Joyce Curtis said her son Nicholas may have spent time ‘living rough’ on the Paris streets
By Peter Aitken
A Scottish woman is celebrating a Christmas miracle after learning her son, whom she believed was dead for over a decade, is still alive and may soon return home.
“I can’t believe it,” Joyce Curtis, who lives in Glasgow, told The Herald newspaper. “I thought with COVID and everything that has gone on, I thought he was dead. I grieved for him.”
“When I got the call to say he was alive I just went into shock,” she continued, saying she cried all day after learning the news. “Then, of course, I phoned my mother and I phoned my brother and I phoned my daughter to tell them.
“Everyone is asking after him now. Nikky is a good boy. The feeling is that I still can’t believe it.”
Curtis filed a missing person report in 2009 after not hearing from her son, Nicholas, for some time. He had traveled to Europe to find work, and she had last heard that he was hitchhiking across Spain and France.
The British Consulate in Paris contacted the Curtis family in 2010 to inform them that their son was in a hospital. The couple flew over to France to visit him — the last time they would see him until 2022.
Curtis believed it was clear that her son had spent time “living rough” on the streets of Paris.
After that, Nicholas just “disappeared again,” even though the consulate said it would put him on a flight back to the U.K.
“I was expecting him home at Glasgow at a certain time,” Curtis explained. “I worked at the Southern General Hospital at the time. I was waiting on him coming home and there was no sign.”
Curtis claimed that she called every airport to check on the status of her son’s flight but received no response for more than ten years, until the week before Christmas in 2022.
When Curtis received a call from the British Consulate in Paris to learn that her son had been hospitalized once more after losing her husband in June of this year, she had already given up hope that her son was still alive.
“It’s like that film ‘Miracle on 34th Street.’ It’s like a miracle,” she said.
Although Curtis has begun to make preparations for his return, she does not want to get her hopes up before he returns to Scotland. She even plans to travel to Paris in the hopes of running into him again before he returns.
