What becomes of a teenage runaway? Fifteen-year-old Arthur Heeler-Frood, from Axminster in Devon, left his home in September, leaving his parents a measured note of apology, explaining: “I have run away because I am bored of my life”, with instructions on where to find his school uniform (“in a bin bag in a small barn in the field on the green down the road near Membury church”).
Two months on, his parents made a public appeal on ITV’s this Morning. It worked. On Monday, he was spotted at Honiton railway station, 10 miles from his home and taken in by the police. He’d been sleeping rough as far away as London and Birmingham, and has since issued an apology to the police, and society as a whole.
Which is a rare spot of positivity in the pitch-dark world of missing persons. No harm appears to have been done to Heeler-Frood’s person, but his Google profile is in tatters. Unless he wins a reality show of a notability-standard equivalent to or higher than The Voice, employers will always mark his CV with “missing boy”. And as of now, there is still no legal mechanism to hide those results. Has he succeeded in making life less boring at the cost of his future employment prospects?
“The EU’s ‘right to be forgotten’ only extends to removing information in breach of the Data Protection Act or excessive unsubstantiated comment,” explains Roz Sheldon, managing partner of online reputation firm Igniyte. “So there is absolutely no obligation – or reason – for any of these articles to disappear.”
But employment expert Trevor Gilbert OBE, of Trevor Gilbert & Associates, suggests that even with a single headline hanging over your online life, the simple passage of time will draw enough of a shroud over events. “If he settles down to his studies now, if he goes to university – that’s six years. And if this is indeed a blip, then it will appear as that. So long as he has shown application elsewhere.”
Adam Nicholl, marketing director of recruitment agency Randstad UK, goes further. “To be honest with you, I think this shows a bright, creative, resourceful, independent soul who has grown up faster than your average 15-year-old. It reminded me of the case of Stephen Fry, who did a similar thing at a similar age, though I think he also maxed out his parents’ credit cards. What boardroom wouldn’t want Stephen Fry?”
In fact, emphasising a get-up-and-go spirit seems to have been part of the boy’s motivation. “In a way, he is thinking of this as a gap year early,” Heeler-Frood’s dad Jeremy told ITV last week. The “early gap year” – a Duke Of Edinburgh Award-style CV-fillip you should not try at home.
