Staring down at the plain, grey doorstep, Harvey Shackell was filled with disbelief, but also a sense of wonder.
More than 60 years earlier it was on this very same slab of concrete, on a freezing cold Christmas Day, that Harvey had been abandoned in a cardboard box as a newborn baby.
“I can’t believe this is where I was left,” he says. “If I hadn’t been taken in, I would have frozen to death.”
But he was taken in, by the kind-hearted owner of that doorstep, Vera Wood, who discovered the tot hours later on Boxing Day, 1960.
So began more than six decades of questions that Harvey has only now, finally, found answers to. Not only has he been reunited with Vera, he has discovered two sisters and 16 half-siblings.
The moment he saw sister Cherry for the first time left him in tears.
“These last few months have been so emotional. I get choked up just talking about it,” says 62-year-old Harvey, from Wiltshire, who is married to Vanessa and has two stepsons.
“When I met my sister Cherry, I couldn’t believe how much alike we are. I feel a lot lighter now that I know where I’m from.”
That mystery was reported by the Mirror at the time when we revealed a “beautiful blue-eyed” baby boy had been discovered in a cardboard box in Hayes, Middlesex.
He was named Christopher by nurses at nearby Hillingdon Hospital before being adopted by his emergency foster parents, who renamed him Harvey after taking him in at five days old.
Over the years, Harvey thought a lot about his birth family but only recently took action after his adoptive mum, now 95 and in a nursing home, showed him the old Daily Mirror clipping.
Harvey says: “I’ve had a good upbringing with a loving adoptive mum, dad and brother, but over the years you get this niggle in the back of your mind thinking ‘Where did I come from?’”
He launched an appeal in the Mirror last year saying he wanted to know his roots at last, and also turned to hit ITV show Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace.
In emotional scenes to be shown on the ITV show next week, Harvey begins his search at the only link he knew – the doorstep. Vera had moved, but she hadn’t forgotten him.
He discovered she had appeared on Surprise Surprise in 1988, desperate to know what had become of the little lad.
Vera, now 89, lives just around the corner from where Harvey was found all those years ago and remembers the incident as if it were yesterday.
She says: “At about 4 o’clock on Christmas Day I heard a rumpus in my front garden. I pulled the curtains apart and saw these young boys run out of the gate. Then at about 6 o’clock I heard a baby cry, but I didn’t think anything of it because the girl across the road had a new baby.”
Then, around 9am on Boxing Day, she opened the door to the milkman – and there was the box.
She recalls: “There was no sound coming from that box, but when we pulled the sheet of brown paper away from the top, there was a baby lying at the bottom.
“The baby was exhausted through crying all night on and off. He was just laying there quiet with his eyes closed.
“He had nothing on his feet, nothing on his hands or a bonnet on his head. He was wearing a little cloth round his body, like a torn up pillowcase wrapped between his legs, with two little safety pins on either side.
“Although there was a lady’s thick blue cardigan over the top of him and the brown sheet of paper over the top of that, he was cold. It was his weight that helped him to survive. I later found out he was 8lbs 8oz.”
Vera, who had three children of her own, aged three, four and one, wrapped him in a cot blanket.
“I just cuddled him until the police arrived,” she recalls. “My husband was in shock and my eldest daughter thought that Father Christmas had delivered her a baby brother.
“I would have loved to have kept him, but I had three other children, it just wasn’t possible.”
Eventually Long Lost Family, presented by Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell, tracked down Vera, who had never stopped wondering about “Christopher”.
Vera says: “When I met him I just broke down – and so did he. He pulled me into his arms to give me a big cuddle. We won’t let each other go now. I told him ‘I can go to my grave happy now because I’ve seen you’.”
Finding Vera filled in a lot of blanks for Harvey about his past.
He says: “It’s amazing that she was thinking about me for all those years.
“Knowing Vera found me and that I survived overnight, it was a shock to realise I might not have survived and I’m here probably because of luck.”
The meeting became particularly poignant for Harvey after DNA results revealed that both his birth parents have died.
The search also reveals Harvey has two older full sisters. One doesn’t want to be identified, but Cherry, from Devon, was delighted to be found.
“At first I didn’t believe it,” says Cherry, who is three years older than Harvey. She was shocked he was a foundling – someone abandoned as a baby with no birth record or name.
“It’s a wonder he survived. I feel guilty that I was kept and he was got rid of. It doesn’t seem fair.
“I’ve always wanted a brother. He’s had a raw deal.” Cherry reveals to Harvey that his birth mother had no say in his abandonment and thought he had been taken to a place of safety.
She remembers: “It was our father who took him away, leaving Mum really distressed.”
It’s discovered that Cherry and Harvey’s father had relationships with various women, leading to 19 children in total. Some were adopted and some went to children’s homes.Harvey says: “My father obviously was not a very nice person. My mum must have been in a terrible state.
“I was taken away from her and she never knew I was alive.
“Thinking about my adoptive father, who sadly died ten years ago, who was the complete opposite – such a gentle, soft, nice man. Not ever knowing my mother brings it home that I wish I’d not waited this long.”
But it’s a positive, joyful reunion for the siblings. Cherry and Harvey have met up several times now and he has an invitation to his niece’s wedding this summer. He has also been introduced online to several of his half-siblings from across Europe.
Harvey says: “What is overwhelming is how the family has just brought me in and accepted me.
“I met Vera and thought it can’t get better than this, then instead of the icing on the cake, it was the Cherry on the cake.”
Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace starts on Monday, June 26 at 9pm on ITV1 and ITVX.
