Heather Bellamy spoke with Mike McDade about his early years when his mum left, his dad was an alcoholic and he subsequently ran away from home

Mike McDade

Growing up in a broken home, Mike McDade decided he wanted to be rich and found his own dubious way of achieving this. Despite leaving school with no qualifications and living on the streets, he had a Rolls Royce, a large house and holiday homes, yet left behind his flash lifestyle to become a Baptist minister. Mike has served in Bradford, Warrington (at the time of the IRA bomb attack), London and Cambridge and in each of these places he has left a deep impression. With the release of his biography Runaway, Red Beret, And Reverend, Heather Bellamy spent some time with him to find out more.

Heather: How did life begin, was it a happy childhood?

Mike: Yes. I was born in a place called Stanford-le-Hope in Essex; so some good people come out of Essex despite all the rumours that people hear! I was born in a prefab, which many people may not recognise today. It was a prefabricated house, which was built after the Second World War to house those families that had been devastated during the second war. My mother went out cleaning to help us as a family to pay for things, because we were a poor family. My father worked as a railway porter after leaving the Royal Navy. I think he found it quite difficult, in spending so long in the services and then coming out to civilian life.

I enjoyed playing and playing football and doing all the stuff that kids enjoy doing, but life changed. It changed for me and my older brother and my elder sister and my younger sister when I was about 10 years old. I came home and my sister said I've got something to tell you and she looked as if she'd been crying. She said, mum's left home. I said, fine, but when is she coming back? She said, no, no, she's left home; she's not coming back; she's found someone else that she has fallen in love with. They had gone in a sense never to be seen again.

I couldn't really understand as a 10 year old what that meant, but I think looking back what I did feel was a sense of grief; a sense of loss as each day passed, that the reality that my mum was no longer going to be there; no longer going to be cooking or cleaning; that life just changed completely overnight. My father took it really badly. He became an alcoholic and more often than not when I used to come home from school he would be stretched out on the settee, comatose from alcohol. There would be no food and that led to us as a family, as individuals, becoming what I described in the book as tearful strangers. We were all crying inside as well as physically crying on the outside, but we weren't talking to each other because we didn't know how to talk to each other. We didn't know how to cope with this. There were no Social Services around to pick us up and look after us. Although my mum came from a large family and some of the uncles and aunts all lived around us, it was as if life had come to this abrupt halt and what we were doing was existing day by day.

After about six to nine months, the school that I was attending discovered what had taken place and said to me I could be entitled to have free school dinners. That meant actually having a meal and a pudding. I used to look in the windows of the dining hall and see some of the food that they had and think to myself that that looks really delicious and tasty. They arranged for me to have these free school meals and I couldn't wait. I got to school in the morning and I was looking forward to lunchtime. I was queuing up. You can imagine how excited I was; my lips were moist with thinking about what I'm going to have and then I felt this twist of my ear. One of the teachers had got hold of my ear and twisted it and believe it or not I can still feel the pain of it. They pulled me out of the queue and said to me that those who have free school meals queue up over there. I looked over there and there were about half a dozen sheepish kids looking down, almost afraid to look up at life, who were queuing up to have their school meals.

Mike McDade with Terry Waite

That teacher hurt me and whoever wrote that sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me, because we were being called names by then, I'd like to meet and tell him they were wrong. Names at that age and perhaps any age really hurt and me being me I tore up the dinner tickets that I had for that week and I walked out of school and the truth is I never went back.

Heather: Literally you never went back?

Mike: No, literally. My education stopped at that particular moment. I lived in a sort of farming community and I discovered that during the summer I could pick peas; I could do bean snipping; I could do potato picking and I would get paid an amount of money and that's what I began to do and to live on right up until the time when I ran away from home.

Heather: And how old were you when you ran away?

Mike: I was just over 14 years old. The sequence of events that led up to that was quite simple. I was walking home one afternoon; I can't even remember what I was doing. I could have been out playing as I tried to still do, or I could have been coming back from bean picking. There was a group of kids in a sort of circle laughing and spitting and kicking at something on the floor, which attracted my attention. I walked over to where all these kids were and I looked down and they were just kicking this old man who was on the floor; he was scruffy and dirty; so I joined in. I spat a couple of times and I gave him a good few kicks. Then he rolled over and it was my dad. He was so drunk that he couldn't feel or understand what was going on; he was almost comatose with all this; but the thing I remember, whether it happened or not, but it was in my mind, was he looked at me and I can still feel those piercing eyes looking and I ran off. I didn't know what to do. I was supposed to be this hard individual who had a few friends in a gang and did some stuff that probably hurt other people in lots of different ways and here I was trying to figure out what on earth do I now do? It was that moment that I decided I would run away.

Heather: There were other incidences weren't there that really shaped and defined your life?

Mike: Yes there was. One of those incidences happened the very first day I went to school; I think I was about five years old. The teacher was calling out the names on the register trying to encourage the children to reply and to respond to her, as a way of getting to know her. She shouted out a name, which was Terence McDade and I'm looking around the classroom thinking, oh there must be somebody else who's got the same surname as me, perhaps it's a cousin. She kept on looking at me as if to encourage me to say, answer yes and I'm thinking no; how can I answer yes, that's not my name. Then afterwards when I had this conversation with her and eventually she spoke to my parents as well, we got to the truth, which was that my name was Terence Michael McDade. However my name should have been Michael Terence McDade, but my dad was drunk when he went and signed the names on the birth certificate and so he got it round the wrong way. I didn't know my mother never forgave him for that and my mother refused point blank to ever call me Terence; she always called me Mike and when she was angry, Michael. That's all I knew that I was; I was either Mike or Michael McDade. It's amazing, because that affected the rest of my life right up until now. When I get official papers come through the post, of course they're addressed to Terence Michael McDade. I had to think about my bank account and everything else that I had, which name do I actually put it in?

Heather: Did you have a lot of anger towards your dad, or were you just hurt, with a desperate longing for a dad that could give you what you needed?

Mike: I think there was a bit of everything there. It's difficult to say it was one thing, when I believe it was part of several things. The pain was on my side and I believe that I was so disgusted with myself that all I could do was to run away and to spend the next three years living on the streets; getting jobs where I could and sleeping on people's floors. As I reflected on that, I really believed that the grace of God was upon me because I was never abused and we hear about the things that go on today and how easy it would have been to fall into those traps and to end up taking a completely different path. I often say to people, there by the grace of God go I, because it could have so easily been so very different.

Heather: What affect did it have on you being homeless?

Mike: It had a number of affects and some of those were having this sense of being unclean all the time and yet one of the things I took from the house when I ran away was a towel. Everywhere I went I had this towel, as if I needed something to help me stay clean in some particular way, although I felt very dirty. It sent me in a spiral, in a sense that I had to lie to get jobs and nine times out of ten, the jobs didn't last very long because I'd lied so convincingly that they soon found out that I couldn't do the job that I said I could do. I was either sacked or kicked off the particular job. There were times when I felt I was carrying a placard round my neck, which said unclean. If I'd been back in the times of Jesus I'd probably have a bell and be ringing it so that people would avoid me and people wouldn't be contaminated by who I was.

There was a young lad of 14 growing up very quickly. You can begin to imagine the wounds that they were beginning to leave behind as I moved from one place to another; from London for a while; then I ended up in Warrington and I got a job painting the Manchester ship canal. There are some great stories in the book about that as well. Then only 40 years later I find myself as a Baptist minister in the town centre of Warrington, which is just incredible. I also moved on to Blackpool where I got a job painting Blackpool Tower; I started from the top, but the book illustrates why I started from the top and what happens to me as I left that particular employment.

You can buy Runaway, Red Beret, And Reverend from Cross Rhythms Direct for only £7.99 + p&p.