A gifted footballer and boxer, he joined the Army on the age of 16 after his grandfather advised him he might do each there, in addition to studying a commerce. For the primary few years, he had the time of his life. He began as a paratrooper, then turned an avionics technician with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, hooked up to forty seventh Regiment Royal Artillery. However, the world exterior the Army was complicated to Clark. “It was strange to think you could just walk down the street and get a coffee without having to ask for permission,” he says. “Life was so regimented.”
At the time, he was nonetheless sometimes praying, however he says: “My faith was weaker and I went through a lot of stuff because I was a boy in an adult’s world, a place where you could also see the horror of what man can do to man.” Two folks he knew killed themselves. “I started losing friends to the wars in their own minds instead of actual wars that we’d been trained for.” He felt a private guilt: “If only they had come to speak to me, told me they were struggling.”
And his personal issues piled up. He had damaged up together with his long-term girlfriend and was satisfied that he would by no means discover love once more. Then he was hospitalised with kidney stones, and when he got here out, was the sufferer of an assault (a case of mistaken identification, as he discovered himself in the course of a gangland warfare) which left him with a damaged cranium and two entrance enamel lacking.
“I thought there must not be a God, as I’d spent my whole life praying and I had all this to deal with,” he remembers. “I would be crying all the time, feeling like I was a burden to my family. They were all so worried about me. But it was faith that saved me.
“I remember saying to my mum, ‘I’ve had enough.’ Instead of hugging me and telling me everything would be better, she simply said, ‘What’s the one thing you know how to do from being a kid? It is time to pray.’’’
And so he did: “It wasn’t a switch that happened overnight,” Clark says. “At first, my prayers would just be me having a go at God, as if he was my best friend, saying: ‘You are supposed to be there for me, why am I in this hole?’ But then I realised that being angry and effing and blinding had got me nowhere. Gradually, I started to introduce the idea of being grateful for having fresh water to drink, for being surrounded by a family who loved me, and for having a roof over my head. Slowly things shifted.”
He went again into the Army and located love in a Brighton nightclub with Anna Maynard, a CBBC presenter and social media influencer. It was Clark’s goofy appearances on her Instagram feed that led bookers for The Traitors to ask him if he would really like to apply for the present. He had by no means watched the series, however from the second they talked about a attainable £120,000 prize fund, he knew he needed to win.
