ORPHANS OF ADDICTION

Drug abuse leaves thousands of children without parents at Christmas.
Patricia Nicol on an abandoned generation and those who raise them

It is a typical children's Christmas party. There is jelly and ice-cream,
pass the parcel and pin the tail on the donkey. Joe, who works as a
caretaker at the church across the road, is Father Christmas. He has a
present for each child: Barbie dolls for the girls, toy cars for the boys
and building blocks for the toddlers.

What makes this festive gathering in the back room of an office in the east
end of Glasgow remarkable, however, is the generation gulf between the
party-goers. Grandparents have scrimped and saved pounds 300 to throw the
party and buy the presents. The children's parents are absent. A few are
dead, several are serving prison sentences for petty theft and
drug-dealing, others have shown little interest in their offspring since
bringing them into their chaotic world.

The youngsters at the Gallowgate Family Support Group's Christmas party are
the sons and daughters of drug addicts. There are hundreds, perhaps
thousands more like them. Little girls who make-believe at being grown-up
by pretending to tie tourniquets. Little boys, like six-year-old Stephen,
who lasted only seven days at his first primary school before being
expelled. Stephen, who lived among users and dealers before moving to his
grandmother's home earlier this year, is a cherubic-looking boy. But his
language would make the hardest character in an Irvine Welsh story blush.
On his first day in school he reduced fellow pupils to tears by telling
them their mothers were dead and would not be coming to collect them. The
next day he responded to a teacher's reprimand with a crude, sexual taunt.

In the beleaguered housing schemes of Glasgow, the extended family is back.
Grandmothers single-handedly take responsibility for childcare - not
because mum is working but because of her habit. Already exhausted by their
wayward children, the older generation must now embark on parenthood all
over again.

They see no alternative and pity the children who are left with addict
parents - the preferred option of social services. Earlier this year, a
child living in a high rise in the east end was thrown to his death from
one of the upper floors, allegedly by his mother. Earlier this month, the
country was shocked by the suffering of a five-year-old Easterhouse girl
who spent 10 months with her leg in plaster after a road accident. Her drug
addict mother failed to take her back to hospital to have the cast removed.
The child was discovered in a soiled bed, covered in lice. Her leg is
permanently scarred by ulcers that formed under the plaster. Social workers
did not intervene until the girl was rescued by a relative.

Often a member of the wider family offers the only hope of a normal life.
Jeannie tries not to think about what would have happened to her
granddaughters if she had not been around. She travelled to London to find
Kim, two, and Karen, one, the children of her daughter, Theresa. She
already cared for Lorna, Theresa's seven-year-old from a previous
relationship. A relative in London wrote to say that he was worried about
the baby girls. Theresa and her then boyfriend Jim, the girls' father, had
used heroin since Kim was born.

Jeannie wrote to social services in London asking them to look in on the
family, but she received no response so she decided to go south herself.
Jeannie went straight to the north London council estate where she had last
seen her daughter, but she had fled. A caretaker told of frequent fights.
Theresa had found a new boyfriend and had left with him six weeks earlier.
Jim disappeared with the babies shortly after, but neighbours had no idea
where they could be found. Jeannie returned to Scotland. She heard nothing
until an Essex social worker contacted her to say Theresa had the girls
back, but could not cope and had signed them into her care.

"I was beside myself," she says. "It was the dead of winter when Kim and
Karen arrived. They were just bits of weans, with nothing but the clothes
they were in."

Jeannie supported herself and the girls on a pounds 58-a-week salary as a
lollipop lady. As a "grandmother-parent" she was not entitled to state help
for the children. The fact that she owned her council house made matters
worse, excluding her from entitlement to certain benefits.

Her difficulties were exacerbated by the damage done to the children in
London. Kim became hysterical most nights, always between midnight and 3am.
And she cringed when Jeannie tried to cuddle her. A consultant
paediatrician at Yorkhill found evidence of sexual abuse. Karen was a slow
speaker. Today she has learning and hearing difficulties, probably as a
result of being breastfed by a mother who injected heroin.

Friends and neighbours help out. "I never was one to accept charity, but
sometimes I had to," says Jeannie. "If I was hard up against it, a
neighbour would empty her freezer and say: 'There's enough food to keep you
and the weans for a week.' "

Jeannie was forced to move out of her home in Carnwadric in the northeast
of the city. She now rents a three-bedroomed council house where she lives
with the girls. She returns to Carnwadric each day to look after a former
neighbour who is 72.

Six months after she took the girls, Jeannie had a letter from Theresa
saying she "knew she'd done bad by the weans, but was getting married now
and hoped her mum would wish her all the best". She has never asked for her
children back.

Jeannie's new home is in a housing scheme where drug abuse is commonplace.
The familiar signs of urban decay are everywhere: overturned shopping
trolleys, sectarian graffiti and discarded syringes. Inside, her house is
warm, clean and festive with a Christmas tree in the corner, fairy lights
in the window and Santa Claus figurines on the mantelpiece.

"The only time I really relax is when we go on our annual week's holiday to
Anstruther," says Jeannie. "We pay pounds 100 for a chalet and the girls
can go anywhere they please. Even wee Karen, who I'm scared to let out
here, can roam free. Watching them reminds me how the world was when I was
a child."

Christmas and holidays are the most difficult times. She dwells on the past
and worries about the girls' future. She was diagnosed a diabetic and needs
treatment for blood clots behind her eyes. She has had two heart attacks
and is waiting for a by-pass operation.

Like many who find themselves in her situation, her greatest concern is
that her health will fail her before the girls are fully grown.

"Sometimes I worry that something could go wrong [during the operation] and
I wouldn't be there for the girls. My biggest fear is that they could be
split up, because I've fought so hard to keep us together," she says. "The
oldest girl, Lorna, worries the most. She is 15 now, but sometimes she asks
where she'd go if something happened to me."

Jeannie's experience is not unusual. The Christmas party organisers in
Gallowgate still remember a time when the area was the arterial vein of
Glasgow's much mythologised east end. Today it is a ramshackle
thoroughfare, with small-time dealers and drug users quite openly
exchanging money for wraps in the street.

The body of Hugh McCartney, the son of Ian McCartney, the cabinet minister,
was found near here. Paradise, Celtic's gleaming new Parkhead stadium,
towers over some of the most blighted spots. The few remaining shops,
off-licences and bookmakers have doorbells outside and re-inforced glass
guarding the produce. Recently a woman had her handbag stolen inside the
bank. A florist was held up by two addicts with syringes. They stole pounds
30.

This area, once renowned for the pride of its working-class, has been
gutted by heroin. Government agencies are the only industries flourishing
here. The Social Inclusion office opened recently. It joins the Citizen's
Advice Bureau and East End Partnership.

At the Gallowgate Family Support Group's drop-in centre, the regulars talk
of having "lost" a child to heroin, irrespective of whether the son or
daughter is dead or alive. It is photographs of the grandchildren, not the
children, they carry in their purses and which hang from their key rings.
Last year, a group of 20 saved for a holiday in Crete. They must have been
an odd sight. There was a 30-year age-gap between the oldest child and the
youngest adult.

Often their story starts late at night, with a knock on the door. They open
it to find a social worker and traumatised children.

"It happened to friends of mine. The social workers turned up with their
son's three kids," says Jim Doherty, a founder member of the Gallowgate
group. "The bairn of 18 months didn't even have a pair of shoes. They were
told the children would go into care if they did not take them. Nobody
turns away their own, but it's a one-bedroom flat. This old couple put the
children in their own bed and slept on the living-room floor. The next day
they had to go out and find bedding, clothing and food."

The Gallowgate families are united in their distress at the seamy
underworld these children witness. One man took his four-year-old
grand-daughter to visit a friend. When asked how her mother was, the child
replied: "She's fine, but she got her medicine stuck in her foot yesterday
and it was me who took it out."

Another woman's grandchildren refused to eat and became hysterical when sat
at a table for their evening meal. Friends, who had been in a similar
situation, advised her to feed them fast food in front of the television at
first, introducing them gradually to home-cooked meals on a plate. Although
the eldest child was six, she had never been shown how to use a knife and
fork.

Another party organiser, Margaret, who has looked after her heroin addict
daughter's five-year-old girl almost since birth, says: "These children are
four going on 40. Just today I saw a woman, stoned out of her head, fall
over on the street. It was her wee girl, who couldn't be older than six,
who righted her and put her handbag back on her shoulder."

Many still grieve for their own lost children and ask what went wrong. Ann
Wilson has cared for her two teenage grandsons since they were toddlers.
She cries when she reveals that sometimes she sees a woman in the crowd who
looks like her pretty daughter did before her habit stole her good looks.

"Sometimes it's just the way a girl walks or how she wears her hair, but it
always winds me," she says. "I stand there and, just for a second, I think,
'What if that's her? What if she's clean now and she's come back?'
Sometimes I've caught the boys doing it too. We never talk about it, but I
know they are thinking the same thing. They are wondering what might have
been if their mammy hadn't been a user."

For the social services, grandparents are a valuable back-up. Care workers
heap praise on the vital role they play, saying they are providing a
"familiarising environment for children who may be suffering trauma". What
they fudge is the money they save the state.

Taking a child into care is an expensive business, with costs in Glasgow
ranging between pounds 800 and pounds 2,000 a week. The city has 20% of the
country's most vulnerable children, but only 14% of the funding. Its social
services are stretched to bursting. It is in the strapped council's
interests to leave the child in squalid conditions - like the Easterhouse
girl in her plaster cast - or find doting grandparents.

Yet grandparents often cannot obtain child benefit because the addict
mother has absconded with the claim book. Until they get legal custody,
many grandparents struggle without social security benefits, such as family
credit, or grants to buy essentials, such as cots, beds and clothes.

"The authorities use emotional blackmail," says Peter McLean, a voluntary
advice worker. He is something of a folk hero among Glasgow's grandparent
parents. He has successfully lobbied the city council to help them
financially.

"He's done everything he could for me, bar put his hand in his own pocket,"
says one grandmother. As a result of McLean's lobbying the council set up a
fund to supplement a few of the grandparents, including Jeannie. But the
money has run out.

Until now the authorities have concentrated on helping drug users.

Little is known of the children in the 20,000 drug-abusing house-holds
across Scotland, or those that have been ophaned or abandoned. Some 60% of
all drug users here are parents, most have more than one child. It is only
recently that charities and local councils have begun to look at the impact
of drugs on families. The neglected generation has future social
implications. In the new year, the University of Glasgow begins research
into the subject.

"It is only really with this generation of user that it has become the
issue," says Professor Neil McKechnie of the university's Drugs Misuse Centre.

Every November the Glasgow Family Support Group organises an ecumenical
church service in the east end for those bereaved by heroin. A roll-call of
that year's deaths is read aloud. Each year it takes that while longer - so
far this year the Strathclyde figure is 137.

The church walls display anti-drugs propaganda drawn in local schools. One
image in particular stands out - it is a drawing of a benevolent-looking
teddy with horns, a forked tail and a prong in its paw. Underneath, in
teenage, loopy script, is written "Born to raise hell". Who does it refer
to? The grandparents, the addicts or the children who have already seen too
much of life?

Names have been changed to protect the children's identity