Unbreakable spirit, an overview of my new book

YOU CAN DO ANYTHING YOU WANT
My first recollection of my childhood goes back to when I was four years old and was of my father beating my pregnant mother. It was a trend that was to continue for another sixteen years.... My mothers goal was to become a secretary. My grandfather owned a farm and wanted my mother to work on it.

In fact, my grandfather’s decision was that all of his three children were going to work the farm regardless of what they wanted. He didn't believe in freedom of choice, with one exception which just happened to coincide with him. My mother was a determined young woman and she would not relent regarding her position until she got what she wanted. For a short while it looked as though, through persistence, that she was going to get her wish until one morning at breakfast, there was one member of the family missing and in his place was a note saying, “I don't want to work on the farm so I have left home.” The only son had run away. My mother now had lost her chance of becoming a secretary so her next objective was to leave home but that was not allowed either, unless she became pregnant. My mother was eighteen years old and engaged to my father and I was the ticket out. On becoming pregnant, my mother was ordered to get married immediately! She thought she had just “been born” however it turned out to be the single, biggest mistake she would ever make; she married my father. After a very short space of time she was to discover that my father's qualities included being a compulsive liar, a drunk, lazy and, worst of all, violent. He would turn without warning or reason and launch into the most horrifying attacks you could imagine. She was the sole attraction for his violent tendencies until I reached four years old when the attention was equally divided between us. I remember my father would get so drunk that he would have to hold a pint in both hands and bend his head down to meet the glass halfway. An early recollection of life was that of my mother being beaten when she was carrying my baby brother. My little brother was born on March 15th 1969. Things weren't good at home as my father never forgave my mother for giving birth to a boy as he wanted a girl and to get me away from the trouble I went to spend the next few weeks over Easter with an aunt and uncle. After a month, and with no mention from me that I would like to go home, it was decided that I should go back home. When I arrived home, I asked how soon it was going to be before I could go back to my auntie’s? My father replied why don't you f-— off now you little bastard! Nothing much was going to change at all over the next few years; my mother would be at the end of my father's fist on a weekly basis and I would just get screamed at. By the time I was five, I was getting clouts and over the months these clouts were more and more severe and would continue to do so over the years. My parents’ marriage was volatile in the extreme and as the years went by our lives got harder. I wasn't getting physically assaulted that frequently up until about seven or eight as my father much preferred to deprive me of things and would get a sick kick out of seeing my feelings hurt. He had two little games that he liked to play with me, one was to lie me down on my back with my arms straight out on either side and kneel on my muscles with his fifteen stone frame and roll on the muscles. The pain was excruciating and I will never forget that pain or how I would scream "Stop it Daddy I love you, I love you, I love you please let me go", he would just reply "I know you do" and carry on! His second game was to suffocate me until I was in such a state that even after he had removed the pillow from my face, I was having such a severe panic attack that I couldn't breathe anyway. These games continued for over ten years. My father hated his life and the only thing he hated more than that was the fact that my whole life was still ahead of me. This seemed to really trouble him and everyday he would tell me how pathetic and useless I was and how I would never be any good at anything. I remember that from about eight years old there were three things that kept me going. The first thing was I always remembered saying to myself that "Next year will be OK. Next year I will be happyE everything will be OK next year". The second thing that used to keep me going and from as young as four years old, was my love of motorcycles. My dream was to become the local motocross champion and sand track champion. I would go to all the races and dream about the day I would be champion. My father may have been stealing my childhood, but he wasn't going to steal my dreams - they were kept safely in my head where he couldn't destroy them. The final thing that kept me strong was a vision, at the time it was merely a dream and it wasn't until my late twenties that I realised that I had been extremely active in the use of visualisation. My vision was of myself as a man lying in bed with my wife asleep and even though it was night the room was filled with an orange glow and there was a cot in the corner with a baby asleep in it. I would visualise this every single night of my life. I just knew one day my own life would start. This vision was my single biggest source of inspiration throughout my youth. I eventually got to participate in one of my greatest dreams at the age of twelve - motorcycle scrambles. I say eventually because I had been trying to buy a motorcycle since I was four and a half years old when I dragged my mother around to a motorcycle shop after we'd been shopping and placed two sixpenny pieces and three old pennies on the counter, thinking that I had enough to purchase a new Honda monkey bike. Needless to say the monkey bike wasn't one of the items with which we arrived home after our shopping excursion. At twelve years old, I obtained an old Honda 125 Enduro bike. I took the indicators and the headlamp off and replaced them with number plates. I then headed off for the first race meeting with all the high tech gear you can imagine - a knobbly tyre, a racing spark plug and an STP sticker for the bike and for me a bright red pair of overalls and a pair of steel toe capped wellies. My day had arrived and after completing the practice session in the morning, I was now sitting on the starting line of my first ever race. I was nearly sick with excitement! The tapes were released and our group of twelve year old would-be world champions hurtled off down the start straight. I made it one hundred yards before my bike engine seized and left me in the middle of the straight balancing on tiptoes so I could reach the floor waiting for some help to arrive. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my dad approaching. He walked over, stared down at the engine and seeing a large hole where the engine barrel used to be, screamed a string of four letter abuse at me and the bike and then kicked the bike over with me still sitting on it. Lying on the track with a motorcycle lying on top of me in front of two hundred people was about one of the most humiliating experiences I had ever gone through at that time. The crowd just watched on in complete disbelief. I took a paper round on and managed to buy myself a proper racing motorcycle, subsidised by my mother, and after missing the first two meetings, I finished second that season, third and next and in my fourth season, at the age of fifteen, I snapped my foot in half during practice of the first race of the season. The year was 1980 and motorcycle boots were very basic with just buckles up the side and a steel plate through the sole. I was riding too fast on a track that had never been ridden on or cleared properly and on about the third lap I took off from a jump flat out in fourth gear and during my descent my racing line was such that I would fly through the air about two inches from the bank. By doing this, it put me onto a perfect racing line which enabled me to accelerate immediately down the next straight. Unfortunately I hadn't noticed a boundary stone sticking out of the side of the bank. My foot did! As my foot caught the boundary stone it snapped in half, and because of the metal plate in my boot, it stayed bent in half. From impact it felt as though my foot had exploded or been torn off. I pulled over at the side of the track and gently laid the bike down. It was brand new and I didn't want to scratch it. I looked down at my foot and couldn't see the front half of it, I wasn't as bad as I had thought, I still had my foot, it was just that my toes were now sticking out under the back of my heel, I remember thinking "Ah that's not so bad", then I woke up in hospital! My foot was all the colours of the rainbow and swollen like a balloon. I was bitterly disappointed; it was my last year as a junior and my last chance to win the championship. I went to “physio” every day to get the swelling down as they could not put it in plaster whilst the foot was so big. A fortnight later, I was due for my Friday morning physiotherapy session, but I didn't turn up as there was a race meeting on the Sunday and nothing was going to deprive me of winning the championship in my last year. I bought a pair of size thirteen boots. I was only a size seven but after lying on the floor with my foot in the ice compartment of the fridge for four hours, I was able to fit my left foot into the size thirteen boot. The foot was obviously still broken but I was able to strengthen the foot by taping umbrella spines around the foot. Race day came and I was up at four am sharp to put my foot in the ice compartment until seven o'clock. My friend arrived, loaded my bike for me and carried me into the van. Because I couldn't walk at all we were first to arrive at the track and we parked where the briefing would be, so I could sit there without anyone knowing I couldn't walk as I obviously wouldn't be allowed to ride. The first race came and my friend lifted me onto the bike and I rolled down to the start line and balanced on my good right foot. The tapes went down and we hurtled off down the straight and the next fifteen minutes were about the most painful in my life. I had to put my foot down as I slid around the corners and every time I put my foot down it was like breaking it all over again, but it was worth it because I won that race! I felt strong and proud and I thought I can do anything I want if I put my mind to it. I remember crossing the line repeating to myself over and over again “You were wrong Dad no ones going to beat me ever!” At the end of the year I was second in the championship, I had lost by just one point. Ironically, I still always felt like a fraud every time I won a race. I felt like it was just luck and that I never really deserved to win. After a victorious meeting, my friends would treat me to fish and chips and a can of coke but I always felt as though I wasn't really entitled to it, so good had been my fathers negative conditioning. From twelve through to sixteen the violence committed against me by my father had been intense. I had learned to read him so well and could tell just by the look in his eyes that a hiding was just moments away. When the signal came, I would leap out of my chair and run from the house as quick as my legs would carry me. My father would soon be out of breath and give up. I would have been relieved but I always knew what was coming next. I would watch him from the end of the road as he would get back to the house open the garage, get my motorcycle out of the garage and smash it down to the floor, breaking off the leavers and bending the bars, tearing the seat and anything else that came to hand. In the end I got wise and when I saw the look in his eye and knew the hiding was coming and if I was supposed to be racing that weekend, I would just take the beating and save the bike. Once, just to get my own back, I left my bike at someone else's house and when I saw the “look” took to the road. I only did that once because that day my whole record collection was destroyed so I decided it was much more viable just to take the beating. When the beatings lost their severity as I was just used to them now and he could see that I was no longer terrified - just broken - he would humiliate me in various ways. One day when I was fifteen - I had long hair at the time - he tied my hands behind my back and put me into a dress with my hair clipped back like a girl. He then threw me out of the house and locked me out. By this time my dad had taken up with another woman but still expected his dinner on the table and his shirt ironed by my mother so he could look good for his girlfriend. She would beg and plead for him not to go and he would respond by beating her unconscious and go to meet his girlfriend, leaving me to bring her around and look after her. One day I decided enough was enough, and I decided to ask his girlfriend to end the affair. I rode up to her house on a motorcycle with no lights on during a dark night and in the pouring rain, being nearly being knocked over four times by cars pulling out. When I got to her house, I knocked on the door and she answered, I said “I'm Mark Baker. Will you please stop having an affair. You are breaking my mother’s heart and I have a little brother who is only ten.” She closed the door in my face. When I got home my father was leaving to meet her and I went to bed to force myself to sleep as always. Twenty minutes later I was woken by several blows to the head. My father was a little upset as he could not believe that I had had the cheek to interfere in his life. but all was not lost as he had found a new way to inflict massive terror into my life. All he had to do was call into my room when he got into a rage and punch me several times in the head as I slept. It was time for me to change tack, rather than forcing myself to sleep now I had to stay awake. My father began taking overdoses and eventually the ambulance was regularly calling at my home to take him to get his stomach pumped. It was just a regular thing. I remember one time, just as the ambulance left, phoning up one of my friends and saying "Guess what, I've got my Dads car tonight". Nothing was normal or beyond belief in those days. When I was seventeen, my parents finally got a divorce but we never moved out until 8th January the following year. I know it was January 8th because it was my eighteenth birthday. We moved in with my mum's new boyfriend whom she had met after the divorce. My world felt like it had come to an end as leaving home and not living with my dad any more was strange. As ironic as it was, I missed him and everything that had happened had just been normal to me because it was all I had ever known. I would go out to disco's or the pub and as soon as I had had a couple of drinks I would feel my lips start to tremble and I would break down in tears and more often than not I would break a glass and cut myself with it. I never knew why at the time. In fact I never found out why until I was thirty years old when I was watching a programme on television and there was a woman who used to cut herself. In Court the Doctor said that people doing this, did so because they felt responsible for things that had happened in their childhood. I went to see a Counsellor and we discovered that I had indeed felt I was responsible for my father's behaviour and used to cut myself to punish myself. I find it quite fascinating how little we really know about ourselves. Anyway, four months after the divorce, I met a girl and fell in love immediately, as I had so often. I know now that it wasn't really love at all; I was just desperate to belong and to be loved. Things were great until one day five months later, when I was getting ready to collect her. The news came on with a picture of her, saying that she had committed a serious crime and had been sentenced to five and a half years in prison. I had met her while she was on bail. It was the final straw for me and I was admitted to the psychiatric unit for my own safety after arriving home dripping with blood and unable to speak through shock. Life had just been too hard for too long and I just couldn't take any more. My mother, aunties and friends would call in to visit me and I could see how much they cared but I couldn't cope with the love as it was too much all at once and I would just break down as soon as I saw them. Two years passed and I have little recollection at all of those two years, everything seems so dark now. One evening I had a row with my now stepfather who threw me out of the house at midnight. I went to my father's house but he wouldn't let me in so I slept in the car. I went to see him the next day to see if I could move into the spare room. He said I'd have to come back in a week as he had promised the room to a barman and that if he didn't take the room I was welcome to it. Needless to say the barman didn't take the room and I was allowed to have it. The terms were sleeping only, no cooking allowed. My father hadn't changed one bit, and one night came up and kicked the door down of my bedroom, switched the light on and said “I want you out of here in the morning". I just smiled as I was too big for him to hurt me anymore and he knew it. He stormed off, disappointed with my reaction only to return five minutes later and said in fact "get out now" or words to that effect. It was one o'clock in the morning. I got my things and left and accidentally reversed into his car on the way out. I got myself a little flat and started racing again. I was twenty years old now and it seemed like a good time to start again and I devoted my whole life to it. Every week day evening, I would run eight miles to the local swimming pool, swim non stop for an hour and then run back home. When I got home I would do two hundred sit ups and one hundred press ups. I would spend three sessions a week in the gym and would spend six hours every Saturday and Sunday practising on my bike. I subscribed to every Motorcross Magazine and read them cover to cover and that that I knew everything I needed to know about every single motorcycle. I studied videos of my competition to learn from their techniques as well as learning where their weaknesses were and in my first sandracing event I came second. For the next two weeks I visualised winning. I knew I could achieve anything I wanted, even if it was against common opinion. The second event of the year was the British Championship and it had always been held over one event in Jersey except that year when it was to be held all over the country with Jersey being one event. I won every race by half a lap and had it been a year earlier, I would have been British Champion. Needless to say, at the end of 1985, 1 was the overall champion for Jersey. I was back and it felt good. The next year I was back in form on the motorcross too but in the second race of the year the week before I was to leave Jersey to turn semi-professional, I shattered my left leg and my racing days at least were over. For the next couple of years I just lived a normal life, enjoying my friends until one day a group of us decided to go travelling through Europe in a camper van. We planned our route with the time allowed. I gave up my job as a direct salesman for a tool company but on the Friday night my four friends turned up and said they were not going. However God works in mysterious ways and I started looking in the paper for a new job. I was twenty three and thought I would really like to settle down into a career. I'd previously only been earning ￡6,000 per year, so when I saw an advert for a large financial services company that said "Become a Financial Advisor, income ￡18,000 per annum” this was a fortune to me at the time and I had nothing to lose, so I applied for the job. I took the job up but it wasn't until I'd been working for them for a month that I found out that there was no such thing as ￡18,000 a year, so I questioned the Boss and he said "Do you consider yourself average or better than average?” I said, "I'm better" He said “Well where is your problem then, ￡18,000 is the average income in the Company. If you are better than average then you should make at least ￡25,000.” I didn't buy it but I stayed after all. I had nowhere else to go and needless to say I didn't make ￡25,000 that year nor ￡18,000 but it wasn't down to the business, it was me. I couldn't discipline myself the way I did when I was racing, I was only twenty three years old and felt immortal. I didn't really believe death would ever come and retirement was too far away. I didn't have the belief or conviction to succeed in the life industry. I had been in the business for two years and was twenty five years old. One evening I was out with some friends one of whom was Irish and had one of her friends over from Ireland. When I turned around and saw the friend, I fell head over heels in love and she hadn't even yet seen me. I knew I was going to marry her. I went over and said “Hello”. I was terrified and if you don't think that going over to her and saying “hello” is a big deal then that's only because you don't know me. I used to be so sensitive that if I asked a girl to dance and she said “No”, I'd have to go home but this was different as I knew that if I didn't at least try, I would never forgive myself. I reminded myself of my telephone record sheet on which I had printed across the top "If you don't make the calls you won't make the sales" (Applies to girls too!). So I asked her out; it was March 10th 1990. We got engaged on April 10th, were married on July 26th and our first baby was on the way on September 1st - all in the same year. We were very happy but we didn't have any money and when Maria packed up work to become a mother, we lost the only financial security we had. Things turned from bad to worse, and the worse things got, the harder I found it to sell. I was in direct sales still for a large company and I was doing such little business that Maria only ever half expected a cheque at the end of the month and half the time she was right. The little things became a major ordeal. We had a new baby and if we ran out of nappies and had no money to buy any more, instead of going to work I would spend a day trying to borrow a couple of nappies. Things got so hard that there didn't seem to be any reason at all to try and make a sale that day which might take two months to turn into cash when we couldn't even eat on that day. Half of the time we would spend an afternoon looking for change in coat pockets and down the back of the settee. I would get up in the morning and find a bag of food hanging on the door. My life was going downhill again fast and I had to do something quick in order to eat, let alone save my self esteem, so I took a job in a garage cleaning cars and sold insurance in the evening. It was a month before I got paid from the cleaning job so I used to go into a car yard of a lunchtime and rummage around behind the seats until I found enough money to buy a Mars bar or packet of crisps, just to get me through the day until I got home. It was the car cleaning job which really made me realise how much I loved the insurance business. Sure the rejection was hard to take, but it wasn't as hard to take as putting your hands in freezing cold water at eight am in the morning, to clean cars. I spent a few days on my own deciding what I wanted to do with my life and decided whatever it was that I would devote everything to that and only that. I decided on insurance. I spent another two years with the Direct Sales Company and in January 1993 on my twenty-eighth birthday, I set up on my own as an IFA working from our spare bedroom with a host of sophisticated equipment - namely an answerphone, a mobile phone and filing cabinet not to mention my first company car which I had borrowed - a battered and rusty Mitsubishi L300 van. However I did have something more important than anything else; I had belief and commitment in the most wonderful business in the world - the life insurance industry. That Easter I attended my very first LIA convention and that was when everything really changed for me. After the first day I got back to my hotel room and sat on my bed in a state of awe. I had just spent that day with the most wonderful caring, sharing people that I had ever had the pleasure to meet. They were the group of people who were to become the second most important people in my life, next to my wife and family, you, my friends and fellow members of L.I.A. My whole life had now, fallen into place, I got home and got straight to work. I just missed M.D.R.T that year. I had heard that only 0.5% of Round Table Membership was under thirty years old; it became my mission, nothing was going to stop me and at the age of twenty nine, 1 qualified for the first time. The life insurance industry is the second most important thing in my life next to my wife and family, in fact it is my second family. If I learned anything in life it is that what goes around, comes around. Drug dealers die violent deaths, people who live only for money, lose it, people who are promiscuous suffer from sexual diseases or worse, and parents who hurt their children lead lives filled with depression and guilt. Yes, I really do believe that what goes around, comes around, so I guess God must really have something special lined up for the wonderful people in the life insurance industry - the wonderful people who lovingly spread that blanket of protection over the towns and the countries where they live. I was meant to be part of the life industry, to be around caring, sharing people like you where nothing is ever too much trouble. I've lost count of the times when I have sought counsel from the greats of our industry, like Ben Feldman, Norman Levine, Tony Gordon and Peter Rosengard to name but a few, and I always left with much more than I had ever dared to ask. This is not to forget four people who gave me everything else I required, my dear friend Mike Clarke from Guernsey who always knew just what to say when I was ready to quit and my three girls, my wife Maria and my two angels, Chloe and Robyn. Yes God has been good to me; he just knew I wouldn't be able to appreciate if it wasn't a little tough in the beginning! Before I go, I would just like to share something that happened to me in the last couple of years. One night when I was going to bed, my wife having already been asleep for an hour or so, I went upstairs to our bedroom and my wife had left a new lamp on that she had bought so I could see what I was doing. As I walked in to the room and closed the door a wonderful feeling came over me and I realised what it was; the whole room was glowing in orange, just as I had envisaged so often, so many years ago. I looked to the corner of the room and looked at my little girl lying in her cot; it had all happened just as I had imagined. I was home at last. The next morning I was shaving, still thinking of the night before, when I heard my wife and daughter having a little conversation. My little girl was having some trouble doing something and she called out to my wife "Mummy I can't do it", my wife replied "You can do anything you want, your Daddy taught me that!"www.markbakerspeaks.com