“I WAS NINE. Someone had given me an ice lolly. My uncle said, 'What's that?' and I said, 'Well - it's an ice lolly.'" Mark laughs, but the punchline that follows is not funny: "He started slapping me and beating me, right there on the street."

This was not an isolated incident in Mark's troubled childhood in Carlisle. Dad in borstal and "no relationship" with mum, he lived with his grandad (till he died when Mark was four). He moved in with his dad and his new woman and their two kids - until they broke up, messily.

It was hardly a good start in life, and that was just the beginning. Moving in with his aunt, Mark was regularly beaten by his uncle until, aged 12, he was fostered.

"I ended up quite rebellious," states Mark, matter-of-factly. "I started smoking ganja and getting into fights at school.

"When I was about 14, my dad came back on the scene. He was kind to me, buying me stuff. I moved in with him."

Sadly it wasn't to be "happy ever after". Mark's eyes cloud a little as he recalls, "My dad was a very heavy drinker. There were times when he got into such a state that I used to have to take him to the toilet and he'd fall over and... he wasn't in a very good state to look after me.

"One time I was left in the house for three days with no food, no electric. I was desperate. That's when I got into inhaling lighter gas. My dad's friend, Smiddy, who was a heroin addict himself, looked through the window one day and saw me tooting on this gas. He managed to get in and said, 'Look, what are you doing?' He brought me something to eat from his house. He was really battling with addiction himself."

Mark pauses. "About two weeks later his wife and daughter walked in and found him dead on the floor. His daughter was about three..." There's tightness in Mark's face; then he resumes, breezily:

"I went back into care when I was 16. Foster home with a woman called Margery. When I moved in, there was a lad called Barry already living there." He leans forward a little. "This is where it starts to get interesting."

I wouldn't exactly have called his story so far dull. Shifting in my seat, I'm all ears. Mark presses on with tales of his misdeeds with Barry: Mark introduces cannabis to Barry. Barry introduces ecstasy to Mark. Drinking and fighting on "the Currock estate". Injecting amphetamines to get high; necking Valium to come down. ("You could get Valium for 50 pence each on the estate").

Barry had "connections" with the drug underworld of the Northwest and began storing drugs in the foster home. On one occasion, Mark found a thousand ecstasy tablets under Barry's bed.

"I put them down my top and went out - up to Currock."

Mark's plan to sell the ecstasy ended in disaster. Ripped off by Harry, a dealer he thought he "could trust," Mark didn't dare go back home "empty-handed". However, after a week or so of sleeping on mates' settees ("I weren't very favoured by their mums"), he went back and told Barry what had

happened.

Minutes later, Mark, Barry and Barry's mate (and heavy-duty drug pusher) Bradley were in a car heading over to Harry's place - or so Mark thought.

"On the way over there, they pulled into a house and Bradley said, 'Right, we're just gonna go in here; we're gonna to make a spliff for the road'. I walked in: the door slammed behind me and there was a massive guy with a bald head. He grabbed hold of me by the throat and pinned me against the wall. He pulled out a knife and put it against my neck. I thought, 'I've had it, this guy's gonna kill me'.

"He said, 'Where are the drugs?' and I tried telling him, through sobs. He kept pressing this knife closer to me. 'Do you know I could put this knife right through your face?'

"I said, 'Look, please don't hurt me, I'm telling you the truth.' He yelled, 'Get out of my face' and threw me against the door.

"I ran all the way back to my foster home, went up into my room, closed the curtains and hid underneath the quilt and just - just wept, like.

"It freaked me out and I thought, 'I've just got to get out of Carlisle.'"

As it happened, Mark's chance to leave Carlisle came unexpectedly. Arrested for assaulting his foster mum in a wrangle over her purse, he was sent to a bail hostel in Accrington. The good news was, he was out of Carlisle. The bad news was that he started using heroin through mixing with addicts there.

"My giro went on heroin. I was constantly using. I just couldn't break away from my heroin addiction."

The continual cocktail of heroin, drink, methadone and Valium made Mark become, in his own words, "psychotic".

"One time, I was drinking with this bloke from the fl at downstairs. He fell asleep. I got a knife out of the kitchen and went and started checking his pockets for money. He woke up, so I stabbed him. The knife that I used - thank God - was a bread knife and quite flexible. If it wasn't actually for that, I'd have probably been in prison now for murder.

"All of a sudden I just came to my senses. There was blood all over me. I panicked and thought 'What have I done?' So I went to the phone box round the corner and phoned up the ambulance and explained, 'I've used a knife on my friend'. The ambulance phoned the police and they came round and arrested me.

"I did 21 months in prison in HMP Doncaster and then HMP Lindholme in Yorkshire. Lindholme was a very raw jail. I once saw a guy get beaten up with a table leg and he was knocked unconscious. He was convulsing and he virtually died in prison."

Ten days after his release, Mark was arrested again for "kicking this guy's door down". He was easy enough for the police to pick up: under the influence of alcohol and diazepam at the time, he fell asleep on the stairs.

Mark grins. "Next to me the door was open with my footprints on it. So: back in prison for six months."

Released again, Mark drifted to Nottingham and then to Northampton where he lived on the streets.

"One day, I saw a Jesus Army sticker on a house's window. I thought 'I'm going to go and knock on that door and try and get some sandwiches and a blanket, like.'

"I knocked on the door and Steve answered and said, 'I think you'd better come in'. I went in and he said 'Just stay. Stick around us, see what we're about. Do you want something to eat? Do you want a bath?'"

Mark had already encountered the Jesus Army, briefly, a few weeks earlier and had sensed that "These people have something that I need". He decided to stay around.

He recalls his first Jesus Army meeting. "I started joining in the songs, but I just started to well up inside. I felt really unclean and I burst out in tears. Steve prayed for me and I felt really filled with God's love. It was life changing. I felt accepted and clean.

"I found God over that weekend and found a love for the church, for my brothers and sisters."

Some time later, Mark was baptised - in a river in December (he must have been serious!) That was four years ago in 2003. Mark is now an up-and-coming leader, living in a Jesus Fellowship community house in Kettering. As he speaks of his love for Jesus and the church, it oozes from every pore.

I look at him. His face falls most naturally into a grin. His blue eyes have a touch of the visionary about them. Using my imagination and calling to mind the story I've just heard, I can just about imagine his face differently: pinched, scared, hard, hunted. But that was the past. In Mark's own words, "God has freed me. The life I'm living now is for God."

At the start of my talk with Mark, I'd asked him his full name and he replied, "Mark Gent - Gent as in gentleman". And he is too: warm, open, peaceful, affable. Despite all the odds, Jesus has made him a gentle - and powerful - man of God.

Some names have been changed.