The first series of the BBC drama The Missing is another of many crime programmes and films which centre on the disappearance or murder of a child. This series came out soon after the success of ITV’s Broadchurch, British TV companies are tapping into the media exposure of several high-profile real stories. In a Radio Times interview, the star of The Missing James Nesbitt says “a lot of people have mentioned the Madeleine McCann case” in its similarity to the series’ plot:
“But it’s much more of a thriller than that. That’s not to say there aren’t thriller elements in any child abduction. But it’s the notion of dropping a pebble in water and the ripples…the ramifications are huge.
It’s not just about the father and mother and immediate family. It’s about other people’s lives being affected over a course of time. That brings the thriller element.” (RT, 25-31 October 2014, p. 11)
This interview aligns the fictional drama with real life while placing it back as a creative work. It’s interesting that Nesbitt refers to a pebble and ripples – in a way the McCann case could be seen as the pebble and this drama itself is one of the myriad ripples which have proceeded from it. Except, of course, the ripples have been crossing the surface for centuries, long before our technological media was invented. The ramifications are indeed huge, and far below the surface.
The academic Jack Zipes published a translation of the very first edition of Grimm’s fairy tales. This is the edition before the Grimms censored, edited and sanitised the stories for middle-class families, upholding Christian values. The tales are apparently much closer to those passed down orally through communities over many years and include such gems as ‘How the Children Played at Slaughtering’ in which a group of children play at being a butcher and a pig and a boy cuts the throat of his little brother, only to be stabbed in the heart by his enraged mother. Unfortunately, the stabbing meant she left her other child alone in the bath, where he drowned.
In these early versions, those tales we think are familiar are also harsher: the stepmothers of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel were, originally, their mothers, Zipes believing that the Grimms made the change in later editions because they “held motherhood sacred”. So it is Snow White’s own mother who orders the huntsman to “stab her to death and bring me back her lungs and liver as proof of your deed. After that I’ll cook them with salt and eat them”, and Hansel and Gretel’s biological mother who abandons them in the forest.
In ‘The Children of Famine’ a mother threatens her daughters because there is nothing else to eat: “You’ve got to die or else we’ll waste away,” she tells them. In response, the children give up life: “We’ll lie down and sleep, and we won’t get up again until the Judgement Day arrives.” (Guardian.com, 12 November 2014,http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/12/grimm-brothers-fairytales-horror-new-translation)
This shows that lost children (not only lost as victims of violence, but also children lost to innocence who perpetrate violence…) are sadly nothing new. The last story recalls an infamous scene in Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure when the young son, known as ‘Little Father Time’, feels the burden of his parents’ poverty and kills himself and his siblings. He leaves a suicide note saying “Done because we are too menny”. Narratives of lost children are perhaps the starkest, most powerful way to convey themes of poverty and social exclusion. They draw attention to the brutal realities of contemporary life in the time in which they are written. The crushing of future hopes is starkly apparent when a child is the victim.
But they are also a reminder of time itself. Hardy’s child who chooses death is called ‘Little Father Time’ because he acts and speaks with world-weariness even though he is only a young child. He is youth and age, life and death in one small package. A doctor in the novel asserts that the boy is an example of a modern child who sees the “terrors” of life too early and embodies “new views of life” different to the previous generation. The figure of the lost child has been and is an embodiment of the conflicts of the modern world but is also a more profound symbol of something beyond history.
In the first series of The Missing, the narrative continually switches back and forth from the present day to eight years ago, when the boy Ollie is abducted. This is a common narrative device in many TV programmes, films and novels with all sorts of subjects. But it is most appropriate in narratives of lost children, where we are forced to consider a future curtailed, what might have been, and the past stretching back, also irrevocably altered as every past event becomes redefined at the point in history – beyond history – where the story is broken, a silence opens up, the pebble hits the pond and the ripples go on forever.
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