Badger's Story - Surfer to Soldier, Strangeways to Stone Mason

Badger heading out to surf, Polzeath, Cornwall.

All images courtesy of Badger, unless otherwise specified

“I was always a bit of a black sheep of the family, looking for attention I guess now, but I was not getting the right attention. We were naughty boys; we were bored and we didn’t have much to do.

DISRUPTIVE INFLUENCES

I went to a run of the mill school at first but I had to go to a special unit for educational help and things like that. I have Dyslexia, which back then wasn’t recognised. I had a learning disability as they called it. The frustration of just being bunged to the back of the class all the time and just made to look out the window and stare because they were more interested in the kids who could read and write! So I got put into a special unit with other disruptive kids. I had a fight with a guy and hurt him and then I got expelled. The next school I got sent to was a boarding school which was for disruptive influencers, boys from abusive families, drug families and normal families. My family was not abusive at all. I was quite lucky really, hearing some of the stories from the other kids.

TROUBLE

When I left school I was just pissed off with the system. Things weren’t going too well at home with Mum and Dad.

Right, aged 18, Ibiza

I was signing on and it was too easy getting in trouble.

Back in them days it was the special patrol group, the SPG, they were bastards they were. They could just jump out of a van and search you and give you a good kicking half the time as well. That’s how the police were at the time. I got pulled up and searched just for wearing a sheepskin coat once. My mate nicked a car and I took the brunt for it and I did 28 days in Ashford, Middlesex. That was my first experience of incarceration, other than school.

My life wasn’t all bad, there was a lot of fishing and a lot of adventures. I was very fit and training and boxing for Ramsgate Boxing Club. I was waiting for something to happen. I couldn’t join the army because of my 28 days in prison, so I waited for my criminal conviction to be spent.

Veterans for Peace UK discard medals outside Downing Street in 2015 to protest the bombing of Syria.

Photo: Corbis, Metro.

THE BRITISH ARMY

Five or six years later I joined the army to get out of the house, to make my mum and dad proud. My dad was a very hard worker from a very strict family. When his dad came back from the war out in the desert, he said he threw all his medals away and said they weren’t worthit, they really weren’t worth it. My mum and dad were both from the generation of the war. They lost a lot of family, a lot of people did, and I just felt it was my duty.

Centre, in the British Army

DRUGS

Where I really found drugs was in the army. We were stationed in Minden which weren’t far from the Dutch border so we’d often go to Holland on weekends on leave. A few of us would go and we got into ecstasy and smoking weed.

CIVVY STREET

The British Army was the best army in the world. It was disciplined. No matter what happens to you wherever you are, unless you’re on your own, you’ve got someone to cover your back. Coming out into civvy street you ain’t got that. I came straight out of Northern Ireland, where I had to rely on the guy next to me being vigilant, and when you don’t have that it’s an awful feeling of insecurity. And that leads to depression. I didn’t realise I could suffer from depression.

British soldier.

Photo: Brett Miller

All my mates in the army settled down and had kids. My life had been institutionalised since boarding school so change for me was difficult because I’d been through routines that don’t change. I was so used to things not changing, prison, boarding school, army. Everything changes when you come out of the army.

I made a trip down to Cornwall after a failed relationship with my baby’s mother and a failed attempt to get compensation for my injuries sustained while in Northern Ireland. I was blown off a roof by a helicopter and that smashed my back up. When I tried to get compensation for my injuries, the army gave me £45,000 and then they took £30,000 back off me because I was claiming incapacity benefits while waiting for the court case.

I left the army when I was 27 with my injury. I was in a lot of pain and it wasn’t going well. I was trying to settle down with my partner and make a life of it and that didn’t work. I was ten years older than her and ex-army and she was 17. And it all went downhill.

While I was convalescing, I was doing door work in Margate. And I started getting into a bit of cocaine. And I didn’t want that. That’s why I urged

myself to move away. I liked a puff of smoke with hash at the time but I wanted to clean myself up.

With the compensation I bought Mum a new car and bought myself a jeep and had a chance to move on.

Up in Scotland I learnt my trade, which is stone walling. My dad said to me, “Get a trade, something what people would need and have it under your belt.” So I worked for free for a seventh generation stonemason because I wanted his knowledge.

I lived with my cousin in Plymouth and did a bit of landscaping when the money ran out. Then I found Polzeath and just stayed there. I loved it. As a family we always came down the West Country, my dad had liked it down here.

In Polzeath I lived at Robbie Love’s campsite for a couple of years. It was one of those places where you could meet like-minded people, all surfers, and enjoy yourself. It was a totally different lifestyle to what I was used to.

Robbielovescampsite.co.uk

Totally chilled out. And that’s where I started dealing drugs.

Being a drug dealer, you’ve got to be sociable. It’s a very interactive job, so to speak, meeting people and having a laugh. But one thing I never did was sell drugs to kids, to under 18-year olds. They’d often come up to me and ask but I wouldn’t give it to them.

A RIGHT SILLY MISTAKE

I felt bad for moving away from my kids. I wanted a lot of money to put in an account for them. In Polzeath someone offered me work going to Morocco to bring back hashish. It was good money but not enough. I got greedy and asked if they’d do any coke runs. I’d only been in Polzeath just over 18 months and I went out to Jamaica to pick up some cocaine. I thought I was invincible after being in the army. When I came back I was arrested on suspicion of importing cocaine within my person. That was it. I rang my sister up from customs and told her “Don’t tell mum whatever you do but I’ve got myself into some real trouble” and told her what I’d done.

The judge said to me when he put me away, “Corporal, it pains me to give you a sentence. You’ve served your country above and beyond the call of duty. Go away and learn your lesson.”

Badger on his longboard

It was that moment I realised I’d made a right silly mistake.

PRISON

I was banged up in HMP Strangeways, Manchester. I was sentenced to five and a half years and I served three years.

In prison I met a double murderer, Erwin James. He was a bit of a legend. Erwin taught me to write. I wrote a book, Wave Walkers, about a boy, me I suppose, travelling from island to island surfing and living the life, the dream. The boy bumped into a guy, Erwin, who was an old legend hotdogger, surfing on finless boards, and he wanted to teach the boy how to surf. It was all made up but it was nice to escape where you were. In Polzeath I was into my surfing so much I was really peed off for what I’d done.

Before prison, Erwin had joined the army. He’d left the country after killing two guys outside of a nightclub in a drunken brawl. He went away and joined the French Foreign Legion and made their special forces.

He could tell you a tale or two. He decided to come back to Britain because he was hopeful that the British would be lenient on him. He got life.

Erwin said “I’ll never forget my last day of my life sentence. I couldn’t sleep. I was just waiting for that half past seven key to turn in the door. I was packed up all ready to go.”

After 14 years of his life sentence, at 8am the screw opened the door and gave Erwin a piece of paper and shut the door. They had just given him another 10 years without warning. That’s the system. He did 25 years.

I was extremely fit in prison because Erwin was my training partner. We’d do weight training and run laps around the bottom field. Erwin writes in the G2 magazine “A Life Inside”, by Erwin James, and he’s a freelance reporter now. My name in his columns is Tank. And in one of his columns he says he was quite surprised when he found “my friend Big Tank” still in his bed 15 minutes prior to his departure. I didn’t want to leave. The camaraderie in there, same as the army and same as boarding school, you are amongst people and a bit of discipline.

PAROLE

When I came out of prison, I was on parole for six months. I was lorry driving and I was doing tramping - where you are out living in the lorry from Monday to Saturday, going around the country. If I missed one parole appointment it would be straight back inside, so I couldn’t afford to miss any. I used to park my

articulated lorry right outside the parole office in the middle of the road between the white lines just to get in there on time.

CORNWALL

Once parole was done, I was driving down the M1 when I heard on the radio that Boscastle had been badly flooded. And I thought that’s a reason for me to get back down to Cornwall. I loved Cornwall. Boscastle is renowned for its stonework and I’d been doing stonework.

The Boscastle flood of 2004.

Photo: Slideshare.net

It was quite emotional coming back after spending all that time away, facing the music. I came back and I was anti-drugs but it didn’t work out as well as I expected.

When I got back I was respected by the herberts. The young kids in the village who do the drugs thought it was big of me to do such a thing (go to prison for being a drug dealer).

One of the lads said to me “We were sitting there watching telly and a picture of you come up. And we were sat there thinking, ‘That’s Badger! And he’s been arrested over importing cocaine and he’s being held in Manchester prison and looking at a big sentence.’” A lot of people saw it and they were really shocked. And living in a little village like Polzeath word gets round quick, and it doesn’t always end up as it started. Village post. As soon as I walked into the pub everyone was offering me drinks, cocaine, have a line…and I’m no, no, no, no, no. But then it ends up I started going out with a local girl who liked that way of life and I got back into drugs before I even knew it.

GOD CAME KNOCKING ON MY DOOR

I just wondered where I was going in life. And then God came knocking on me door (laugh). And I let him in.

Badger

I’d always believed in God but never understood how to believe in God properly, what it was all about. I had a bit of an experience… and I do like to tell a tale! Any story that should be told you cannot exaggerate it, but you can make it colourful.

I went surfing one day and this wave come up and you know you get a feeling, those God moments, that something substantial is about to happen and this wave just lunged up over me and just hovered. Time stood still and it just crashed down on top of me. I was down and my board was down as well, pinned to the floor of the seabed. I kept getting little flashbacks of words from God. Then I just felt someone pull me out and when I come up there was no one there to be seen. Who just pulled me out of the water?

People say desperate people come to God. Maybe so. If you’ve done bad you want redemption, you want forgiveness; you’ve got to ask for it. It doesn’t come for nothing. Jesus said all you gotta do is follow my teachings and his bottom line is love. Love thy neighbour, love thy enemy.

“Tubestation” church gathers on Polzeath beach tp baptise Badger

Adopting an orphaned lamb, Camelford

STONE WALLING

Badger’s stonemason’s logo

My dad was a bricklayer and I couldn’t do bricklaying ‘cause you had to have too straight a line. With my stone walling it’s a rough course wall, random rubble whatever. Dry stone walling is an art in itself. Every stone has to key into another, there can be no movement. The coin end’s got to have a solid foundation to hold the wall up.

Completed drystone wall, Polzeath

GREED AND SILLY MONEY

Jesus had friends who were tax collectors and prostitutes, fishermen, people who needed help, people who were down the bottom. He didn’t go up to Herod and say “Right you lot…”, because he knew they were blinded by greed and money. They say it’s harder for a rich person to get into heaven than it is to get a camel through the eye of a needle.

Cooking for refugees at The Calais Jungle

The rich are taking industry out of Cornwall. The only industry here is that of the summer season. New Polzeath was once a lovely community, a place to be. When I first moved here, in winter time you could look up both

sides of the valley and see house lights on where families live. Now you look up and you see none off-season, because they are all holiday homes.

What happened to the people who lived here? They’ve been tempted out. They’ve been given silly money for their properties only to be knocked down and some monstrosities put in their places. It’s very sad to see. Posh people have moved in and they are taking over the last free spaces. My way of life is going to be a thing of the past. Like Joni Mitchell says, ‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot’, so more people can come in and spend more money, the love of which is the root of all evil. We’re just killing the Earth and we are so bloody blind to it.

Badger's first bus parked at The Lizard

GO WITH YOUR HEART

Don’t allow big businesses to manipulate your way of thinking. Go with your heart, what your heart tells you.

Living in a bus means I can wake up to any view I want. They say nothing’s free in life; you’ve got to pay for your tax, your diesel, your MOT. You’ve got to keep on top of things. I’ve got a fridge, I’ve got a cooker, I’ve got an oven. I’ve got a log burner. I’ve got everything I need, and God provides me with everything else I need.

Bus living with Rodney, the Irish Water Spaniel

You’ve got to have nothing you don’t want to have. I live the way I do because I choose to. I don’t want to stay in one place. I don’t want to be rooted into a house with a living room and a TV.

I look out my window now and I see Alexandra. I see Three Cornered Garlic. I see the ocean full of food. We were created to be free. Live and let live I say.

Badger’s shadow, Rodney, the Irish Water Spaniel

Don’t worry about the future. Why worry? I’ve got faith that the Lord will provide me with work. He gives me work when I need it and that gives me time to reflect.

God is like the tide. He will come in and claim what is his. It’s like surfing, when that wave has travelled thousands of miles. Where it first started that wave was a mess; it was converging tides and massive high seas in the deepest of the oceans. But as it travels on from the turmoil it’s gone from jagged lines to straight lines. And that’s how we can be. Consider the big ocean out there; drift-wood which is floating in the ocean will eventually find a shore. A bit like God who is picking up lost souls who just float around looking and searching for something within their hearts. Just look for that light, that warmth and you’ll feel it in people.”

Jumping off the rocks into the surf at Polzeath.