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I Still dream of the people from my first book, missingI still see them, the children who returned home and those who didn’t, the lost ones troubled us for a weekIn a matter of months, or sometimes years, that continues to this day, disappeared whose vulnerability I had sought to highlight three decades ago when I wrote that little thing Book,
It all started for me in 1973, when a child named Sandy Davidson disappeared one day from a neighboring housing estate in Scotland. At first, it seemed impossible that a child could go missing in broad daylight, but we learned that it happened often, and Sandy became for us a symbol of some unknown, the murky world of social fragmentation or victimization, a fear I never forgot.
Less than 20 years later, as a young writer in London, I began looking for missing persons stories. At night in Soho, I would spend hours with runaways and lonely people, then I would travel around the country, anonymously talking to young people who were missing from home.
I can still see one of them, Angel, crouching in the doorway at the end of a long and frustrating day. She wanted to be famous; She also yearned to be normal, but some things had gone wrong in her life, and she was forced to come to terms with the notion that she might never be able to go home again. She wished she could call them, but she didn’t know how. Building relationships was difficult.
At that critical point, I learned that vulnerable people can fall into the trap. What might be a temporary setback, one of the things in life, can become a body of distrust and eternal danger. I remember being in Gloucester and driving down a street full of media vans and journalists. The bodies of young women were found in Cromwell Street, and many had been buried for years. The married couple present in the house was arrested. Day after day, after the uproar, the media became less and less; They got stories about Fred and Rosemary West, about horrific abuses, about disposal methods and all the gruesome details the tabloids wanted.
But I remained on the road. I thought there was a question that no journalists were asking, a question about missing girls that could take us to the heart of the problem of modern Britain. After all, there was only me in front of 25 Cromwell Street and a lone policeman near the withered flowers. “You’re still here,” he said.
“I have one last question. Just one.”
“This is an ongoing investigation.”
“The last one,” I said. “Of the 12 women they’re talking about, dozens of them have been described as potential victims, why are so few of them reported as missing?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” He said.
“They had families. They had communities. But no one cared.”
They were missing, and they are still a fact of life in Britain today. But the security of such people should now be easy. It just takes a little thought. A small invention. And Independent is behind a campaign to make that happen, to end the suffering of thousands of families desperate to hear about the people missing from their lives. Very often, all it takes is a phone call or a text message, but – when you understand the stories, when you look at the complex situations involved – these very vulnerable people need help.
For some people home is a dream, and home is a paradise, but for others, home is the place where hearts break. To help such people to safety, and to help keep them from being permanently lost, is a task easily understood, if only we would lend a hand to it.
George Baroli was sitting on a park bench near the embankment. He had mental health issues but was released from hospital. He was unable to remember his family’s phone number, and his condition had become so bad that he did not even know his way home, or how he could understand the past that had given rise to his very confusing present. Unlike those of us who take for granted the stable home at Christmas and the family waiting there, George had no idea where to turn, he had no phone, and he had no number in his mind, and then, of course, I thought, we’d better step in and help him reconnect and rebuild, or restore, or start again. Missing people are often just a call away from the help that will change everything. If people have no one to turn to, perhaps they can turn to us, to those who believe that no one is beyond help.
They say that charity begins at home. But for me, Dan Is A kind of home, a place of rest and rescue for the lost. There is currently no single port of call for help for missing people in the UK.
SafeCall will fill that gap: a place for people who have been disconnected for whatever reason; A place to call or message, to get information, advice or direct support that can be a lifeline to people in trouble. For just £10, you can bring a child to safety. During this Christmas season, IndependentIn partnership with the charity Missing People, SafeCall is launching. Families and carers across the UK know that vulnerability can only be met with safety. I’ve seen it thousands of times. The help a missing person needs may simply be a matter of someone coming to them, a reaching hand that can lift them out of limbo and back to safety.
missing It was 10 books ago for me. But I will never forget traveling to Cheam, near the end of my research for that book, to meet the family of Lee Boxell, a 15-year-old boy who went out one Saturday morning in 1988 and never returned. Lee was a bright, pop-loving, smiling kid who was probably going to Selhurst Park to watch football that day, but he was never seen again.
Five years had passed by the time of my first visit. His mother and father were heartbroken: Lee had disappeared, their beautiful boy, and, among all the possibilities, they clung to the possibility that their son had developed amnesia that day or had gotten into trouble and run away, and that maybe he or someone close to him could have given them a message.
During my first visit, his mother showed me up the stairs to his room that day, and it was unchanged, with the walls still covered in posters and his pencils and football scrapbook by the bed. Lee’s father told me that he had been given information that someone who looked like Lee might be working at a market stall in Brixton. He got there and it wasn’t there, but he wished it was, he was so desperate to hear something from his son that he missed anything from his son so badly. “This boy was just like him,” Mr Boxell said. “I was starting to think maybe I should ask him to come and live with us; he was just like him. Just come here and be our son.”
Andrew O’Hagan is a novelist who has been nominated for the Booker Prize three times. He is editor of the London Review of Books and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has donated her fee for this article to The Independent and Missing People’s campaign to raise funds for SafeCall – a free service to help vulnerable children find new, safe futures.
donate Here Or text SAFE to 70577 to give missing people £10 – enough to get one child support.
For advice, support and options, if you or someone you love goes missing, text or call Missing People on 116000. It’s free, confidential and non-judgmental. Or visit: missingpeople.org.uk/get-help