My heart sank when Lorraine Pascale’s documentary on fostering began with her making cakes with Junior, a 10-year-old boy in care. I feared Bake Off meets Who Do You Think You Are?, but those worries quickly faded as Pascale told her extraordinary story.
We know her as a television chef and best-selling cookery author, but her success is all the more remarkable when her circumstances are revealed. Born in Hackney, she was given up at birth and spent the first 18 months of her life with a foster family. Little was known about this period. One hazy photo remained. Possibly the foster mum was called Marion. Where was she now? Thankfully Cilla Black did not surprise us.
Pasale could barely look at the detail that followed: both real and imagined violence
Instead, this was the seed of a narrative that would drive the next 60 minutes of television, interwoven with current stories of foster children and their carers including an artistic teenager and a 12-year-old lad for whom the boxing ring soaked up some of his anger. Inevitably Pascale had that all-important "journey" that documentary makers crave, but actually hers did not feel forced as she sought to make sense of her “painful childhood”. If anything, she was apologetic – “I don’t want to sound like ‘poor me’.”
At 18 months Pascale was adopted by a white middle class couple and grew up in Oxfordshire. Sadly the expected happy ending did not materialise. When the adoptive parents divorced some years later, our narrator lived with the mother who was clearly struggling to cope. In one of the programme’s most powerful moments, Pascale gained access to a social services report, written in 1976 when she was aged just three. "Child at Risk", it said, spelling out the situation. The couple had their own son as well as a "coloured child", it went on. The mother, Audrey, "worried about pressure building up and was likely to take it out on her adopted daughter".
Pascale could barely look at the detail that followed: both real and imagined violence. On one occasion the mother was in the high street with Pascale and saw a lorry coming towards them. She thought about pushing her under its wheels as it would "solve all her problems", the report went on. “I’m reading it almost as if it isn’t me,” Pascale said, adding that it was a further five years before she was put into care. Incredible.
It was not possible to speak to her adoptive mother, Pascale said, because she had dementia, though she did manage to get something out of her father who, separated from his wife at this point, looked desperately sad and said he had no idea at the extent of the risk.The family who took Pascale in for three months as emergency foster carers were thrilled when she appeared at their front door with a camera crew. It might have been a bit awkward after more than 30 years but the presenter has a gentle assurance which meant they could all hold hands and talk fondly of the past. Barbara Stanley revealed that Pascale was one of 11 children she had fostered over the years with her husband.
For Marion and John, the young couple who had given a baby a home shortly after her birth, the young Lorraine had a big impact. Traced thanks to an appeal on radio and, in a heart-crunching finale, they spoke movingly about caring for this little girl for 18 months. They had wanted to adopt, only to have their hopes crushed when Pascale’s adoptive mother wanted her back for good.
What did we learn, then? That foster carers – and there are not enough of them – do a fabulous job in the main. But the role is full of obstacles, not least the difficulties in building trust with a child who gets unconditional love from birth parents. We learned, too, that Pascale is an engaging presenter whose story clearly illustrates that even the most intensely difficult start in life can be overcome.
Though I’d have liked a little more insight into how her experiences informed her career as a successful model and then television chef, this was a moving, thought-provoking hour. So was that a tear in my eye at the end? No, just peeling an onion.
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