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David Jeal explains how he got into a life of violence, and importantly, how he got out of it...

For more than ten years David Jeal was a football hooligan. Eventually, Bristol Rovers, his home team banned him, but not until he'd received injuries as well as dealt out a few. He admits he thought of himself as a hooligan, "It used to excite me ... probably for most football hooligans and other people who carry out criminal acts, there’s a real sense of anger and resentment. There’s something that happened to them in their life, I believe, that made them like that. I don’t believe happy people go around doing such things."

David himself was an angry and unhappy young man. Recently he's been diagnosed as dyslexic, but at school he was simply labelled 'stupid'and was told he'd never get anywhere in life. David, who now works as a prison chaplain explains, "It’s an awful thing to do to someone. I hear it at the prison time and time again, people are told they are no good, and they kick back! It’s the only way they know how."

Under no illusion about that their child was a misunderstood angel, David's parents stood by him, "It must have been so difficult for them to live with a person coming home with bits missing off them, clothes ripped and covered and blood…but they loved me." On a Sunday, when everybody stayed in and didn’t go out drinking - I’d feel guilty and upset about what I’d done…"

Five years ago David became a Christian. Things began to change for David when his mother started work with the homeless in Bristol. David went with her to the centre, "I thought I’d protect my mother from all these junkies and street people - but I found I cared quite a lot for these guys and how they’d got to this place..." The team at the centre were all practising Christians, and when David asked one girl out for a drink she said she'd only come if he came to church with her. He did so, finding the first service boring and irrelevant. It was a couple of services later that David burst into tears, allowing, very reluctantly two fellow church-goers to pray for him..."The church has been very patient with me," he explains, I didn’t, of course, change straight away..."

Although he’s no longer the hooligan, David still goes to football matches and still chats with the people with whom he shared a life of violence, "But they know I’m different now. They know I’m not interested. And they know how wrong their behaviour is themselves. Their lives will change, but it’s where eventually the anger and frustration comes out - with their wives? their children? at work? It will come out, I don’t believe you can bottle such feelings up."

Married now, to Nicky, with a two-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old-stepson, David has managed to turn his life around. He says his wife, also a Christian, thought he was "a bit rough at first, but she’s a good judge of character and she saw that there was potential for me to be different.." David’s been completely open with both his wife and his son, about his past. And as a prison chaplain, David can show his son the consquences of drink, drugs and violence. He is also a pastor at his local church, in Woodlands Christian Centre, in Bristol. It is work he loves. Looking back, David still finds it astonishing that his life has been so transformed, "At one time I couldn’t see a way out," he says, "it’s like being in a pit, not knowing and dreading what's going to happen next. My life now has been renewed and changed beyond all recognition."

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