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.