I’ve been a Dr Who fan since my own childhood, hiding behind
cushions and, I remember once, peaking from just inside the kitchen door,
fearful of even being in the same room as whatever monstrous creation was being
shown (but not wanting to turn off and miss the story completely).
A 2014 Dr Who episode made an interesting reference to our ingrained,
culturally inherited fears and the way they collect around the figure of a lost
child. Episode 10, 'In the Forest of the Night', written by the author and scriptwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce, began with a schoolgirl running through forest as if pursued. Significantly,
she was wearing a red hooded coat so we were deliberately drawn to the tales of
'Little Red Riding Hood'.
There were several other references to this during the programme, particularly
the appearance of wolves, and also to ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (the girl leaving a
trail of items from her school bag, rather than breadcrumbs, to allow the
Doctor to follow). London, and the whole world, had been covered overnight with
forest and the Doctor realised (of course) that this was to protect the world
from being annihilated by a solar flare. Of most interest to me was the
Doctor’s assertion at the end that this had happened before but the human race
had forgotten, except to immortalise the feelings of fear, putting them into
'fairy stories'. The Doctor describes forgetting as 'the human super power',
without which we wouldn't 'go to war or make babies'. At the climax of the
story, the girl in the red coat goes home to be reunited with her sister who
had gone missing, prompting the hearing of voices and visions of the future.
A lot of my research is looking in to why the figure of the lost child
is so often the centre of stories of fear, even to the point of our whole world
being torn apart. Of course, any real lost child is a tragedy which must be
agony for those that suffer it. The first series of BBC drama The Missing, about the abduction of a
child, has as its tagline 'Every parent's worst
nightmare'. And dramatists, writers, TV and film makers all clearly know that
they tap into this psychological darkness - and that because of that many will
not turn away but turn on. I believe there is more than just a parent's fear of
being parted from their child in the constant manifestations of lost children.
In a similar way to the Doctor (stick with me on this), I think that the 'lost
child' is one of those archetypes which dwell within us, are passed down
through a sort of collective memory or, if nothing else, is passed through time
in the stories we tell, from the oral tales that Hansel and Gretel and Red
Riding Hood wandered out of, to the image-laden, noisy narratives of now.
The lost child figure is bound up with our thoughts about birth and
procreation (not surprisingly) but is also intrinsic to how we think about
death and war. Like Doctor Who it is also about time - futures possible but
curtailed, pasts forgotten or re-created - as the good Doctor suggested, the
human race is good at forgetting, forgetting the really profound, burying it
deep. How else to explain that, until recently, the British public had no idea
about the centuries-old practice of Child Migration, where hundreds of
thousands of children were parted from their families and sent to live in
horrific conditions in far away colonies? or to explain the silence surrounding
the thousands of children who go missing every year, a silence which also
surrounds the incredibly loud furore over a few highly-publicised cases (why
them and not the others?) If we care so deeply how do we allow children to be
lost on a daily basis?
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