Mick photographs Harold Fry is the pivotal encounter, south of Coventry, where a convivial young man with soft blue eyes and curling sideburns buys Harold a lemonade, declares his walk 'a pilgrimage for the twenty-first century,' and takes a photograph that will launch Harold into national fame. This single image, staged beneath a sign pointing to Wolverhampton, transforms a private act of faith into a public spectacle, setting in motion the media frenzy, the gathering of pilgrims, and the commercial exploitation that will both sustain and threaten Harold's journey to Berwick-upon-Tweed.

The Meeting South of Coventry

Harold met Mick on the road from Stratford to Warwick, south of Coventry, at a moment when his pilgrimage had already acquired a settled rhythm. He had been walking by day or by night, as the mood took him, mile after mile after mile, binding his blisters with duct tape and sleeping under the stars, when the moon hung like an eyelash and the tree trunks shone like bones. The pale Cotswold stone had given way to the red brick of Warwickshire, and the land had flattened into middle England. He had grown a beard in thick tufts, and his yachting shoes were wearing thin, yet he felt so much at one with the land beneath his feet that he could laugh and laugh with the simplicity of it. It was in this state of hard-won contentment that Mick, proffering his beer glass, toasted Harold's courage and asked, 'So you put yourself at the mercy of strangers?'

Harold's answer revealed the philosophy his walking had taught him. He explained that he was careful, that he did not hang about in city centres at night, and that on the whole the kind of people who stop to listen are the kind of people who are going to help. He recalled one or two moments of fear, including a man on the A439 he thought was going to mug him but who was actually about to offer him an embrace, having lost his wife to cancer; Harold admitted he had misjudged the man because he was missing his front teeth. When Mick asked whether he really believed he would make it to Berwick, Harold replied that he did not push it and did not hang about, and that if he just kept putting one foot in front of the other, it stood to reason he was going to get there. He added, with a smile, that he had begun to think people sit far more than they are supposed to, and asked, 'Why else would we have feet?'

The Photograph and the Sign

Mick licked his lips as if savouring a taste not yet in his mouth and pronounced Harold's undertaking 'a pilgrimage for the twenty-first century,' adding that it was awesome and that his was the kind of story people want to hear. Harold, characteristically, responded not with grandiosity but with a request for a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, explaining he had not eaten since lunchtime. Before they parted, Mick asked if he might take Harold's photograph on his mobile phone, 'Just to remember you.' Concerned that the flash might upset several local men playing darts, he asked Harold to manage it outside where he could get him on his own.

Mick directed Harold to stand beneath a sign that pointed north-west towards Wolverhampton. When Harold protested that it was not where he was going, Mick assured him the small detail would not show up, what with the dark. He then instructed Harold, 'Look at me as if you're shagged out.' Harold found this came very easily. The staged image, with its false directional sign and its weary pose, was a small fiction that would have enormous consequences: it was the photograph that would appear in newspapers and on television, showing a changed Harold, unfeasibly tall and at ease with himself, his hair tangled in a mop, a mottled beard springing from his chin, and his skin so dark that Maureen, staring at the image in the local paper, had to keep looking to find traces of the man she thought she knew.

The Birth of a Media Story

Mick's photograph and his promise to his editor proved prophetic. After Harold's story was reported in the Coventry Telegraph, there was not a morning in Fossebridge Road that passed without event. It had come on a slack news day. Mentioned on a radio phone-in programme, it was taken up by several local newspapers, including the South Hams Gazette, where it was given the front three pages. It was then reported in one or two of the nationals, and suddenly no one could get enough. Harold's walk became the theme of Thought for the Day on Radio 4, and spawned leading articles about the nature of the modern pilgrimage, quintessential England, and the pluck of the Saga generation. People talked about it in shops, playgrounds, parks, pubs, parties and offices. The story had caught the imagination, just as Mick had promised his editor it would, although as it spread its details began to shift and grow: some people reported that Harold was in his early seventies, others that he had learning difficulties, and sightings were made of him in Cornwall and Inverness, as well as Kingston upon Thames and the Peak District.

The photograph also brought journalists to Maureen's crazy paving and a local-television crew beyond Rex's privet hedge, and made it possible, for those with the wherewithal, to follow Harold's journey on Twitter. Maureen had not the wherewithal. The image that shocked her most was how changed Harold had become: just over six weeks since he had set out to post his letter, he looked transformed. The photograph, in other words, did not merely record Harold; it created a public Harold, a figure of the imagination, whose story was no longer entirely his own.

The Pilgrims and the Exploitation

The fame that Mick's photograph unleashed drew followers to Harold, and with them came the distortions of his original intent. Rich Lion, who joined the walk, informed the group that something was needed to distinguish the real pilgrims from their followers, and produced, through an old friend in PR and the distributors of a health drink, official white T-shirts with the word PILGRIM on the front and back, available in three sizes. Kate scoffed at the impracticality, asking where they were going to wash these things, but Rich insisted that white stands out and that its image is pure. Harold, who had shed his possessions and refused lifts and walking equipment, found himself wearing a branded garment that caused such dispute that he eventually removed it, retrieved his worn shirt and tie from his rucksack, and slipped the T-shirt in a bin when no one was looking, feeling it did not feel right to carry something that had caused such dispute.

The splintering of the pilgrims that followed was the direct legacy of the public story Mick had helped create. A week after the split, reports came of the pilgrims' arrival in Berwick-upon-Tweed, with photographs in the newspapers of Rich Lion walking hand in hand with his two sons along the quay, and others of a man in a gorilla suit nuzzling the cheek of Miss South Devon. There was a brass band to welcome the party, with a performance by the local cheerleading troupe, and a dinner attended by local councillors and businessmen. Several Sunday papers claimed to have sole access to Rich's diaries, and there was talk of a film. The pilgrims' arrival was also covered on the television news, and courtesy of BBC Spotlight, Maureen and Rex watched footage of Rich Lion and several others delivering flowers to the hospice along with a giant basket of muffins, although Queenie was unable to receive them. Maureen's reaction was one of disgust: 'Those people didn't even know Queenie. It makes me want to spit. Why couldn't they wait for Harold?'

The Private Man Behind the Public Image

The photograph and the fame it brought stood in stark contrast to the private reality of Harold's pilgrimage. The man Mick photographed was not a celebrity but a solitary figure who had set out, as he told Maureen on the phone from a smelly phone box, because it was not enough to post a letter. He had walked through wind and weather, and beneath sun-bleached skies, measuring distance not in miles but with his remembering, unleashing the past he had spent twenty years seeking to avoid. The public story of the modern pilgrim obscured the deeper truth that Harold carried: that he was walking to keep Queenie alive, and that beneath his new ease lay the buried grief of a father who had discovered his son David hanged in the garden shed, who had drunk to stop feeling, who had dismantled the shed and broken into the brewery, and who had let Queenie take the blame and disappear. The photograph that made Harold famous showed a man at ease with himself, but the real Harold was a man walking toward a reckoning, one foot in front of the other, toward a town he had never seen and a woman he had not spoken to in twenty years.

When Harold finally arrived at the gates of St Bernadine's Hospice, eighty-seven days after setting out to post a letter, having walked six hundred and twenty-seven miles including mistakes and diversions, no one stopped, or looked twice, or offered him food. The seagull wheeled and barked overhead, and he lifted his finger to the buzzer, wishing the moment would hold itself, like an image cut out of time, his dark finger against the white button, the sun on his shoulders. The fame that Mick's photograph had created had long since moved on to other stories, other pilgrims, other spectacles. What remained was the man himself, alone at the end of his journey, about to discover whether the faith that had carried him six hundred miles could survive the meeting it had been for.