A Friend Like Ben: The true story of the little black and white cat that saved my son. Julia Romp

George would pull down his Pokémon baseball cap and tell me the sun was watching him or the clouds were following us. Getting him to the dentist was so hard that I had to take him to hospital for an anaesthetic when he needed teeth removed and he’d told me that the doctor had tried to kill him when he woke up.

      I think that’s why I tried to give him as much love as I could when we were at home, so that he’d at least feel safe with me when the world frightened him so much. But however much I gave him, George never expressed any love back, and even though I had a child, at times it almost felt as if I didn’t. I’d find myself staring at other kids running out of school to give their mums a kiss and longing for George to want to hug me, but he never let me touch him or showed any emotion towards me. It was almost as if it was the first time he’d seen me when he woke up each morning and I struggled with it every day, sometimes even wishing I could meet someone and have another baby just to know how it felt to be a mother to a child who loved me back.

      The only time George would let me touch him was when we rough played and he pretended to be a Power Ranger as we sat together in one of the tents I’d put up all over the flat because he liked them so much. I had even put one up on my bed, hoping he might sleep in it, because George could sit in a tent for hours on end. Most days I’d climb in with him for anything up to three hours at a time and that was when we’d play fight. As George climbed on to me, I would hold on to him for a few seconds as I felt the chubbiness in his legs or his skinny little chest. I loved those moments together because otherwise George didn’t let me touch him. He did not really speak to me either: he still only talked about very specific things like Power Rangers and Buzz Lightyear. Often he spoke just single words or would chant phrases over and over again.

      ‘Oh and the plane, oh and the plane,’ he’d cry a hundred times before moving on to something else.

      I tried to distract him with puzzles or pots of paints but George would scream if he got anything wrong, which made it hard to play because everyone makes mistakes when they’re six. One of the few things he liked, though, was playdough, which he’d squidge in his hands as I made things for him to look at. So one day I bought him a plastic figure of a man with holes in his head to push the playdough through to make ‘hair’. At first George smiled as he watched me do it but the moment I picked up some scissors to cut the hair, he started screaming. Throwing himself on the floor, he went stiff with rage as he roared. His shouts were so loud and sudden that I wondered if he’d somehow hurt himself and I knelt down beside him.

      ‘George,’ I pleaded with him. ‘Tell me what’s wrong.’

      But I never did find out because George didn’t tell me how he felt. How could he? George didn’t even seem to know who he was. When I’d stood him in front of a mirror one day, he’d cried so much that I’d had to take down all the others in the house. So how was he ever going to explain emotions that poured out of him in tantrums that still came out of the blue? George was like a mystery I couldn’t solve, a puzzle whose pieces fitted together to make a picture I didn’t quite understand, however much I wanted to.

       Chapter 5

      Did you know that a leaflet that drops through the door on an ordinary day can start something big? I didn’t when one fell on to the mat about a year after I moved to the new estate. Ever since giving up the Knowledge and getting our new flat, I’d wanted to go back to work, because living off benefits made me feel a bit useless. So after George started school, I got a job in a pub, where I did the cleaning before going into the kitchens to help out the cook. I loved being out and about with people again, but slowly I realised that I couldn’t keep working outside my home because I was exhausted most days after another night without sleep and I kept getting called into school about George. It took more than a year to accept that I needed all my energy to look after him, but in the end I had to give up work because he was such a full-time job. So that’s why when the residents’ association for the flats dropped a leaflet through our doors asking for mums to join I thought I’d give it a go, because I like to keep busy.

      Now I can’t say the association was the most exciting thing I’d ever done, because listening to someone from the council talk about where they’re going to put speed humps just isn’t that interesting. But something came out of it as I listened to people talk, because I found out that the piece of land beside the flats had once been a community garden. It got me thinking, because ever since moving into the flat and getting a balcony, I’d been growing things with George. He liked looking after plants and throwing mud around so much that our balcony was now full of pots of herbs, tomatoes, sunflowers and hanging baskets of flowers. His favourite thing was watering: George would fill everything to the brim, the flowers would struggle to stay alive and Michelle’s balcony below would get covered in muddy water, which ruined her clean washing over and over.

      So when I heard that the land by the flats had once been a garden for everyone to enjoy, I decided to see if we could bring it back to life. One of my neighbours, who’d lived on the estate for years, had pictures of how things once were and I wanted to try to make the land like that again. There were four blocks of flats on the estate with 50 families in each, so there should be enough of us to get something done. When I asked the residents’ association for a grant, I told them that a gardening club might do a lot of good, because our estate had a bit of a past and maybe doing something that everyone could join in with might help. Things had changed over the years on the estate and ours, like many others, had become a real mix of nationalities. But the difference was that a few riff-raff white people hadn’t liked that and before I arrived an Asian family had been harassed. I didn’t know for sure, but I thought that was why people had put up barriers to protect themselves from each other. Everyone kept themselves to themselves and didn’t encourage their kids to mix, which wasn’t exactly good for community spirit.

      Now some might say I’m simple, but we’re not alive that long, so what’s the point in fighting with each other? We’ve all got the same heart, whatever our differences, and while there were some bad types on the estate, most people weren’t like that. There’s always much more good than bad in any neighbourhood and I was right about the gardening. When I got the grant from the residents’ association people were ready to help. Dads came up to do the heavy work and clear the bit of grass next to the willow tree that we wanted to plant, while mums and kids helped Michelle and me with the planting.

      After getting enough money to buy four benches, some equipment and a few rose bushes from the local pound shop, the gardening club soon became a weekly event. Old people arrived for a chat while children had a go with a trowel as I showed them how to dig in a plant and pack the soil down tightly around the roots to encourage them to grow or water the roses and take off the dead heads so that more buds would flower.

      As time had passed with Michelle, Ricky and Ashley, George and I had started to go out a bit more with them. The kids would ride their bikes as Michelle and I chatted or we would go out to play on the green. So when George came with me to the gardening club, I was secretly hoping it might encourage him to mix a bit more. Although he stayed on the sidelines watching, I was glad if he just picked up a spade for a minute because it was a start and at least the gardening club was something for us to do together every week through the spring and summer. Most important, though, it sparked something inside Michelle and me, for we soon started thinking about what else we could do. Once we’d had stair rage; now we had community spirit fever.

      So the next Easter, we decided to do an egg hunt for all the kids. I thought it was a great idea because one of my most fantastic childhood memories was a hunt I’d done as a kid. It was at my cousin Sally’s house, which had a garden backing on to the River Thames, and Mum had put me in my best dress for it. It was magical to be there with all the posh boats going by as we hunted for eggs in the shrubs. My Aunt Rita was a very educated woman who’d done well in life and I remember thinking what a different life Sally led compared to mine. Even though I cried after finding so many eggs that Dad had told me to share them out, I never forgot that day, and those kinds of memories were what I had always tried to give George, because they’re the ones that