TEN years ago a bewildered-looking couple sat in front of flashing cameras and pleaded for the return of their missing daughter. The father’s voice cracked as he told a tense press conference he was sure the three-year-old would be back for her birthday in a few days’ time.

Ten of Madeleine McCann’s birthdays have since gone by, and still there is no sign of the girl who vanished that May evening in the Portuguese resort of Praia Da Luz.

Last week was the 10th anniversary of her disappearance. “Can it really be so long?” people say, casting their minds back to their own lives a decade ago and wondering just where the time has gone.

On the eve of the anniversary, a flower garden in tribute to the 140,000 children who go missing annually in Britain was opened at Chiswick House, west London, as part of the charity Missing People’s countdown to International Missing Children’s Day on May 25. Chief executive Jo Youle said the garden is a place for families to “be reassured that there are others who are thinking of their missing loved one too”.

The floral memorial was opened with a performance by the Missing People Choir, made up of families with relatives who have vanished. The choir, which recently appeared on Britain’s Got Talent, includes Peter Lawrence, whose daughter Claudia went missing in 2009 after failing to arrive at work in York; Peter Boxell whose son Lee went missing in South London in 1988 after a football match; and Rachel Edwards, the sister of missing Manic Street Preachers guitarist Richey Edwards, who vanished from a London hotel in 1995.

York Press:

STILL MISSING: Kate and Gerry McCann hold an age-progressed image of their daughter Madeleine at a news conference on the fifth anniversary of her disappearance in 2012 

Can there be anything more agonising to endure than someone you love going missing? How can you move on not knowing whether your loved one is alive or dead? It has been a long, gruelling decade for the McCanns, who have vowed to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to find Madeleine. Whatever you think about the circumstances in which she vanished, or the way the search has been conducted, you can’t blame the parents of a missing child for clinging on to hope that one day they might find her, or at least find out what happened to her. We live in an age of mass communication, which has in some ways made the world a more dangerous place, but it has also widened the net in searches for the missing.

It wasn’t always so. My grandad’s mother vanished when he was just five. She left home one day and never came back, leaving six children motherless. Such a thing was simply not talked about back then. My grandad, who died in his 70s, never knew what happened to his mum.

No longer are the missing brushed under the carpet, only mentioned in hushed tones or not talked about at all. If a child, a parent, a sibling or a spouse disappears, a widespread search through a vast network of mediums can be launched within hours. But, as the McCanns and the Missing People Choir know all too painfully, this doesn’t always bring them back.

The horrible reality is that people go missing all the time. The disappearance of a child from a nice home who makes newspaper headlines is no more significant than that of a street child in Brazil or India.

But for those who are left behind, a light has gone out and the search goes on. What else can they do?