HOW I FIRST MET CONRAD & WHAT HE DID TO ME

This is Conrad Mainwaring. He was a prefect and, I believe, Head Boy of the City of Leicester Boys Grammar School in Leicester, England, a medium sized city in central England (East Midlands). My first connection to Conrad was that I went to the same school a year after Conrad left, so I did not actually know him then.

In 1976, I started work as a Saturday assistant in a sports shop in Leicester city centre, and it was here that I first met Comrad. He was a local athlete of some repute, who competed for Antigua and Barbuda in the Montreal Olympics. He visited the shop regularly and the manager used to give him free sports goods to promote the shop.

He befriended me as a 16 year old, and persuaded me to come and train with his personal squad of athletes at the council run Saffron Lane sports centre. Over the course of the next year, he convinced me that he was doing some sort of psychology study for a masters or doctorate in psychology and that I was his subject. He made me feel really special. After training, he would take me out for meals and we would have 'chicken and chips' at a city centre Chinese restaurant. I also visited him at his parent's home, where he lived. I remember him showing me all his regalia from the Montreal Olympics. To me, at the time, he was an amazing man! He told me he was also a trained physiotherapist, and after training all his squad members would receive physio. We weren't allowed to call it a massage.

As part of this study, which made me feel so special, Conrad would get me to reveal my sexual activities, focusing mainly on masturbation. He would persuade me to abstain, and then report to him how I was feeling and anything that happened to my body as a result of this abstinence. He would also sexually stimulate me when he was giving me 'physio' both physically and mentally, controlling when and how I became sexually aroused. There was never any skin to skin contact, it was always over sports clothing.

When he stopped giving me all this attention, presumably he had found a new victim, I felt devastated. I felt like I didn't matter anymore, and was no longer special. Even so, I went with Conrad and 2 other members of his personal squad from Leicester to Camp Greylock in America in 1978, where we were camp counsellors.

It wasn't until my mid 30s that I began to realise that I had been sexually abused by Comrad and eventually this realisation led me to walk into the police station in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire where I was serving at the time in the Royal Air Force to make a full witness statement on 24 October 1996. By this time Conrad had been living in the USA for many years and no action was taken by the police. However, the Leicestershire Police wrote to me on 1 May 1997 stating that they "will notify the relevant authorities in America, so that they can monitor MR MAINWARING in that country.

I was driven to report him primarily to stop him harming anyone else even though it was 20 years after what he had done to me. At the time I though, what else can I do? It gave me some peace at least.

Unfortunately, my life has not been easy, and a certain set of events resulted in old wounds being opened up. In 1996 did the internet even exist? Certainly it was not what it is now. That is when I came across Tym Desanto's blog:

http://tymdesanto.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/villa-gets-makeover.html

To be continued.....