Leonard Portway’s story begins with a frantic search in Edwardian Hendon and ends in the very same house he fled. Born in 1897 to a skilled commercial family, his early life was shaped by the London suburbs. But his father's early death left his mother, Alice, a widow, running a small tobacconist shop to support her children.

Then, on a July day in 1911, things fell apart. The 14-year-old schoolboy said goodbye to his mother and vanished, sparking a national mystery and a desperate search that soon had police dragging a local pond for his body.

For four long years, the trail went cold. His name appeared in newspaper appeals, police notices, and even in Parliament. His mother contacted consuls worldwide, searched every workhouse, and chased false leads, but her son was gone.

Then, in 1916, the mystery was solved: he was alive. He had reappeared around 1914, not as a runaway, but as a soldier serving in France. A decade later, he was in Wales, working as a groundman and building a new life.

By 1936, following his mother's death, he had returned home to Hendon. And in 1944, he died at 41 Algernon Road, aged just 47, from a chronic heart condition. The prodigal son had returned to become the master of the very shop he had abandoned.

His life, pieced together from faded documents and desperate headlines, tells us as much about survival as it does about his disappearance: a story that measured a life not by its mysterious flight, but by its quiet and extraordinary return.