Chris Freer was born in wartime Leicestershire in 1943 and then grew up among the bombsites of Exeter. Attending a Roman Catholic primary school run by American nuns gave him an early insight of religion. At the age of 16, having lost his mother to cancer three years earlier, he went to sea on tankers training as a navigator before living in Australia in the early sixties. He became a production engineer and yacht designer travelling widely. When he became a father for the first time at 55 he wanted his son to Alex to have a multicultural background, he moved the family to Portugal, bought a couple of green field sites and designed and built two houses with Russian, Polish and Romanian labour which transmuted into a holiday business. Always travelling with his eyes and ears open he learned much from the differing countries in which he lived and worked which included military dictatorships, communism and corrupt democracies as well as learning about the major religions and philosophies.