A Walk In The Dark (Part 1)

The following story happened to me, on the first occasion I visited the remote village of Medjugorjein Bosnia Hercegovina, in the former Republic of Yugoslavia. I am moved to write this down because yesterday was the twentieth anniversary of Our Lady Queen of Peace beginning a series of daily apparitions to a number of (then) children, many of who still receive messages to this day.

Please don't groan when I say I want to start this story at the very beginning, at a time when I was only three or four years old in the early 1950's. It is necessary to provide the context for what unfolded and I'll try to keep it mercifully brief!

Just about the first thing I can remember thinking is 'Why me, what have I done to deserve this?'.

You may think this is rather strange behaviour for a young child, especially when I tell you that at this time I was living in a beautiful white painted original Georgian mansion, Charlton Park, set in acres of parkland, with it's own garden maze and pool. This house was literally like something out of a James Bond movie. The ballroom was reputed to be the largest room in the whole of Kent, a picturesque county in the South-East of the country known deservedly as 'The Garden of England'. It was approached via, what through the eyes of a child seemed like, a mile long drive. I remember, feeling envious of 'ordinary' people, even those that lived on the squalid council estates (projects) that were prevalent in post-war Britain.

And the reason for this was the mansion was an orphanage, I was the proverbial bird trapped in a gilded cage. In reality, my reason for envy was rather more personal than this. After all, to this day, I have a love for beautiful architecture. I was nobody's fool, I knew that I was living way beyond the means of 'ordinary' people. No, the real reason that I was consumed by envy was because they had real mothers and fathers and even though I had a mother, she couldn't afford to keep me, and not unnaturally I felt abandoned and unloved.

A child without the love of a mother has a corrosive 'black hole' eating away at his or her very soul.

Phew, that's the first time I've said it in print, but it's true. The net result of this upbringing was that I became extremely emotionally introverted, the fear of more rejection, real or imagined, should not be under-estimated. At surface level I had developed the protection of a happy even-tempered personality and this helped to disguise the serious, shy and emotionally stunted underlying persona.

Whilst not possessing matinee idol looks (unless you count Rin Tin Tin as a film star), I had at least been blessed with a quick sense of humour and had inherited a reasonable level of intelligence, and the orphanage latched onto this and made me their 'trophy' student. Eventually, I was blessed with the extreme luck of being sent to a boarding school (Public School in England or Private School in the States) which during my period of studying there celebrated the 300th anniversary of it's foundation.

(I throw that last bit of information in to interest any Americans who may be reading this. I'm talking about a time well over 30 years ago so the school had already celebrated it's centenary years before the American War of Independence!)

Boarding school was the first time I felt a degree of normality.

This was firstly because the dynamic of an old boarding school where not dissimilar to that of an old orphanage, but also because all the other boarding pupils were in the same boat, nobody had parents to go home to! Nobody knew about, what to me felt like a dark secret, and I applied myself to studying because I knew this was to be my route out of charity and poverty. My fear of poverty was more conditioned by the lack of aspiration and ambition of most of those other unfortunates at the Children's Home. Let's face it, I could hardly claim I was suffering in a material sense, living as I had been in a mansion and being educated at a Public School! I was determined to be just as successful as the middle-class children with whom I was now at school.