More than a hundred volunteers joined South Devon coastguards
and police in the search for 18-year-old Harry Martin, the film and photography
student who has not been seen since Thursday when he went out on a coastal path
to take photographs of stormy seas at the height of the tidal surge.
Christ knows what his Mum and Dad are thinking right now.
Are they cursing the mountainous waves for bearing down on their boy like a volcanic
eruption? Or cursing their son for taking unnecessary risks – gambling with their
lives as well as his own?
Please allow me to address you, Mr and Mrs Martin. For the
sake of everyone else, for all the people you don’t know and who never knew
your son, I’m asking you not to be too hard on him.
Harry Martin may have lost; but he had to play. Taking those
shots, trying to get the story – that was his chance to leave behind spotty
youth and grow into the firm jaw line already prominent in the photo the papers
have of him. The chance to go beyond everything you’ve offered him, Mum and
Dad, which might only have stifled him if he’d stayed.
Of course it’s easy for me to say. Not difficult for a
lifelong journalist to make a public pronouncement in favour of a young man’s
ambition to enter the public domain with a fistful of newsworthy photographs.
But even if I had known him personally, I should like to think I would still
know his actions for what they are – a young photographer's drive to get it right.
I hope Harry Martin hasn’t gone down beneath the ocean
waves. But if not for the level of ambition which he has demonstrated – a firm reminder
to the rest of us, we would all be plunged into the abyss.
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