Davy and Mandy are placed in foster care

Davy and Mandy are placed in separate foster homes after Cushla seeks help for the family, a decision that exposes the painful gap between her intention to protect the children and the consequences of intervention. The separation is revealed in a letter from Davy: he has been placed with a foster family, while Mandy is elsewhere, and the family has not found a new house. Cushla receives the news as both a loss and an accusation against herself, even though Gina tells her she is not to blame.

Background and Search

After Gerry leaves, Cushla asks him to find out where Davy is. He cannot locate the boy without knocking on doors in Short Strand. Cushla also tries to return toward the east, reaching a point from which she can see the place where she had left the children. The flags and bunting on one side and the oppressive walls on the other overwhelm her; afraid that she is being followed, she drives away. Her attempt to find the children therefore stalls amid the same neighborhood divisions and fear that shaped their displacement.

The Letter and the Separation

Davy’s letter arrives in a blue Basildon Bond envelope, addressed in an unfamiliar hand. He has arranged the page as Cushla taught her pupils to do, beginning formally with a greeting to Miss Lavery. That schoolroom formality briefly brings her pleasure, but the letter’s news extinguishes it: the children have not found a new house, and social services have placed Davy with a foster family while Mandy is somewhere else. The letter establishes the central fact of the event without specifying either foster home or when the children might see one another again.

Responsibility and Consequence

When Gina enters and asks about the letter, Cushla hands it to her. After reading it, Gina responds with alarm; Cushla then says that she had asked Bradley to help the family and that he reported Betty to social services. Cushla interprets the chain of events as her own doing and insists that it is all her fault. Gina rejects that judgment, but her reassurance does not remove Cushla’s sense of responsibility. The episode leaves her confronting an unintended consequence of her intervention: the children she wanted to help have been separated, and the news reaches her through Davy’s carefully composed school-style letter.