Memories….An Urban Myth

The prompt was – what was your earliest memory of being in danger? Well I can’t tell you that but I will tell you about the time I was nearly abducted by an urban myth instead.

I lived for the first 3 years of my life in a local authority house on the northside of Dublin. The house was nothing special – what suburban terraced house is – but it was home and it was safe, or at least that’s what I thought. It appears though that it wasn’t as safe as I thought it was.

As the story goes, shortly before we moved across the city to another end-of-terrace house in a very similar local authority estate, I was rescued by the quick thinking of our next door neighbour’s daughter. Apparently I was standing on the front pathway to the house waiting for my mother to come out on our way to somewhere, likely to visit her mother on the southside of the city near where we would soon live, when a large white van came to a stop outside the garden gate and a man jumped out of the back making his way towards me. At the same time the neighbour’s pre-teen daughter spotted what was happening and jumped the railings between the houses. Snatching me up in her arms she ran into our house calling for my mother at the top of her voice to come quickly. When my mother came running the van made a hasty retreat at speed – if you knew my mother you’d know that was a very wise decision indeed.

Thanks to my hero I didn’t suffer the ignominious fate of other children who were abducted in a spate of kidnappings terrorising the city at that point in time – at least according to the local newspaper. The Modus Operandi of the child abduction crew was to cruise housing estates  in their white van (the dominant colour for vans at the time was white because it was cheaper to buy that colour in bulk and it meant the van would be less expensive to buy – apparently it’s still the same to this day) looking for unattended children and swiftly pulling up to the kerb, jumping out,and grabbing the unsuspecting child. This was 1964 and it wasn’t at all unusual for kids to be entertaining themselves in their front garden or even on the road outside their homes – TV was in black and white, only started at 6pm, and not every house had one, so entertainment had to be found elsewhere.

Recounting this tale to me on a number of occasions in the years to follow, my parents were oblivious to the urban myth that went along with this type of occurrence and the involvement of the ubiquitous White Van. But given the high volume of white vans and the well documented disappearance of children during those years, I’m not sure it was entirely a myth at all. Right up to 1999 even the illustrious and very serious Irish Times was willing to recount the news from not one but two local Irish newspapers about attempted abductions using a white van. These reports admitted it lead to the local towns being on “red alert” for roaming white vans with suspicious drivers. 

Either way I still view white vans to this day with a jaundiced eye.

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