FORMER ALCOHOLIC and smack addict Bruce’s journey started in 1954 when he was raped by a family friend at the age of seven. To forget the pain, anger, and shame, he went to a cupboard where his dad kept a bottle of whisky. Bruce downed the lot, along with his mother’s tranquillisers.

From this point on, addiction to alcohol and drugs was to hold him in a vice from which he was not to break free for 33 years.

“I’d bunk off school - get me name taken at register, then dodge it - see if I could nick a bottle of drink,” he recalls.

The family were ‘poor as church mice’ but Bruce’s mother did her best to make sure the children were fed and clothed. However, as fast as his dad earned any money, he drank it.

One day his dad’s alcoholic temper burst forth on Bruce: “He pulled out a shotgun, aimed it at me and fired. I grabbed the barrel and hit him with the butt, before smashing the gun over a concrete post.”

Bruce then packed two carrier bags with his possessions - jeans, shirts, socks, underwear and a pair of shoes – and left home. He was 15.

His wanderings eventually took him to London, where he melted into the scene round Piccadilly Circus. There he met the woman who became his wife. They had three children. She OD’d. Bruce used and OD’d himself. He came round several hours later.

Towards the end of his using, Bruce was capable of taking ‘anything I could get - 20 pints of Guinness, an eighth of a gram of smack in one hit, and coke.’ He knew he was due for the morgue.

So, on 7 February 1988, he decided he had had enough.

"If there’s anyone there, get me off this stuff,” he prayed. Immediately he felt a ‘cool spirit’ come over him. One minute he was having severe withdrawals, the next he was completely well. God even healed Bruce’s arms from the injecting scars: “They used to look like a railway junction – now, there’s not even a track mark on me!”

Shortly afterwards Bruce was handed a leaflet about the Jesus Army ‘Eat Drink & Pray’ bus. Bruce decided to go and see what it was about.

“I liked the food!” he recalls. “And people were talking to me, even though I was dirty and smelly.”

He then visited a Jesus Army house in west London. “I felt welcomed,” he says. “I hadn’t had that response from anyone since leaving home. They accepted me – and my dog.”

Bruce was baptised and joined the Church in 2002. Now he spends much of his time sharing his story in hostels and prisons. But he can’t wait for the London Jesus Centre to open.

“All these people taking drugs, I got to tell them that to stay clean properly, you’ve got to turn to Jesus,” says Bruce. “I should be dead and I’m not. I’ve got to thank God for that.

“Using is a one way ticket to hell, anyone who thinks it’s easy don’t know what they’re on about.”