Bag For Life | Careless Ep 1

Careless | Tortoise Investigates

Actor and former care leaver Nkechi Simms joins journalist Ashley John-Baptiste to trace her journey through the UK's child welfare system after being taken into state care at age

Key takeaways

• Nkechi Simms was placed into foster care at age 12 after her mother signed a Section 20 order relinquishing parental responsibility to Camden Council.
• She spent roughly 16 months in the system, moving from a rural Cambridgeshire placement to South London hostels with severe living conditions and minimal support.

Main topics

• UK foster care & social services
• Childhood trauma & fragmented memory

Notable quotes

"That corporate parent word is so fucked."

Conclusion

The episode underscores how unresolved trauma and bureaucratic gatekeeping

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:04) Tortoise Speaker 2 (0:05) Investigates. Speaker 3 (0:09) Hi, it's Basha Cummings here from The Observer. Before we get going, I just wanted to let you know that to listen to the full investigation, you'll need to subscribe to The Observer, where you can get access to all of our Tortoise Investigates podcast series. It's really easy to subscribe. You can sign up on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify or directly at observer.co.uk. If you're already a subscriber, just link your account. Thanks, as ever, for listening. Speaker 4 (0:39) Welcome to Camden. Speaker 4 (0:46) Everything sort of happened in Camden. Camden is the heart of my story, I'd say. Speaker 2 (0:54) Nkechi Sims is walking the street where she grew up, a stone's throw from the borough's famous market. It's full of tourists and buskers and for Nkechi, memories. Speaker 4 (1:06) This is the door, pretty magical. It didn't look like this when I lived here. The door would be blended in to like a big mural and there'd be people sat here eating Chinese. But yeah, I have lots of happy memories living in this flat. My best friend at the time lived downstairs. So we had lots of fun. I feel like as teenagers, you've got your best friend living downstairs, you're living in the centre of Camden. So we got up to a lot of trouble. Well, everything is so different now, but I still love it. It's still Mike Hamden. Speaker 2 (1:38) And as the buildings and the graffiti of the borough have changed, so too has Nkechi. When Speaker 4 (1:43) I was 18, I used to work at that pub behind me for £6.20 an hour. I didn't have any GCSEs. And I actually cried outside my job interview at the time to my boyfriend. I was like, I'm not going to know what to do. I can't do it. And he was like, they're going to train you. It's going to be fine. But I had such little self-confidence that I just thought it was going to be terrible. And I mean, it was terrible, but I did it and I survived it. Speaker 2 (2:08) Nkechi has come a very long way from the teenager crying outside a pub before her first shift. In fact, she's a bit of a big deal now. Speaker 4 (2:17) I wanted to be an actor from when I was a kid. I was very playful and silly and creative. And I think also my mum really enjoyed watching TV. And so when I think back to my childhood, some of the best memories of my mum would be... when we would be curled up on the sofa under a blanket watching Charmed and EastEnders. Speaker 2 (2:41) She didn't just like the idea of acting, she was actually good at it. At 11, her nan managed to get together the money to send her to a drama school on the weekends. Speaker 4 (2:52) Everyone else would be dropped off by their mums in their Range Rovers and I'd just be there having got a train and a bus all by myself at 11 and showed up and done my best. But then as I got older, life got harder, my reality became a lot more... difficult and suddenly acting felt very silly, don't have time for that, I've got real world problems and so yeah by 12, 13 I was sort of involved in other things that meant acting felt ridiculous. Speaker 2 (3:29) Her ambition to act gave way to some really turbulent years. But then, when she turned 19, someone recommended a youth theatre group to her. Speaker 4 (3:39) I got kicked off the first project for fighting, but they welcomed me back and they kept working on me and I just needed to channel all those emotions. By this point, I was 19 years old and I... yeah, was really blessed to have sort of had their intervention because a year and a half later I was cast in Top Boy. So it all worked out for the better, really. Speaker 4 (4:13) Once we turn it easy Speaker 2 (4:16) That's right, you might recognise Nkechi from her part as Keziah in Top Boy, one of the UK's most popular TV dramas. And not just that, she's been in the BBC comedy Prue, Death in Paradise, and in an amazing full circle moment, an episode of the one and only EastEnders. Speaker 1 (4:37) Are you alright darling? It's Holly right? We're all ready for you, let's Speaker 2 (4:39) just park round there. Speaker 4 (4:40) Nice one, thank you. I'm Speaker 3 (4:42) looking forward to repping Francesco's engine on Overtown again. Speaker 4 (4:45) And that for me felt monumental, even though it was maybe one of the smallest things I've done, if we're going by the size of the role. But there was definitely a moment where I got a bit teary eyed and had to like, you know, act really cool because that childhood version of me would... of just simply not believed, Speaker 3 (5:08) not Speaker 4 (5:09) believed at all. It was all I used to talk about being a kid. I was like, I'm going to be an EastEnders. I'm going to be an EastEnders. Speaker 2 (5:16) Nkechi is only 26 and she has achieved things that not only she can't believe, but a lot of young people wouldn't dare to dream of. A scroll through her TikTok page gives you the impression of a pretty aspirational life. There are trailers of TV shows she's in. Speaker 4 (5:34) Have you Speaker 1 (5:34) seen Sophia? Speaker 4 (5:35) No, I haven't heard from her since last night. Speaker 2 (5:37) Behind the scenes of her on set... Speaker 4 (5:40) I had my eyes on today and I thought I'd show you how it works. It was quite jokes. 9am in the morning, sat down, grabbed a script, read through the scenes, discussed the characters. Speaker 2 (5:49) Doing press for Top Boy, a coffee with a stunning view of the Caribbean coastline, even an advert she starred in for Kurt Geiger. Speaker 4 (5:57) My name's Nkechi Sims. I'm an actor, a drama facilitator and a youth mentor. Going back to my childhood, I think people would describe me as a kid who had a lot of energy. Speaker 2 (6:09) Things are looking pretty good. But getting to this place hasn't been easy. And there's a mystery that has been humming in the background of her life for years, steadily getting louder. Speaker 2 (6:24) When Nkechi was 12, Camden became something else for her, no longer just the world she grew up in. Camden Council became what's known as her corporate parent. It's a phrase I have a lot of thoughts about and apparently so does Nkechi. Speaker 4 (6:42) That corporate parent word is so fucked. Speaker 2 (6:45) Her mum had signed a Section 20 order effectively handing over responsibility for Nkechi's care to the state and specifically the local authority. The question is, why? Nkechi was taken into foster care, but what happened next doesn't make sense either. Speaker 4 (7:06) And I actually ended up staying for close to 16 months and I... don't really know why there are lots of reasons that I've sort of heard over the years but at the time it was incredibly difficult because six weeks and 16 months are two very different. expectations. Speaker 2 (7:30) Here's the thing. If you grew up with your family, you probably had someone who was a consistent witness to your childhood. Someone to answer your questions about what happened and when, what you were like and who the people around you were. But for Nkechi, this kind of consistent person just doesn't exist. Speaker 2 (7:50) She has her suspicions about what happened and why, but she's not able to confirm this with anyone. And that humming sound is getting louder. And those unanswered questions are gathering at the forefront of her mind. What did happen to her and why? And what are the consequences of her pushing on that door to find out? Speaker 4 (8:16) It's heartbreaking. I don't really know the word for it. I feel heartbroken for myself. I feel heartbroken for, like, my family. Speaker 2 (8:29) This is a story about memory and what we're entitled to know about ourselves. It's about piecing together the past in order to be freed from it. And it's about how a crumbling state looks after its most vulnerable young people. And I have to be honest, as a journalist, reporting on Nkechi's story has been tricky. It involves excavating the most private details of a family in their hardest moments. And for that reason, there's going to be certain things that Nkechi just cannot share publicly. There are other barriers too. The narrative is rarely clean and straightforward, and for very good reason. It's blurred by trauma, competing accounts, and gaps in memory. This makes Nketchi's search for the objective truth, whatever that is, even more important. I'm Ashley John-Baptiste. From Tortoise Investigates and The Observer, this is Careless. Episode 1, Bag for Life. Speaker 2 (9:49) I first met Nkechi when she was playing a lead role in a production with her theatre group. I went to interview her and the first thing I noticed about her is her charisma and her ability to tell stories. She was part of a drama group called The Big House, a cast made up entirely of young people who have been in care. Also, she was cool, braids, swagger, but now she is telling me her story, the one she has pieced together. from fragmented memories. Speaker 2 (10:21) What kind of kid were you? Speaker 4 (10:24) Oh, that's a good question. Um... Speaker 4 (10:28) I think I was quite interesting. I was very cheeky, very, like, smart-arse, always had an answer for everything, very, like, silly, but I was also very, like, angry and sad and... Yeah, childhood was an interesting time. Speaker 2 (10:50) What do you mean? Speaker 4 (10:53) I think I had quite a... Speaker 4 (11:00) intense family dynamic I think even like long before I was born There's like a history of challenges within my family. And so by the time I came into the world, things were already quite precarious. Speaker 2 (11:16) In 1999, Nkechi was born in London to an Irish-Granadian mother and a