Carol Wirdnam tells MARION SAUVEBOIS she feels like a mother and grandmother while fostering children

MIKHAIL, Arianna, Rudi, Cora, O. and D., read the five embroidered stockings lining the wall in the conservatory. One for every one of her grandchildren, Carol Wirdnam announces with obvious pride at her steadily growing clan.

D. has not yet joined the family, she explains, but the little bundle is due just before Christmas.

Warming to her theme, the doting grandmother whips out her phone, eagerly swiping through pictures of O.’s recent birthday party. She lingers on a photograph of the toddler happily ripping the wrapping paper on one of his (oversized) presents. “I was his mum’s birthing partner,” she grins.

Although she was there to welcome him into the world, O. is not her biological grandchild. Like Arianna and Mikhail, he was born to one of her former foster children. Not that the outspoken matriarch would ever make the distinction willingly.

A foster carer, she insists, scooping up her sprightly granddaughter Arianna from the floor before blowing a raspberry on her chubby tummy, is and always will be a parent - and so the family line goes on.

“I feel like a parent, and grandparent,” she says resolutely. “I’ve always treated my foster kids the way I would want my children to be treated. If they’re going to get a rollicking, they get a rollicking, and if they’re good, they’re good. If they get upset, I get upset for them. I’m a very loyal, very protective person - I’ve always been like that,” adds the 50-year-old from Stratton who, modest to a fault, immediately catches herself, worried she may come across as boastful. “These children are missing that family unit, that care and love, and we’re here to show them the right way to be looked after.”

Long before she made the decision to foster, her house had always been a hive of noise and laughter, filled with her son’s schoolmates chasing each other around the living room, her own friends’ children pulling up a chair at the dinner table or inviting themselves for sleepovers, she recalls.

So when a friend and foster carer suggested she apply to give vulnerable children a safe haven 12 years, she did not hesitate. Although, she points out, she made sure to have the blessing of her two boys, then 13 and 10. Had they shown any resistance, she would have abandoned the idea.

“Once they said yes and my partner said he’d support me, I never questioned it," she says matter-of-fact. "It's not a sacrifice at all. It felt natural to me and the timing was right. Children deserve a childhood, they don't deserve what's happened to them. They deserve to come home and somebody is there for them,” she smiles warmly.

Undaunted, she and her partner of 32 years, Iain, attended a six-week introductory fostering course, before submitting themselves to social services’ probing questions, and home visits, all set to test their strength of character and relationship. Far from putting her off, the thorough vetting process only compounded her conviction she had made the right decision. Eventually they were approved as respite carers.

Respite care involves taking in children at weekends or during school holidays, to give their parents a break - particularly if they are raising another child with special needs - or simply to support a foster family unable to look after their charge for a brief period.

Her first foster child was a six-year-old girl, who only stayed over for a weekend. Other children followed over the next year, each time from two days to a fortnight.

But it all changed when 13-year-old Tasha was put in her care out of the blue, two days before Christmas 2005. Carol had made up her mind not to welcome any more children during the holidays but when social services rang unexpectedly pleading with her to take in the teenager, she agreed without a second thought.

After a two-week emergency placement, Tasha returned to her aunt’s, then her primary guardian. But when she became unable to care for her, Tasha was placed with Carol once more, while social services looked for a permanent host family. Two weeks turned into six and she never left.

“Even know my sons are like her brothers, they argue and defend each other like brothers and sisters,” says Carol, glancing across the kitchen at Tasha, now 25, hugging her daughter Arianna, greedily biting into a square of chocolate, to her chest. “In just six weeks, her whole demeanour had changed. Going somewhere else would have been like taking a step back. They found her a foster carer but she went once and said she didn’t want to stay there. Her schooling had got better, she was settled, happier. She was part of the family. She leaves with her partner now but she treats this like her home. It’s like she never left.”

This new addition to the family prompted Carol to seriously consider the possibility of long-term fostering. Since Tasha came into her life, she has nurtured and effectively acted as a mother figure to 16 foster children on a ‘permanent’ basis– as well as taking in countless on respite care placements.

Until she was made redundant six years ago, Carol held down a job throughout - even working the night shift in a factory for a time.

Even for someone as outwardly calm and unflappable as Carol, showing love to and slowly gaining the eroded trust of traumatised and rudderless children has been on ongoing challenge.

No amount of training or hands-on parenting, she admits, can prepare anyone to foster vulnerable children, many of whom have either been taken away from neglectful or dysfunctional homes or suffer from abandonment issues, having been shuttled between relatives or temporary carers.

“You get trained and they give you some know-how but until you meet a child you don’t know,” she adds thoughtfully. “Some children on paper were meant to be hard, they had been through a lot and they ended up being lovely, absolutely amazing and still come back to me now, all the time. With others it can work the other way.

“It’s so hard for them. They’ve been taken away from mum and dad, and they’re taken to this lady’s house. They don’t know who is behind that front door. It takes time, you just have to accept that. But I run a tight ship, I set boundaries and a lot of them like having boundaries, they’ve never had rules before.”

Regardless of the harrowing ordeals, depth of abuse or trauma they’ve been subjected to before finding their way into her home, Carol’s priority is to ensure they feel supported and heard.

“They need you to check in with them, to show an interest. A lot of them are so angry, they feel that they’ve been let down, that they’re not listened to,” says Carol, who is currently fostering two children with learning difficulties and cares for an 18-year-old under a Staying Put arrangement. This means that although the teenager is technically now old enough to leave the care system, she chooses to stay on with her foster parents.

Most parents feel a pang as their little ones fly the nest and repeating the experience 16 times over would take its toll on even the most hardened of mothers. But not Carol. This is not goodbye, she adds firmly, motioning to Tasha and Arianna.

"When they move into independent living, I always fill up their cupboards with food,” she says. Tasha nods eagerly in agreement. “I make sure they have what they need. You don't want your children to go without anything. When they go it's never the end. My door is always open for them and always will be."

To find out more about fostering visit www.fosteringadoptionswindon.org.uk or call 01793 465700.