I remember saying to the nurses, ‘Can you please take all these tubes and drips off me so I can hold my baby?’ There was an immediate bond there, straight after his birth, as there was with all my children. To me, it feels as though you somehow open up physically, somewhere in your heart, and hold your children there inside you, for ever after. It’s lovely.
Toby was a brilliant baby. He ate well, slept well, smiled well – he was just straightforward. My schedule was full-on from the moment he arrived, smack bang in the middle of the first term of school. My day would consist of feeding Tobes, putting him in a sling, walking to school and dropping the other two off, walking back, feeding Tobes, changing him, walking back to the school to pick up Joe (who was doing part-time to ease him into big school), coming back, doing lunch, feeding Tobes, feeding the cat, going back to pick up Lauren … That was pretty much all it was, day in and day out. Whenever the other two were at school or tucked up in bed, though, I would take the opportunity to enjoy a cuddle with Tobes. Those times are so precious, aren’t they? You don’t get them back again. I made the most of every second.
His siblings bonded marvellously with him; I couldn’t fault them. There was no animosity, no jealousy – they would simply lie next to him on the floor or sit across from him in his bouncy chair and play with him for hours, making his favourite toy, a soft brown bear (called, imaginatively, Bear), entertain him from morning to night.
Toby hit his development milestones steady as a rock, one by one, and though he was a bit behind Lauren and Joe on reaching them, those two had been so relatively advanced that I didn’t bat an eyelid. It didn’t seem to me that Toby was slow, just that he was ‘normal’. His language in particular was slower to come, and even once he’d mastered individual words, he took longer to get going with more complex language and full sentences. But Gobby the Hobbit spoke enough for us all, and we just thought Toby was taking his time, going at his own pace, and that was absolutely fine with us. Not everyone is the same; Toby was just different.
When Tobes was coming up to a year old, I started to go back to work, doing the odd bit of supply again at the local school, working in partnership with the nursery teacher with the ‘rising fours’ – three-year-old children who will turn four that school year, the year before they start in reception. It was hard work, but it was also really nice. I loved being part of a community and the friendships I made with my colleagues. And I loved working with all the children; there is nothing better than working with kids. As for my own children, Toby took to my return to work like a duck to water. He separated from me with no distress and was looked after by a childminder. The family home ran like clockwork.
But then it came time for Toby to be weaned – and the mechanism in our clockwork suddenly jammed, completely unexpectedly. He came off breastmilk and onto pureed food with no problems, but getting him onto solids was another matter entirely. With Lauren and Joe, we had used ‘finger food’, leaving their meal laid out for them on their high-chair table so they could feed themselves, and that had worked really well so we tried to do the same with Toby.
Big mistake.
My heart dropped to the very bottom of my feet the first time he cried out.
‘Too hot!’ he yelled.
I rushed over to him, guilt propelling me across the kitchen, and tried the food myself, worried I’d hurt him. But it was lukewarm at best.
‘It’s not hot,’ I said to him in confusion. ‘It’s not hot. Try it again, Toby.’
But he cried out, ‘It’s burning, it’s burning!’
I wondered if it was food allergies, and so I tried him on something else – but nothing seemed to work. Whatever we gave him, he would react the same way; this wasn’t an allergy. The food would be too hot, too crunchy, too wet … always it was just ‘too’ much of something. Often when we gave him new foods, he physically gagged on them. He refused point-blank to eat anything crunchy or juicy – apples were a double-whammy no-go area – and even textured foods like mincemeat made him turn away from the proffered spoon. Whereas Lauren and Joe had happily fed themselves, pushing food into their mouths with little fists squishing in every last morsel, Toby refused to touch his food. He would never pick up his dinner himself and eat it; I always had to spoon things to him or cut the food up into little pieces and pass them to him. I became a master at diversionary tactics, reading a book to him while we were at the table or distracting him as best I could to ensure at least some food passed his lips. At every mealtime, I had to make sure I was sat next to him to be certain I was getting enough calories down him.
Nonetheless, despite my best efforts, and our pandering to his peculiar demands for extremely bland food, sometimes he would eat nothing.
Nothing at all.
We battled against him in those cases. As far as we could tell, he was just being a very fussy eater. We would know that, for example, he usually liked a ham sandwich, so we would give him the tiniest square of sandwich and say to him, ‘If you just eat that, you can get down from the table. Just eat that, Toby.’
But he would stand off for a very, very long time, and refuse to give in. His little mouth would remain tightly closed and he would roughly shake his head from left to right, his whole body taut. It became a battle of wills – and we were losing.