For about 15 years, from the early 1980’s to the late 1990’s, I used to do sessions on the Social Services Standby Team. You would cover nights and weekends, as well as doing your fulltime day job.
It always seemed to be
that the oddest and most perplexing cases turned up outside normal working
hours. Nigel was certainly one of those.
One Saturday afternoon,
I received a call from the Charwood Samaritans. They needed the help of a
social worker. However, it was not the sort of problem that the Samaritans
usually dealt with.
Nigel had turned up at
their offices out of the blue in some distress. It had taken them a while to
coax the story out of him. They eventually gathered that Nigel had been living
in some sort of residential facility in a county about 150 miles from Charwood.
They thought he probably had learning difficulties. He told them that one of
the staff had shouted at him, so he had decided to leave. He had packed a few
belongings in a bag and had left.
He had then gone to
the local coach station and had got on a random coach, which had eventually
dropped him off at Charwood bus station. Lost and upset, he had found the first
place that seemed to offer help.
My first step was to
try and find out more about him. If he had left a residential care home, then
he would have been reported as missing. I rang the standby social worker for
the area he had apparently come from to see if they had an alert out on him.
Unfortunately, he was unable to tell me one way or the other.
I decided I would have
to see Nigel, and make an assessment of the situation. If he appeared to be a
vulnerable person, I would then need either to arrange bed and breakfast for
him through the local housing authority, or if necessary, try and find an
emergency residential placement for him until we could return him to his home
area.
When I arrived, one of
the Samaritan volunteers took me through to a side room where Nigel was
ensconced with a cup of tea, three sugars, and a sandwich.
Nigel appeared to be
in his forties. He was wearing an anorak zipped up to his neck and had a round
face and rosy cheeks.
“Hello,” I said to him
gently, and told him my name. He peered up at me through the thick lenses of
his glasses. “I Nigel, thank you” he replied.
I attempted to find
out from him his full name, his address, and a contact phone number. He told me
the place he had come from, but was unable to give me names of carers or a
phone number.
“The bad man shouted
at me,” he said. “I didn’t like it. So I wanted to leave. So I got a coach. I
got off here. Here I am, thank you.”
I asked him if he had
any sort of identification. He shook his head. I asked him if he had any
medication with him. He took a bottle of pills out of his duffel bag and showed
them to me. They were anticonvulsant tablets. They came from a pharmacy in the
town where he said he had run away from.
It was apparent to me
that Social Services would have to look after him until he could be returned to
his home county. He seemed far too vulnerable just to arrange bed and breakfast.
Being many years
before cheap mobile phones were available, I was reliant on the Samaritans to
let me use their phone. They were kind and accommodating. One of them showed me
into a small cubicle which contained a small desk, a phone, and a chair. It was
one of the cubicles the volunteers used when they were manning the Samaritans’
helpline.
I started to make
calls to the social services residential homes that specialised in learning
difficulties. I then had to wait while staff talked to managers and managers
talked to staff.
After a wait, one of
the care homes rang me to confirm that they could accommodate Nigel on an
emergency basis over the weekend, until further enquiries could be made.
I went to see Nigel and explained to him
what was happening. He seemed a bit apprehensive.
“They won’t hurt me? They won’t hurt me? I
don’t like it when they hurt me!”
He suddenly stood up and picked up his
duffel bag.
“I go to the bus station. I get a bus, thank you.”
“It’s OK, Nigel, nothing’s going to happen.
You’ll be safe.”
He eventually calmed down and allowed me to
take him to the care home.
The next day being Sunday, I rang the next
social worker on duty and explained the situation to them. They would chase up
the local authority where he came from and get some more information, and
hopefully arrange for his safe return. And that was the end of my involvement.
I happened to see my standby colleague a
week or two later.
“Remember Nigel?” he said. “I got through
to his local authority. I managed to speak to someone who knew him. They knew
him all right. He’s not from any of their care homes – but they did accommodate
him in one a few weeks ago when he turned up on their patch one weekend saying
that he’d run off from somewhere in another county a long way away. That is,
until they made their own enquiries – and got the same story. Then they sent
him on his way! Once we found this out, we confronted him with it and he left, rather
quickly. I wonder where he is now?”
There is a postscript to this story.
I was speaking to a social worker in a
neighbouring county a couple of years later. I told him the story of Nigel. He
immediately recognised him.
“We put Nigel up in one of our mental
health care homes for about 6 months,” he said. “Then we had a full
psychological assessment done, and it turned out that he had a completely
normal IQ and everything. Then he mysteriously disappeared.”
From time to time I think of Nigel,
traveling the country, turning up in distress, like a lost person with learning
difficulties, in need of care and shelter, being taken in and looked after, at
least until the truth about him was found out, then moving on again. What
drives someone to live their life like that?
He’s not the only one who does it. I knew
of another case which happened in our county, of a young girl, apparently in
her early teens, who presented herself one day, wearing a nightie and clutching
a teddy bear, claiming to have been abandoned. She was placed with foster
carers for several months, until it was discovered that she was actually 25 and
had the tenancy of a flat in another part of the country.
Does it constitute a mental disorder, or is
it simply a means to an end, a way of being looked after without any responsibilities?
How many are there like Nigel and the “little lost girl”? And how many are so
successful that they’re never found out?
This reminds me of that case in America where a young man impersonated a missing boy returned to his family - they made a film out of it - The Imposter. He'd been doing similar things for years - turning up and pretending to be a teenager who needed help. Interesting article in the Guardian about it - http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/sep/28/crime.unitedstates
ReplyDeleteExcellent and informative articles
ReplyDeletekeep them comming