A passing policeman found a little child,
She walked beside him, dried her tears and smiled.
So begins the 1894 ballad The Little Lost Child, a song so tender and reassuring that it once filled music halls and inspired the monumental painting Passing Policeman. The image is simple: authority made gentle, protection embodied in an outstretched hand. It is the version of the story we long to believe—that in our moments of deepest fear, someone steady will lead us home.
Said he to her kindly, “Now you must not cry,
I will find your mama for you bye and bye.”
This morning, another version unfolded in my school. Two officers arrived unannounced to serve a pick-up order for one of my students. I asked them to wait in a side room while I went to bring her from class. But the moment she stepped into the hallway, she saw the patrol cars outside. Panic washed over her face. I walked her forward anyway, each step weighted with betrayal. Our secretary, with a mercy that still humbles me, pulled a curtain across the lobby window to spare her a little dignity. Still, as the officers led her out in handcuffs, a bus arrived and students spilled out, silent witnesses to her shame.
Do not fear, my little darling, and I will take you right home,
Come and sit down close beside me, no more from me you shall roam.
But there was no return home. No reunion. No tidy resolution. For the student, it was humiliation and loss of control. For the police, it was procedure. For me, it was something harder to name. I am a teacher in a last-chance school, one who spends his days peddling hope like fragile currency. I tell my students there is still a way forward, still worth in their effort, still light in their story. I build trust slowly, carefully, as one tends a fragile flame. And then, in moments like this, that flame feels smothered in an instant. My presence—meant to be safe—becomes part of the machinery of compliance.
You were a babe in arms, dear, when your mother left me one day,
Left me at home, deserted, alone, and took you, my child, away.
The song aches with the fracture of family, the wound of separation. That ache resonates in my classroom too, though the words are different. I have seen both sides of the story: the officer steadying a trembling hand, embodying compassion; and the officer clasping wrists in steel, carrying out orders with necessary detachment. Both are real, both leave their mark, and I am often caught between them.
James Baldwin once wrote, “The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.” That is what I try to tell my students: that they are not bound to repeat the verses already written for them. But on days like today, that conviction feels fragile. The old lyrics of loss and return echo uncomfortably close to the reality of rupture.
Suddenly the door to the station opened wide,
“Have you seen my darling?” an anxious mother cried.
The ballad ends with reunion, husband and wife embracing, child restored. It is a resolution fit for song and sentiment, but rare in life. My own work rarely concludes so neatly. More often, it ends in silence, with students watching as a peer disappears into a patrol car, with trust stretched thin but not entirely broken.
And yet Václav Havel reminds me: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” My work is not to control the ending of the song. It is to keep singing even the dissonant verses, to keep extending trust even when trust is undone, to keep offering hope even when hope falters.
Husband and wife then, meeting face to face;
All is soon forgotten in one fond embrace.
The painting in the museum shows only that embrace, only the moment of reunion. But I carry both stories—the sentimental and the shattering, the heartwarming and the heartbreaking. Perhaps my calling is not to reconcile them but to hold them together, to stand in the space between the painted ideal and the lived reality, and still to offer my own hand—flawed, trembling, but steady enough to whisper, even on the hardest days: Do not fear, my little darling…