In The Beginning

It was the high spring tide of 1952. Mum and dad and their four male offspring were re-located from the dockside slum to a corporation housing estate in Ipswich. It was on this estate that I was to live a semi-rural life until the end of my teenage years. At ten years old, which was also the age of criminal responsibility, I had joined the ranks of young runaways early. There were two major roads out of Ipswich. London Road and Norwich Road. I would go to London. At home, things couldn’t be worse. Soon apprehended by the police, the escapade landed me before the magistrates. I was criticized by the court, taken home and beaten-up by my father. My parents were told to make me behave or have me taken into local authority care. My father went around muttering mysteriously about ‘The Workhouse’ and ‘Sleeping over the line’, which appeared to my nascent imagination to be a bedlam of some sort. In any case it was a prospect to be feared and avoided.
Unsettled, always dissatisfied and uninspired by what the narrow adult world had to offer me as a child, I enjoyed the thrill of driving, and stole vehicles for joy-riding. Yes, at ten. Not surprisingly I was a failure at school, often caned by one or other sadistic teacher under the rationalization, ‘corporal punishment’. I left school at fifteen without qualifications in 1962. I obtained a job as a janitor in a hardware store where in twenty seconds I learned to cut Yale keys. That was my apprenticeship training. My future seemed pretty well laid out. I would work in manual jobs until retirement and die. I was unsatisfied, and didn’t mind. Then followed an assortment of manual jobs under a series of employers. I was a van boy, shop assistant, janitor, travelling salesperson, a butcher’s assistant, farm worker, concrete-mixer’s assistant, railway laborer, a cleaner of hessian wheat sacks, a warehouseman and a chicken-gutter in a slaughterhouse and many other things. None of which inspired me. Or indeed earned much money.
But this was not to be the theme of my existence.
Vehicles were easy to hijack. My adolescent practice of taking and driving away motor vehicles without insurance, a licence to drive or the consent of the owner caught up on me. I was consigned to prison. I had graduated to becoming a juvenile delinquent and prisoner. I did not enjoy this experience, but managed to avoid the bullies as I made my way through the prison and borstal system. I absconded twice, and was eventually incarcerated in a closed prison on the outskirts of the town of Rochester. I could not escape. Journeying through the system, I devoured many books in the series of prison libraries. The shelves, rich in bibliographical resources, had become my university. In these early days of learning and discovery my CV list of universities was prison libraries. They were Norwich Prison, Wormwood Scrubbs (three times), Gains Hall Borstal (twice), Gloucester Prison, Reading Jail (Detention Centre for punishment), and Rochester closed Borstal. Not Oxford, although I was later to teach at Oxford Brookes, or Cambridge, although I was later to address the Law School there, nor Harvard, although I have been abstracting the Theology Department’s theological Journal for the past ten years! I still enjoy the irony.
It was in Rochester closed Borstal’s chapel one Sunday that I experienced a Christian conversion. Visiting the chapel every Sunday morning with the other prisoners, my attention had been caught by a life-sized wooden carving of Jesus of Nazareth suffering crucifixion. He seemed so small to have been such a history-changing figure. Empathizing with his suffering, I joined my life to His. It may seem a strange thing to do. But it wasn’t the wood of the figure before me. It was the idea of dignity and love and honor that pierced my soul. It was love at first sight, and it was forever. I fancied that he immediately called me to be ordained into the Church of England priesthood. An arrogance beyond belief for a snot-nosed working class criminal recidivist teenager. But it was a call that I was compelled to obey. My incarceration had changed my world. Now, my earth was to move for a second time at age 19. I saw the bishop. Leslie Brown. Formerly the Archbishop of Uganda, he was a small, very pleasant man. He backed my assertion of divine Calling.
“Go and see Canon Churchill, the Diocesan Director of Ordinands at Bury St. Edmunds.” He said. Which I did.
This episcopal wet dream made a good story, and inevitably put me on the TV and lecture-circuit. All went well. Then, after a lifetime of professional Anglican ministry as a parish priest I thought that was to be the end of my adventures. My future seemed pretty well laid out. I would continue to work in the churches until retirement, and then do a bit of voluntary work. My retirement mission would be founding and running a food bank for the local hungry. I would be engaged with this until I went off to glory. I was now 69 and ready for a comfortable armchair and the respect and friendship of the local church communities. I had found a good life and a pleasant retirement. I had done well.
But once again, it was not to be. An innocent abroad, I had managed to spend a whole life in the Anglican Church without ever coming across the corruption at its heart. My earth was about to move for a third time. This time, not for the better.
We arrived home after a visit to the garden center. My wife and I. We were met at the garden gate by two men. They were police detectives. They entered my home and arrested me. After forty years of church ministry, at sixty-nine years old, like Joseph in the Old Testament, I learned that I was being accused of sexual assault. It was a false accusation. But I was the only one who knew it. But surely, you may think, my accuser also knew it. I was to discover much later that not even my accuser knew she had been making a false allegation. She was not well.
I was told that a female member of my church congregation had made a series of fantastic allegations. Initially, the Crown Prosecution Service offered fourteen counts of sexual assault that I had committed against this woman. For the next twenty months, the nature of the truth would not be disclosed to anyone. It was complex. My accuser had been experiencing multi-sense hallucinations resulting from PTSD – symptoms from some early trauma she had suffered in the past. Since then, she had been regularly confabulating in all five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch). She had undergone numerous periods of incarceration for treatment in various psychiatric wards and institutions for her condition. She was seriously psychologically disturbed. Her allegations had not been an intention to deceive. But because this medical history was not admissible as evidence to the court, she being defined by the process as a ‘victim’, this would later prove to be an insurmountable barrier for my legal team.
My false accuser was unaware she was making a series of false allegations. So far as she was concerned, her delusions were as real as the sun in the sky. Her personal testimony both to her legal team and counsellors, and in the court would therefore be completely convincing. She believed herself to be truth-telling. Who were the jury to believe? It was her word against mine.
But I was a man and a priest, and she was a vulnerable woman and a parishioner. According to the legal language being used in court and all proceedings, she was the ‘Victim’ and I the ‘Perpetrator’. Not only had a crime been committed, the guilty party had already been discovered according to the language being used. The shortened slang, ‘Perp’, similar in construction to that other sexually-descriptive derogatory term, ‘Perv’ was a word I was to become accustomed to being applied to me for the next two years. It was to be devastating...