Some just keep walking

It's not just teenagers who run away - depression, debts and mid- life crisis make men more likely than most to go for a drive and never come back. By Jack O'Sullivan

Jane Dryburgh is hoping for a message today. A phone call, perhaps a card, anything indicating that her husband Allan is alive and safe. On February 2, he walked out of their front door in Rosyth as if he was going to work. He never returned. Today is their son's 19th birthday.

When middle-aged men suddenly leave family, friends, jobs and disappear, sometimes it's the children who bring them back. Chris Stone from Inverness came back last year after being gone for 11 months. He had secretly gone to France and had survived, indeed thrived by grape picking. Then one day he realised that it was his son's birthday and he called home.

Last week, Matthew Choyce's wife was hoping that a similar feeling will bring her husband to the phone. Dr Choyce, 34, a hospital physician, left home in the middle of the night last year, after suffering depression. This week, his wife was pictured in the press holding their new-born son. "I just want Matthew to get in touch," she said, "to let him know how I am, how beautiful our baby is, to find out how he is and hug us closely. We really are a family now."

Perhaps the appeal will work. Many of these men really want to be searched out. "A number of missing people have rung me to complain that their cases have not been advertised in the Big Issue magazine," says Sophie Woodforde of the National Missing Persons' Helpline. "I know of one chap who really wanted to be found, but did not have the courage to ring home. He would go out driving, pretend to break down and call up the RAC in the hope that they would lead his family to him. But they always found something wrong with the car. Eventually he went home himself."

Going missing is not simply a male or a middle-aged issue. But it is predominantly men who disappear in later life. And the reasons are very different from teenage runaways, who are frequently escaping family conflict and domestic abuse. Debt, depression, the burden of too many responsibilities tend to explain a sudden departure. But there are also those who feel an irresistible urge to break free.

A striking feature of many cases is the casualness, the nonchalance, the unplanned spontaneity with which so many abandon their lives. Again and again, they play out the almost clicheed theme of the man who went out to buy a packet of fags and never came back. When Alan Dryburgh walked away in February, he took no clothes and left his money, credit cards, keys and rail pass at home. All he took with him was several months' supply of blood pressure tablets. He stopped at the newspaper shop to buy a packet of Polos and walked away from his life.

In her new novel, The Last To Know, Candida Crewe describes by uncanny coincidence a middle-aged doctor, named Kim, who suddenly leaves home.

Kim is just nipping out to buy his wife ice cream for dessert. But the shop doesn't have her favourite flavour and he becomes confused as to whether he should buy her a different brand or try elsewhere. So he sits down and his mind wanders as he watches cars go by and tries to guess their makes by the shape of the headlights.

He gets very cold and overwhelmingly hungry, when he spots an Indian restaurant. Craving a curry, Kim thinks he'll have a quick one and ring his wife from the restaurant to explain. But the phone is out of order. Even after eating, he is still intending to go home and spots a telephone box nearby. It's in the opposite direction of home, but he thinks it better to ring than go straight home. He walks towards it, but someone is already in the booth. So he carries on walking and finds himself in the centre of Oxford.

As a doctor, Kim always seems to be in such a hurry and he finds himself enjoying the free time, overwhelmed by the beauty of the floodlit Magdalen College. But he is feeling very cold again. He sees a coach opening its doors beside him and feels the waft of inviting warm air. In an hour or two, he's in London's Victoria coach station, longing for a night's sleep. He chooses the longest journey from the notice board. By next morning he is in Inverness, at home he's a missing person.

"I'm fascinated by how, through a series of circumstances, a man can get carried away with the moment," says Candida Crewe. "It's all so physical, the yearning for a curry, warmth, a sleep. He doesn't really think of the consequences. But the longer he doesn't call home the harder it becomes. And then, after a while, he starts to think that perhaps they are better off without him."

There are similarities between Crewe's fiction and reality. In particular, according to people who work with missing persons, some men really have a problem in talking about or even understanding the pressures in their lives. Leaving is their way of coping. It may even be an expression of love. One is reminded of so many suicides, which notes often reveal as an act of benevolence by the dead person, fearful of burdening loved ones with problems.

In Rosyth, Jane Dryburgh suspects that such an attitude explains her husband's four-month absence. He was, she says, having problems at work, but she now realises that they were not of the importance that he might have imagined. "Allan is six foot one, 18 stone and a former prop forward in the Navy," she says. "If he had a problem and thought it would cause David and me distress, he would think that he was doing us a favour by walking away. He tends to put us on a pedestal and if he thought he had let us down, he must have felt his only option was to go. He could only think that we have benefited from him leaving."

In other cases, a succession of unexpected events can prompt a mid-life crisis. Candida Crewe has had long discussions with Chris Stone about why he left home in Inverness. He was 37 and his life seemed to have lost its meaning. Work wasn't going well. One night his wife was on a late shift, his 16-year-old daughter was on holiday and his 14-year-old son was out. He brooded all night at home, feeling neglected. Next morning, Chris picked up his daughter from the airport, bringing her boyfriend along for the journey. Other than lugging the bags home and paying for the taxi, he felt fairly redundant. So he went off to the train station, bought a ticket to London and headed to France. All he took with him was some scruffy camping gear, pounds 120 and his bicycle.

You might think that many of these disappearances can be explained by adultery or secret lovers. You would be wrong. Instances of men disappearing with other women without a word to their families are rare. At the National Missing Persons Helpline, staff can remember few instances. Perhaps it is because wives usually know, maybe unconsciously, when there is another woman involved and so do not report him as missing. When there is no other woman involved, the disappearance seems baffling, which is probably why it gets reported.

Whatever the reason, when men go missing, they leave chaos behind. For the 11 months of Chris Stone's absence, his wife Sue had to rely on the odd cheque turning up at his bank indicating that he was somewhere in France. She felt that he almost wanted to be found. Knowing that he had taken his house keys with him, she clung to the belief that he would return. Now that he is back, she is just glad to see him. But his children are less forgiving of their prodigal father.

Meanwhile Jane Dryburgh doesn't even know whether her husband, Allan, is still alive. There have been none of the long, silent phone calls which the missing often use as a code to tell their loved ones that they are okay. He has not used his bank account. She is convinced now, having blitzed the local media, that he is not nearby. She has placed posters in London and all over Portsmouth, where Allan was once stationed with the Navy and has friends.

"The greatest fear," says Sophie Woodforde of the NMPH, "is that the missing person has had an accident and has died. In fact, that is the least likely reason for someone to be missing."

Mrs Dryburgh keeps searching. She cannot just rely on her husband eventually coming home. "A consultant psychiatrist has told me that when people leave home, they often go for a walk and sometimes something happens along the way. They either keep walking because they don't know how to stop or because they forget who they are. He said that if Allan has forgotten, then it's not a question of him coming home. It's a question of me finding him."

The National Missing Persons' Helpline is funded solely by charitable donation. Its freephone number is 0500 700 700. Message Home is a confidential freephone number for anyone missing who wishes to say they are alive and safe: 0500 700 740.

`The Last To Know'

"SOMETIMES, awake at night, or to pass an idle moment in a post office queue, he enjoyed speculating about what would happen if he just walked out of his life, not because the world was falling in on him, but purely for the sake of freewheeling. Who didn't? But they were fleeting thoughts only, insignificant, and the stuff of common, not even extraordinary, curiosity. Everyone had them. Over the years countless patients had said to him: `Sometimes, Doctor, I just wonder what it would be like if I were to walk away from everything,' but they never did. The sentiments were common enough but - pretty well- everyone dismissed them pretty damn quick, for the simple reason that they were also impractical, sad, impossible and, in a matter of fact, completely devoid of appeal."

Extract from `The Last To Know', by Candida Crewe, published this month by Century, pounds 14.99