Mick Hunter with the God Pod, in which he takes the Word round the Island, welcoming troubled people aboard. Picture by Jennifer Burton.
WIGHT LIVINGWHEN Mick Hunter sat on the edge of his bed contemplating plunging his slaughterman’s knife into his throat, things could hardly have been darker.
Slipping on a pool of blood carrying a pig carcass had left him with a debilitating back injury. Five years of constant pain had gnawed at his spirit until it was raw. It broke him down piece by piece, leaving him in a black place where no light shone.
As he sat there he saw his daughter, Lisa. She begged him not to take his own life and he pulled back from the very brink.
The effect he would have on his girl had conjured up the most personally powerful image that could be evoked to prevent what would have turned out to be selfish suicide.
Not long after that Mick, quite simply, found God, or God found him.
He lives just a few yards away from Carisbrooke church that he had taken to attending to get one of his sons into the local church school. The way he had conducted his life was about as far away from the Christian path as could be imagined.
Mick was a violent bloke, roughness and selfishness borne from a loveless upbringing as one of seven in a house where there wasn’t enough of anything to go around.
That thuggishness took him onto the streets of Ryde, where he would routinely carry his slaughter knife with its vicious blade, or sometimes, an axe.
He was part of the darker side of the Island. He wouldn’t be happy unless he had a big wad of dosh to take onto the streets for dodgy deals and he’d be very happy indeed to be in a scrap.
He was a contemporary of one "Lord" Ronnie Morris, who, as Mick says, had a violent worm in his brain that would turn as soon as he had a drink.
But Mick, being from Newport, was very much not in the Ryde camp.
If you were to tap Mick on the shoulder, the old fighter’s trick of getting you to turn, so that you could receive an immediate blow to the face, Mick would crouch, turn and prepare to get in first.
That was the way he was.
His unhappiness that manifested itself in aggression was nourished at Priory Boys’ School.
He left barely able to read but with 34 detentions under his belt in his first year and a reinforced notion that respect was wrong and violence right.
He points to one teacher stripping to the waist and wielding the cane with such force that he lifted off the ground near the end of the stroke, to a woman teacher using the edge of the rule beating the quicks of offenders’ fingers.
The main qualification with which he graduated was quickness of fist. You didn’t mess with 18-year-old, 18st Mick, particularly when he was Guinness fuelled.
He was a strong boy. When he finished work, first as a cinema projectionist and then as a glazier, he would earn extra cash "loading-up" roofs with tiles. Hefting heavy weights up ladders created muscles that could hit.
By 1969 Mick had followed the money to become a slaughterman at FMC in Worsley Road but as the slaughterhouse was in its death throes Mick slipped.
Life would never be the same. It would first be much, much worse and then transformed.
He experienced depression borne out of helplessness. A man previously in control of his own destiny found the mire of a true black hole no painkiller or anti-depressant could touch.
His reluctant visits to church in pursuit of a better education for his son, coupled with the discovery of the Christian spirit of gunsmith Charlie Hall and, particularly, Charlie’s son, John, began the transformation.
Mick was persuaded to go to the laying-on of hands, an evangelical experience far removed from the sombre daytime church services.
Even in his broken state, Mick’s natural dislike of religion shone through. He still had as his maxim: "Do unto others what they would do unto you but do it faster and harder …" But something took him, painfully, up the hill to the healing service.
"As I got inside, one man was crying like a baby. People were passing out on the floor," says Mick.
"I don’t know what made me say it but I just said: "I am a violent scumbag, if you really are Jesus Christ would you help the likes of me? And to my amazement he did.
"All I could describe it as is that it was like a giant pair of arms hugging me and I experienced a feeling of love inside me that I had not felt before.
"I walked out of the church not only healed but I knew I was forgiven for what I had done in the past."
He was then to kneel in front of his family and beg for their forgiveness for how he had been.
At the Jobcentre they thought he had flipped when he told them why he wanted to sign off invalidity benefit. He wanted to go to college that was the antithesis of his very core. Then he went to work with people with learning disabilities.
It was the beginning of a long road leading to trying to make a positive difference to people’s lives.
Now Mick brings his values of selflessness above self, love over hate and the importance of respect and family across the Island in what has been dubbed the God Pod.
The current Pod is a rusting 18-year-old Mercedes that has been round the clock even more than Mick. Mick comes from the Ryde Elim Pentecostal Church but he’s one of an inter-dominational team of 13 who travel to Wroxall, Newport, Freshwater and soon to Ryde, where people in trouble can hop on board and talk about whether Jesus Christ can help.
There will soon be a much newer and more comfortable God Pod that is being converted by the team at Romahome, the not inconsiderable cost paid by people with the faith that Mick and his team do make a difference.
Mick says: "People who visit us can accept our message or they can ignore it. In much the same way I would like that message to be there for young people in schools but sadly that isn’t a fashionable thing to say.
"Young people are intelligent and can make up their own minds but not if they aren’t taught about being a Christian first.
"People seem to be afraid to talk about that now and about the need for self-discipline. If there were no rules all you have would be anarchy.
"It’s a simple message but with the freedom people have comes responsibility. Two-hundred and fifty thousand British men died in one day alone in war fighting for that freedom."
A negative side of that freedom has been exhibited by drink or drug fuelled louts trying to turn over the bus, torching it or beating-up team members.
"But it’s worth it," Mick says.
"Sometimes the bus is crammed with 12 people and I have seen lives transformed. Most of those that come aboard say they have one thing in common. They describe their lives as s**t."
"With some of the things I am told I could cry myself to sleep.
"The message is that there is a way where you don’t need to turn to drink or drugs but to Jesus Christ.
"A lot of people are anxious these days and anxiety of the heart brings depression."
Mick has taken his message around the Island each Easter, with the team carrying the cross, and travelled with his zeal on gospel mission to India, Romania and Thailand, to some of the poorest people in the world.
"There are people who are trapped in their broken lives. They are living in a home made from pieces of wood and polythene," he says.
"But, when they experience Jesus Christ in their lives, they have far more than we have."
He takes the Word to fetes and fairs, carnivals and the after-pub gospelling in the confines of a bus often crammed with violent people made unpredictable through twisted lives and booze.
A story all too familiar to Mick.
And this time he takes it on the chin and all he dishes out is the message that there is a better way to live.