Cor Blimey !
I’m just a regular bloke born at home in Croydon, just south of London, England. I have three younger siblings and parents that celebrated 53 years of marriage before my father died.
When or how I became a renegade is hard to determine. I was basically a good kid, went to Sunday School, sang in the Church choir and played sports. In 1967 my mum came with me to Windsor Castle to see her most royal majesty Elizabeth II present me with my Queen Scout award. At the Bexhill-on-Sea Grammar School in East Sussex I enjoyed civics and studied the great British Constitution and economics and maybe it was then that I first discovered how laws are applied unjustly and unfairly.
My acts of rebellion started at school and got me in plenty of trouble. Corporal punishment was accepted. I got excluded from classes, slippered and caned and even forced to crawl under a classroom floor through broken milk bottle glass. My disgust and disdain for authority was a product of my education and other abuses.
My innocence quickly dissipated with sexual predators like my scoutmaster, my young Christians priest and the gay guy in Paris. He found me and my hitchhiking schoolfriend trying to sleep under a bridge in Paris. The offer of a warm flat with a soft bed was hard to refuse but his insistance that homosexuality was now legal in the UK and we should all be doing it was not ok with us. It was 1968 and the times they were achangin’.
I was a child of the 60’s liberally partaking of the free sex, drugs and rock’n roll. Pubs, clubs and concerts were overflowing with the great bands of that era. It was all mainstream fun for a teenager in that time, I was a renegade among renegades.
It was 1969 when my finance ditched me and my last connection with convention ended. Brokenhearted I traveled to Israel to work on a kibbutz supposedly picking grapefruit. Inadvertently, I got educated in middle eastern politics, biblical history and modern sexuality. My life changed forever.
Back in London I got my B.A. while protesting the Vietnam war, getting stoned and drunk and becoming totally disillusioned with capitalism. Returning to the kibbutz, the Yom Kippur war opened my young eyes to the evils of government propaganda. I regressed to playing with children and became a teacher. I found my assignment for this life. The rest is history, to be unfolded in future blogs.
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.
Renegades Escapades 