A Good Mother explores the power of maternal love from the point of view of Nicci, a young woman who lost her own mother as a young child and was brought up in care. Like many teenage care-leavers she was forced to face the adult world without help or support once she left the system. With no-one to turn to she is groomed and exploited by people she regards as her surrogate family. Years later, after she has turned her life around, the tragic events that unfolded during her time as a lost, lonely care leaver return to threaten her life, her marriage and the safety of her son.
I first became interested in the plight of care leavers after my husband took a three year job in Kenya and I volunteered at a Nairobi based charity called I Afrika, which rescues, houses and schools street children. When I heard about the amazing work they were doing I offered to come in once a week to run creative writing sessions for the children. The director hoped that putting their life stories down on paper would help them to come to terms with some of the terrible trauma they had been experienced. The children loved the sessions but their stories were so heart rending that I wanted to do more to help with their day to day lives. I ended up getting deeply involved in the organization, and my husband spent every Sunday afternoon teaching the children to swim. Some of the children that Afrika rescues are as young as four and although they have been traumatized by the horrors of life on the streets it is remarkable to see how quickly they respond to being in a loving environment, eating good food, going to school, wearing clean clothes and having the chance to play with toys, live without fear and be children again. For many it is the closest they have ever come to living in a family and in some ways their needs, although complex, are clear.
A raft of different problems arises when they reach eighteen and are ready to go out into the world. I Afrika helps some to go on to university or vocational training, and supplies others with barrows or bicycles to help them to earn a living as delivery boys but the director is aware that helping with the practicalities of life is not enough. Despite having extremely limited resources, he also devotes a huge amount of time and effort to supporting the children emotionally as they take their first shaky steps into adulthood, a time when a veneer of bravado masks the naïve and vulnerable teenagers they are inside. He recognizes the fragility of their lives during the transition to independence and is currently raising funds to build a halfway house to provide them with at least some of the support that teenagers with loving parents take for granted. It was really inspirational to see adults who grew up at the centre coming back to share their skills with the children currently in I Afrika’s care and to hear them speak about being part of the extended I Afrika family.
When we returned to the UK I was shocked to discover how limited the support for care leavers can be in this country. I read about eighteen year olds who were given flats but who ended up homeless because they had no idea about paying bills or managing their money, or whose homes and lives were taken over by unscrupulous gangs involved in ‘County Lines’ drug dealing.
For those of us lucky enough to have supportive families it is almost impossible to imagine how it feels to have no safety net at all, nowhere to go at Christmas, no-one to give you a hug, a hot meal or a bed when things get tough, no one to care or even to notice when you disappear.
It was this notion of teenagers dropping off the radar after they leave care which really disturbed me, and which formed the basis of the plot for A Good Mother. What really happened to eighteen year old Nicola Cahill before she became a mother and turned her life around? What is the terrible secret from her past which haunts her life now that she is married and trying for a baby with her wealthy husband? Why does she refuse to discuss the lost years after she left care? Why does she fob off questions about the identity of her son’s father with a lie about a one night stand with a nameless stranger?
Sam Hepburn read modern languages at Cambridge University and, after a brief spell in advertising, joined the BBC as a General Trainee. She worked as a documentary maker for twenty years and was one of the commissioners for the launch of BBC Four. Since then, she has written several books, including psychological thrillers Gone Before and Her Perfect Life, and novels for young adults and children. She won the 2017 CWA Margery Allingham Short Story award and has been nominated for several other prestigious prizes, including the CILIP Carnegie Medal for her YA thrillers.
Sam has worked and travelled widely in Africa and the Middle East, and is a trustee of the Kenyan’s children’s charity, I Afrika. She now lives in London with her husband and children.
