Sharon Feinstein

Lara was born with her hands up in the air, reaching for something, the stars maybe. Now she’s 21 and wants to live the dream, and don’t we all, secretly. Two years at uni studying music and she decided she had to get out there and break into the music industry before she was too ‘ old ‘. I’m not sure where that leaves the rest of us, mind you. But moving on, last night she did something pretty damn courageous and I have to commend her all the way from London to Toronto.
It was midnight, she was in bed after a hard day, and the phone rang. At last, it was the well-known music producer she’d been trying to get hold of for days, calling her from the famous Orange Lounge Recording Studios. If you want to sing for me, how about now, he said. She shot out of bed, put in her hair extensions and took a cab downtown. This is the same girl who  used to go bright red and get really nervous when she took to the stage with her little violin to play Bach’s Minuet One, aged four.
The studio was candlelit, cool, sophisticated, with lots of music going on. La, on the spot, had to sing against a background of guitar riffs,  phones ringing, people interrupting, lots of distraction. After all, this is rock ‘n roll, not horlicks and slippers. She did it, she says it went well, she can be very proud of herself. That journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

It’s two years since Madeleine McCann, aged 3, vanished without trace, and most people have given up hope of her ever appearing again.

But miracles can happen, as with the incredible case of Steven Damman, a toddler left outside a shop on Long island for ten minutes by his mother, 55 years ago, who has now come back to claim his birthright.

Over half a century later, a man bearing a striking resemblance to Steven’s father, walked into a police station claiming to be the missing child.

In the fifties you could leave children outside supermarkets, or playing happily on the streets without the dark fears that hang over parents today.

Though every time I saw the nanny wheel my daughter, Lara’s, pram round the corner of our Islington Square on their way to the park, a mild panic kicked in, and I had to tell myself to stop being neurotic.

Mrs Damman parked a buggy with Steven’s 7-month-old sister in it, outside a supermarket.  3-year-old Steve waited next to it holding a bag of jelly beans.

Ten minutes later they were both gone, though the buggy with Steven’s sister was later found round the corner.

Steven’s parents separated over the trauma of losing their child, but it turns out that all along he was living in Long Island with another family.

The mystery is still unfolding, but children who go missing are a terrible sickness in our society and a chilling horror for anyone who is a parent. It’s  that worst, darkest cupboard is impossible to enter.

If this man really is the long lost Steven, it somehow makes it more imaginable that somewhere out there is Maddy McCann, leading a parallel life to her parents and twin siblings.

If only they knew, one way or the other.