On missing children
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.