Bohemia Village Voice

Sometimes a tragedy is averted by the quick thinking of good people. This was the case on Tuesday 27th February in St Peter’s Road, when a missing toddler was reunited with his mother.
 The two-year-old boy was spotted around lunchtime walking down St Peter’s Road in the direction of Tower Road. According to street bobby Andy Hubbard, who was quickly on the scene, it was only the alertness of members of the public that prevented the boy from wandering out into busier roads.
  ‘A local lady stopped him from walking any further, and then a driving instructor who had stopped gave the boy his jacket to wear,’ says street bobby Hubbard. ‘It was a very wet afternoon and the child was barefoot too. Apparently, as we found out later, the mother had gone down to the shops at Silverhill, leaving the child at home with his grandmother. It seems that the boy had slipped the latch when his granny’s back was turned. When I got to the scene I gave the boy my fluorescent jacket, so at least he was warm. But all he would say was “Mummy gone, Daddy gone”.
MOTHER
‘While we were standing there trying to work out where he had come from, his mother came up the road from the Silverhill direction. It turned out that we were only a few doors away from his house, so we got the boy and his mother inside where they could get warm and dry before we could work out what had happened.’
The Voice has also spoken to Christine Hollins, the grandmother of the child in question, at the family’s address in St Peter’s Road. She told us, ‘We’d just moved in a couple of weeks before this happened. I was cooking and the boy just slipped the latch. We nearly died when we realised he’d got out.’