‘Our foster child asked us to adopt him – by drawing himself on to a family photo’

George is one of tens of thousands of children in the UK who've been taken into care because their parents are unable to look after them. Severely neglected, he struggled to express himself, so when there was something very important he wanted to ask his foster family, he chose an unusual way of doing it.

George was three-and-a-half when he went to live with the Atkinsons. The moment he arrived, the children excitedly steered him into the living room to watch TV while their parents, Tony and Elsie, talked to the social worker in the kitchen. But George didn't seem to know any of the programmes that Nancy and Stanley were flicking through.

There was spaghetti Bolognese for tea, but when Tony and Elsie showed George his plate and his knife and fork he just stared at the floor. They pointed to tins of beans in the cupboards and frozen chips in the freezer in case he'd prefer something else, but George didn't seem to recognise any of it.

"We didn't know what to do," Tony says. "We couldn't engage him at all."

After dinner Tony and Elsie were at the sink doing the dishes when George suddenly moved from the spot where he'd been standing motionless for more than an hour. He ran to the fridge, took out a two-litre container of milk, bit off the plastic top and then the foil and drank the milk down, straight from the bottle.

"It went all over him - but at least we knew there had been milk where he'd lived," Tony says, "although he didn't seem to know about putting it in a cup."

Later, when George seemed sleepy and Tony announced that it was bedtime, George fetched his coat and lay down underneath it on the living room floor. Tony gently ushered him upstairs to his new bedroom.

"He seemed unfamiliar with the concept of lying in a bed under a duvet," Tony says.

George was only the second child the Atkinsons had ever fostered. Before him there had been a baby who, Tony says, "didn't know to be scared". But George was altogether more complex - it was clear to Tony and Elsie that he'd been severely neglected by his birth parents before being taken away from them.

"George had obviously had a very, very difficult time," Tony says. "When he first came to us he was very pale - not a good colour - grey really. He had limited speech, didn't know that you sit at a table on a chair or what a spoon was for, and had no idea what a bath was.

"I don't think anybody had hurt him - they just didn't know how to look after him."

The next day Tony took George to the local park. He noticed George staring intently at something, and Tony realised that it was a tree. He took George over to the tree and together they looked at it and patted it for a good 20 minutes.

"This is the bark, and these are the leaves," Tony explained to George.

"This kid had never seen a tree before, and had certainly never touched one."

Tony and Elsie wrote down their observations and sent the notes to George's social worker.

"It gives them a picture of what this child has lived through, and basically confirms that he did need to be removed from his mum and dad," Tony says. "Because there's an awful lot of things that little kids should have been exposed to by the age of three-and-a-half that he hadn't."

George gradually settled into his new life with the Atkinsons and seemed to feel safe with them, Tony and Elsie thought. He began to speak and express opinions, and would get really excited when the microwave pinged to signal that his beans and sausages from a tin - his new favourite food - were ready.

But one day Tony discovered that George, who was now four, had drawn a circle with a dot in the middle on the walls of every room in the house, using a felt-tip pen.

"It looked like somebody had drawn boobs everywhere," Tony says. "Some parents would go ballistic, but as a foster parent, I thought, 'What's this all about":[]}