Heather Bellamy spoke with Lorraine Poulton

I think what happened was I came to a point in life where I had no-one I could lean on. There was nobody there for me. I really didn't have any friends and when he went I was on my own. I went to a party that was for three days and I stayed there and I really hit rock bottom after that. I began to realise that I'd got all this stuff in my life, but I'd got nothing that really mattered and I'd got nobody who really loved me. I felt so destitute.

It was shortly after that I went to see my father-in-law. He was my ex father-in-law because I wasn't quite divorced. We were chatting and he said that his sister was a Christian and she was taking him to church that weekend. He was in films; he was a property master and he was wrecking his life and his family's life with all the cocaine he was taking and they had no money left. I asked if I could come. I just wanted to watch the show. He said he wasn't going for a christening or a wedding and I couldn't think what on earth he could be wanting to go to church for, but I went with him. I listened to what was being said and then the next day I read the booklet, which was a bit like a journey into life. Right there and then, when I was all by myself, I gave my life to the Lord. It was May 7th 1984.

Heather: How did that change your life, with all the drugs and also your modelling?

Lorraine: Becoming a Christian in California, Los Angeles was a fantastic place to be if you could handle it, but I couldn't handle it and as a Christian I didn't want to stay there. At first I did, but after a little while, and I think this was probably the Lord, I wanted to get out of that place. To me that place represented all the hedonistic pleasure seeking that I'd been doing and I wanted to get back to reality. I wanted to get back to something that was real. There wasn't much modelling going on at this point, if any at all. I was making a living in different ways, doing different things.

The first thing that happened was I came home. I became a Christian in the May and by the autumn, I'd sold everything, got my dog on the plane and I came back to England. I moved in with my mum into a maisonette above the shops in the town centre in a small village called Wednesfield in Northampton. It was as if God dug me up from a part of the garden that did not suit me. It was a lovely part of the garden and it was really sunny, but it was killing me and it was burning me up. He put me in the shade and he watered me and I started to attend the local church and I began to grow and flourish as a Christian.

A couple of years went by and you know you can't believe this, but I was still drinking and getting drunk. I was still smoking and swearing like a trouper. I mean God must have been doing some wonderful things inside, because I genuinely loved him and I genuinely wanted to have everything he had to offer me. I was going to church twice on a Sunday. I started at an Anglican church and moved to a Pentecostal church and I was going twice in the week to the prayer meeting and the Bible study and I was fully into it, but I always thought of myself as being a normal Christian and I thought those others, those are the goody goodies. It was like them and me. I didn't realise that one day I'd become one of them. It was just that they'd gone on ahead of me and they'd given up their bad habits and I hadn't given up mine.

It took two years of the Lord working in my heart and establishing me and then a wonderful thing happened. It was New Year and I made a new years resolution; I said Lord I want to give up smoking and swearing. I was smoking pot and cannabis; in fact I used to grow it in my bedroom and my mum used to come along and water the plants. She said, "It always smells funny in this room doesn't it?" I'd have a big joint and I'd be smoking this big joint and say, "Yeah it does, it smells nice doesn't it mum?" She would water them; there were only a couple of them and I'd pull the leaves off and cook them under the grill and roll up a joint when I didn't have any stuff. I said to God I want to quit all that when I'd been a Christian for two years.

I believe that for Christians in church, it's no good expecting the church to be full of people like ourselves, because there's got to be people coming into the church like me; people from a completely different background and lifestyle. The church should be very tolerant to people like that, because otherwise we won't feel accepted.