Morgan Meredith with his parents

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A MOTHER has travelled 6,000 miles from South Africa to Camden in search of her son after his father was diagnosed with cancer.

Juliana Meredith, from the small town of Riebeek-Kasteel near Cape Town, has not heard from her 33-year-old son Morgan, since 2021 – but said she had walked the borough’s streets looking for him.

She said his father, Michael, has been diagnosed with a “very rare form of cancer: neuroendocrine cancer of the adrenal gland, and the lung”, adding: “We desperately want to reconnect with him. I want to talk to him about his father who is ill, and that I miss him and I love him. I need him to know that his father is ill, very ill.”

Ms Meredith arrived in the borough last month, knowing Morgan, who moved to the UK, had lived in homes in Gospel Oak and Swiss Cottage.

“He broke communication on the June 21, 2021,” she said. “You must understand a mother will remember that date: it’s imprinted in my brain,” she said.

His disappearance was very out of character, Ms Meredith said.

During her recent visit to London, Ms Meredith asked the Metropolitan Police to conduct a “welfare check” on Morgan.

The force confirmed he was alive. “That was all they could tell me,” she said. She said she then walked the streets and liaised with community groups in the hope of finding him, but said: “It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Where do you start looking? I want him to live his own life. But every birthday [of his] that I don’t know where he is, every Christmas and New Year that I don’t know how he’s spending it – it tears away at your soul, every single day of not knowing.

“If I hear from him once, I’ll be happy. But not knowing where he is – a mother finds that really, really difficult.”

She said her son, who loves photography and trained in IT at a college in Cape Town, is a “people person”, adding: “He makes people laugh. He is very well-read so he can talk on a wide variety of subjects. “He seems to attract people to him, like a candle flame. He’s just my amazing, beautiful son.”

She said she was worried that the isolation of the Covid-19 lockdowns “were not good for him at all.”

“As the days went by and became weeks and months, I spent a lot of time crying for my son,” she said. “If I found Morgan, and he said to me: ‘mum, I don’t want to have contact any more,’ for whatever reason, it would be okay. It would be closure.”

Ms Meredith can be contacted on 07761 232080.

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