Missing Link

This is the story of the clever 11-year old Rick who lives with his mother Lydia in a small town in The Netherlands. The year is 1955. Rick has never seen his father. He was an RAF pilot and was shot down in the war. In Rick's opinion, his mother’s new lover Jef, a nice but rather ostentatious tobacconist, cannot hope to match his neat hero father, let alone replace him. Rick has come under the spell of Africa. His mother has given him an old atlas in an attempt to quench his thirst for knowledge. In it he finds a genealogical tree showing the descent of the human species with the annotation “missing link” made in ink by a previous owner. When Rick hears that an expedition, with the mission to search for the missing link, will set out from Brussels for Congo, he tries to contact the leader of the expedition, because he is convinced that they will search in the wrong place.