I was sent a note telling me: If you come to our club, we’ll break your back you bag of n ***** s***
EXCLUSIVE: MARK BRIGHT ON BEING A FOSTER
I WAS too young to know it at the time, but I later found out it was a note pinned to a door – from my mum to my dad, basically saying she’d had enough – that was the trigger for the direction my life was to take.
Looking through official documents and piecing together what went on, I’ve been able to get some idea of what happened.
You hear about kids who spend their entire childhood in a care home, but that didn’t happen to us. It was always me and my older brother, Phil.
He was always there for me and, by the time I was seven, we’d been moved around from one place to another for most of our lives, so turning up at a new home was probably something we became used to.
By the time we met them, Bob and Irene Davies were in their mid-50s and had already fostered more than 50 kids, as well as having their own family.
We had no way of knowing it, but Bob and Irene would have a big part to play in our lives. They were kind but firm, and we soon referred to them as Grandad and Gran. I was seven years old when I arrived at their house and 18 when I moved out. I will never get my head around how parent can give up a child.
Luckily, there are people in this world willing to take on someone else’s responsibility and, more importantly, give a child a chance in life.
Colour may not have been an issue for our foster parents, but we soon learned that was not the case for some of the children we went to school with.
Dove Bank Primary School, in Kidsgrove, was only a few hundred yards from the house, and we would walk to school each day, but it wasn’t long before it became the walk of fear.
The daily journey home soon became the source of a new game for some of the other kids. They would lie in wait for us.
They would get hold a of