Snipped by me. This is a value bit of info that l didnt realise before. I always thought it odd he just popped out and was never seen again. That's the kind of thing that happens to younger children going to the corner shop.
But if he often went out for hours and would get chatting..heknew a wide circle of people...he was sociable...his parents didn't really know what he was up to..that gives us valuable insight.
I've put a link up the article in question in the British newspaper archives below. It's an interview with his mother.
It's from The Croydon Advertiser on 25th April 1986, so pretty close to when Kevin disappeared. I have transcribed it below so hopefully that's ok:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When the phone rings
EVERYTHING that has happened in the long weeks since Kevin Hicks vanished is clear as crystal in the mind of his mother.
She remembers how Kevin’s father came up with a fiver after the wheedling Kevin had said on the Saturday: “Mum, Andrew wants to go ice skating and I haven't got any money.”
“You’ve cleaned me out, ask your father,” she had replied. And so, with his father's help, Kevin and his friend went ice skating.
She remembers how for three weeks she and her husband went out every morning and every night looking for the boy in the jeans and anorak, and calling on people he knew.
Letters
She remembers how letters in answer to job applications began arriving: an interview to be fixed came from the Bank of England; a request for a reference came from Barclays Bank. It was banking that Kevin thought he would like for a career.
“He would have been well chuffed at this,” said Mrs Hicks, smiling wistfully, she added: “I typed the letters for him.”
A personnel clerk in a Croydon store, she happened to be on holiday from work the first week of Kevin’s disappearance. Then she had two weeks more away from her part-time job as she waited for news.
She remembers with deep gratitude her friend and neighbour Maureen’s support in those weeks.
Maureen would come and sit with her and they would talk for hours. “Just so that I was not on my own,” said Mrs Hicks.
The three weeks are long gone and Mrs Hicks has returned to her part-time job, working Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
On Thursday, a few weeks ago, the phone rang in the morning.
“I answered it and no one replied. I couldn’t make it out. I said ‘hello,’ and ‘speak to me’ but nothing happened, and then the line went dead.
“At first I thought, how rude. If it was a wrong number they could have said ‘sorry.’
“Then I thought, perhaps it was His Lordship (Kevin), just ringing to hear my voice but too scared to say anything.
Hopes
“Last Wednesday evening it happened again. The phone rang, but there seemed to be no one there. Kevin would know I was usually here on a Wednesday evening ... I just wonder, perhaps it was him.”
It’s little things like this that keep Mrs Hicks going, keep up her hopes.
“Perhaps he met someone and was persuaded to go somewhere, thought it was a good wheeze at the time and is now too frightened to get in touch,” she said.
Missing from home
'Like a bereavement without a funeral'
WHERE is Kevin Hicks? The 16 year old schoolboy, a lanky 5ft 10in, left his home in Addiscombe one Sunday evening to buy eggs and chocolate buttons for a cookery class at John Ruskin High School the next day.
He had 200 yards to go, a 15 minute trip there and back, to a late opening, seven days a week, shop on the corner.
On the coffee table in the lounge of his well-kept home that Sunday evening were his keys to the front door and his special pride since he wanted to buy a motorbike — the driving licence he had just received.
Kevin Hicks never returned from that trip to the corner shop.
Now, almost eight weeks later, his parents Derek and Terry and his 15 year old sister Alex, don’t know what to think.
Alex, also a pupil at John Ruskin, has to cope with her schoolmates' inquiries for news of Kevin. Sometimes she tells her mother how fed up she is, having to tell them he is still missing and that they have heard nothing.
"Sometimes she's a bit tearful," says fair-haired Terry Hicks, the boy's 38 year old mother, sitting in her kitchen within a few paces of the phone and the front door.
On the evening his son vanished, Derek Hicks, 40, a computer manager for Tate and Lyle, had been summoned back to work in Bromley because alarm bells were ringing in the computer department.
His wife and Alex were watching TV after Kevin went to the shop. About an hour later Alex noticed the time he had been gone, said Terry. "You wouldn't let me take that long — you'd want to know why," she observed to her mother.
"I expect he met someone and is talking," said Mrs Hicks.
At 10 pm Alex again remarked on her brother's absence. "I'd get in a right row if I had stayed out that long," she said.
Mrs Hicks felt a faint stirring of anxiety, dismissed it.
When her husband returned from work at 11.30 pm he found an anxious Terry meeting him at the door. "Calm down," he advised.
Alex went to bed. And when anxiety eventually got the better of them, Mr Hicks went to the police.
Understandably, they did not at once share the Hicks' concern. A 16 year old boy, away from home for a few hours? So what's new? Details were taken, routine checks begun . . .
Mr and Mrs Hicks could not just wait. First he drove around the district, looking for the young man in a distinctive anorak in red, white and black that Kevin put on to go to the shops.
Then she took over and drove everywhere she thought her son might have gone.
It was four o'clock in the morning before, exhausted, the worried parents went to bed.
MOTHER'S VIGIL AT THE WINDOW
KEVIN’S bedroom in the corner house in Sissinghurst Road, has two regular occupants since he vanished.
One is Blue, the pet tan and black alsatian with the floppy ears.
Kevin taught the dog to do little barks when ordered to “speak.” And he showed Blue also how to rattle the letterbox when someone calls.
Nagging question: WHY?
AS they contemplate in their separate ways the mystery of their missing son, Derek Hicks and his wife Terry try to find answers, reasons.
There was the case of the washing up the night he vanished.
Mrs Hicks had a sore throat and asked her husband and son if they would do the washing up after their evening meal.
“I’ll wash, you dry,” said Kevin.
When he had finished, his father was dissatisfied. There were, he complained, still traces of food on the washed plates and they would have to be done again.
Was that enough to make the boy leave home, the bewildered couple have asked themselves.
He had a Saturday job at the Co-op and had just spent a £35 bonus on new speakers for his stereo system.
Would he have done that if he meant to
leave home?
Blue now sleeps in Kevin's empty room each night.
And in the daytime the room provides a vantage point for Terry Hicks, seated on the sill and gazing forlornly from the window.
From there, and the window in the next bedroom, she can see two different roads.
"I spend a lot of time there, just looking, in case I should see him coming home and not brave enough to come and ring the bell, but standing somewhere near.
"My husband tells me I must stop it and Alex says I shall wear out the carpet walking from one room to the other."
"I glare at the phone and say to myself. . . ring, ring, ring. . . I'm trying to will it to ring and for it to be Kevin."
"One day I screeched to a halt in the car because there was this boy in a jacket just like Kevin's. It was a friend of his, who jumped out of his skin.
"I said, 'Oh, I thought it was Kevin, and he said I'm sorry Mrs Hicks, I won't wear it any more.
Sometimes I see Alex get up and stare through the window and she says she thought some lad passing looked like Kevin. On one occasion I looked, too, and said, no he's got too big a bum, that's not like Kev.
"But sitting here, waiting for the phone to ring, or the gate catch to go and the door bell to ring, and nothing happens, and the police don't call. . . it eats away at you. . ."
Mrs Hicks says she understands now what it must have been like for women during the war who were told their sons or husbands were missing. Never to know for sure what had happened.
"It is like a bereavement without a funeral," she says.
The search
MAN in charge of the search for Kevin Hicks is Det-insp Brian Tomkins.
His latest move will be next week when 150 cadets from Hendon Police College will be joining local police in a yard by yard search of Shirley Hills, where Kevin was known to go for walks.
"He was not the sort of boy one would expect to disappear," said Insp Tomkins. "We have become increasingly worried that something may have happened to him.
"As time goes by, we have to conclude that either he was determined to get away from the area, or something more serious has happened to him.
"But if that is the case, why haven't we found him?"
END OF ARTICLE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also worth noting is that the article clearly states that Kevin had bought the speakers with a £35 bonus from his Saturday job at the Co-op. Clearly, the police no longer believe that to be the case, so had possibly checked with the Co-op and found that there had not been a bonus or that it was a lot smaller than £35. If indeed Kevin was being groomed and had got the money from someone, £35 was a lot of money back then, especially for a teenager. As of April 2026, it would have been the equivalent of £150 - it seems very, very unlikely that a kid with a Saturday job would have got a bonus like that in those days unless it covered quite a long period. His basic pay would have been an absolute pittance and he would only have been working a few hours a week. The co-op was also in real decline back then, which makes it seem even more unlikely.
www.bbc.co.uk
