I was born in 1978 into a working-class family in the UK. I was the youngest.

 

Like most children, I began life with that glorious feeling that anything was possible.

 

Endless summer days, playing with friends, long spooky evenings around Halloween. That first magical glimpse of Christmas decorations appearing in shop windows.

 

Awe. Wonder. Possibility.

 

A child should, at the very least, feel safe and loved.

 

I often did not. Home could be turbulent and unpredictable.

 

There were a few pockets of happiness I would find during short visits to family in Portsmouth. Those visits felt like a haven from everything happening around me, and I remain grateful to those family members.

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Yet alongside that physical world was another one. 

 

From my earliest memories, I could see spirit. I could hear spirit.

 

I could sense people, presences and atmospheres that others around me seemed completely unaware of.

 

What I would later understand as mediumship and psychic ability was simply normal to me.

 

And thank God it was.

 

Because while the physical world around me could feel uncertain, spirit became a constant.

 

I also grew up in what I experienced as a haunted house. Strangely, rather than terrifying me, I found the paranormal activity fascinated me.

 

I wanted to understand it.

 

Why could I sense things other people could not?

 

Why did some rooms feel completely different from others?

 

Who were these people I could see?

 

What was happening?

 

I did not have words such as mediumship, paranormal phenomena or spiritual sensitivity. I simply knew what I experienced.

 

Years later, when people began asking me for help with unexplained activity in their own homes and businesses, I was not approaching their experiences purely from books or training. I knew what it was like to live with the unexplained.

 

That first-hand understanding became an important part of my later work in paranormal investigation, spiritual protection and clearing.

 

It also taught me something I still believe today.

 

Fear is rarely the best place from which to understand anything.

 

Calm. Curiosity. Discernment. Understanding.

 

They take us much further.

 

I also grew up around very different expressions of religion. 

 

There were Catholic services, Easter, Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and other members of the family who attended a Christian Church where people would fall to the floor and speak in tongues.

 

As a little boy, I remember thinking:

 

What's going on?

 

Are they happy?

 

Are they in pain?

 

Am I supposed to start rolling around too?...I had questions. Lots of them.

 

But the thing I struggled with most was not what happened inside the church.

It was what happened afterwards.

 

I would hear people talking about God, love and goodness, yet sometimes witness behaviour at home that seemed completely at odds with those words.

 

Even as a child, I noticed the contradiction. I did not have the language for it then. I do now.

 

What we call ourselves matters far less than how we actually live.​

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Childhood also brought experiences no child should have to navigate.

 

I was sexually abused by an older woman in my family when I was around six years old.

 

Something that should have felt safe and affectionate felt completely wrong. I tried to push her away. Eventually I found the courage to tell adults what was happening.

 

It was minimised. I was encouraged not to speak about it.

 

There was physical abuse too.

 

I remember being dragged from the bath by a man in my family and badly beaten while I was still wet. I was threatened by him not to tell anybody, or it would happen again. 

 

Another member of the family later that evening realised I was in so much pain that I could barely sit down. She saw the bruising and his handprints all over my legs and buttocks and intervened.

 

There was a moment when I was around seven that has never left me.

 

I was playing and making noise, as children do, when a female member of the family became angry with me.

 

She hit me with wooden clog-style shoes. I ran upstairs and tried to hide beneath the covers of my bed.

 

She followed me.

 

She climbed on top of me, pinched my nose closed and clasped her hand tightly over my mouth so that I could not breathe.

 

All the while she was saying:

 

“I’m gonna kill you.”

 

I believed her.

 

I remember the terrifying realisation that I could not breathe and that, if I did nothing, I might die.

 

Somehow I managed to bend her fingers backwards just enough to take a gasp of air. I got my feet underneath her and, with every bit of strength my little body had, pushed her backwards.

 

Then I ran. Down the stairs. Out of the house. And straight to my den at the bottom of the road.

I sat there in shock, my nose and mouth hurting, thinking:

 

I could have died.

 

Something changed in me that day. I knew that whenever I possibly could, I would stand up for myself.

 

The discord continued. Violence, Family conflict. Fear. A deeply volatile Christmas Day when my parents separated. Later, during another incident, I was grabbed and threatened with a knife.

 

For periods of my childhood I became frightened to sleep.

 

Eventually I was taken in by another family member for several years because I no longer felt safe living at home, and for that I am grateful.

 

I am not sharing these things to create villains. Nor do I need to name the people involved.

 

This is not revenge.

 

It is context.

 

For much of my childhood, I did not feel safe.

 

And yet spirit was there. Always.

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In one of life’s stranger twists, another source of resilience arrived through an Australian television programme called Prisoner: Cell Block H.

 

I became enthralled with it. Those strong characters, their survival and their refusal to give up gave something to the frightened boy watching them. Strength can arrive from some wonderfully unexpected places.

 

Not every wound was physical. Just before I started secondary school, I was taken to a market to buy my new uniform. At eleven, I had not yet grown tall and I was a chubby little boy.

Several pairs of trousers did not fit. Frustration turned into a sentence I have never forgotten:

 

“You shouldn’t be so bloody fat.”

 

It was said in front of the woman serving us and other customers.

 

I was mortified. I was already conscious of my body. I did not need somebody close to me confirming every insecurity I had begun carrying about it.

 

What I remember just as clearly is the woman in the shop speaking up for me and saying there was no need to be so cruel.

 

Years later, there is an irony that makes me smile.

 

That chubby little boy grew up to become a dancer and a model.

 

Another label that could have become a limitation did not get to decide who I became.