This is the first of what could be a number of extracts from the unpublished autobiography of a very remarkable man, who it has been my great privilege to work with, albeit at a distance. Strange to tell, we discovered recently that we had some circumstances in common, including growing up in the same county at the same time--my aunt was actually a teacher at the school he attended for a time. However, his experiences were very different from my own.

The gentleman in question has been many things in his life, including a nurse, a soldier, a teacher and a Buddhist priest. Indeed, he is still very much three out of the four! He started from very humble origins, and the early episodes do not make for pleasant reading, containing as they do a lot that has to do with child abuse and cruelty. However, those experiences are essential for understanding what was to come later.

It is a moving story, from which one can learn much about the human spirit. I find it uplifting and inspirational. I hope you do too.

These extracts are presented with the subject's full permission, but bear his copyright.

A Troubled Childhood. Part 1

My earliest recollection is of a fire and flames and smoke and the terror of not knowing what was going on, but being sure that something terrible was happening.

The panic of those moments often catches me when I am unaware, for I was three years old and I can, in all honesty, not remember anything before then. A fire had broken out in the building in which I was living. I have no recollection of parents, brothers or sisters being there, or of anything else; I can only remember that the room was full of flames. A dark figure crashed into my reality as the window shattered and a deep voice muttered non-understandable words. I was grabbed, not too gently, and pulled out of the burning room, rescued by the fire brigade, but my memories of exactly what happened are confused. In later years I learned that it was a domestic dispute that had resulted in the fire.

I remember being in this brightly lit hospital with lots of strange people running around. There was noise and confusion, there were the bangs of trolleys, there was loud clashing, there were people crying and screaming. In a quiet moment the trauma of this still catches me unawares.

There is a faint, distant, but haunting memory of what I presume must have been a better time, for I can clearly see myself standing by a brook which has bubbling water, and I am looking for small fish living under the rocks. The overriding sound that recalls that day to me, even now, is of the trees and the wind speaking to me through the trees. I felt that this was a special day and it was important as it gave me my first recollection of the two individuals who I now call my brother and sister.

My brother is called Clive and is younger than me, and my sister is the youngest of the three of us, playing in this brook with a strange shadowy lady. I cannot see her face but she is warm and she says nice things and there is a warmth inside my stomach that I was not familiar with. But I do know that it was a special day.

My next clear memory was quite definitely from when I was three years old. This was a horrible day. This was a day of darkness when a shadow came over my life and I felt lonely and scared because everything around me suddenly became new and unknown. This was the day when I was I placed in a children's home. I was three years old, and anyone who says that a three-year-old cannot remember is lying, because I remember everything about that awful day. I remember seeing this strange woman who said to call her Auntie. I remember the hugeness and unfamiliarity of the place. I remember being shown into a vast dormitory full of beds and being told that this was where I would now be living.

I remember being shown a bed with a mattress and white sheets with three blue lines down them, and blankets with arrows on them.

I remember that all the things I owned, and there were not many of them, were very important to me. Indeed, the only thing I had that was really mine was a beautiful silver badge that had wings, and with those wings I could fly anywhere. It was a very special badge to me and I treasured it deeply.

These were empty and disturbing times, for most of which I felt small and frightened. I was in a children's home, my brother was not with me at this time, and my sister, being the youngest and a girl, had been easy to find foster-parents for, because people like baby girls. They're not so keen on three-year-old boys.

Certain parts of that home I recollect with an intensity that burns down to my soul. These were the coal bunker, the locker room and the dark cupboards, the places where I was locked up if I didn't conform or I did something wrong. Or maybe it was because I was a Catholic and not the same as the other boys; or it was my mother who had committed the original sin and I, as the product of that sin, was being punished for it.

At those times there cried out in me an anguish that is hard to put into words. I found that the only safe place was inside me. Inside was warm, nobody could touch me inside, inside was safe, inside was knowingness. I got to know "inside" very well, as I was in care from the age of three to sixteen-and-a-half, when I was released to go to college and the Army - but I am running ahead of myself.

© J K Adler-Collins 2008