Malcolm Applegate, a 62-year-old man from Birmingham, England,
recently made news headlines after revealing that he had lived in the
forest for five years before moving into a homeless shelter, just to get
away from his nagging, controlling wife.
According to Oddity Central, Malcolm Applegate worked as a gardener
for most of his life, and enjoyed tending to people’s gardens. It
wasn’t until he got married, about thirteen years ago, that his life
took a turn for the worse.
He claims that in the beginning, he and his
wife got on pretty well, but as he became increasingly busy with work,
she became more controlling, to the point where he had to cut his hours
just to please her. At one point, all the arguments and his wife’s
nagging got too much for Malcolm, so he just packed up his things and
left her. But instead of moving to a friend’s house and filing for
divorce, he just disappeared.
“I was married to her for three years, but unfortunately it got too much,” Applegate said. “For
three years it was alright, we got on with one another and the
gardening got too much for her. I just upped and left, I got fed up with
her because we used to get so many arguments.”
The man planned to ride his bike all the way to London, but while
in Oxford, he forgot to lock up his bike and it got stolen, so he had to
make the journey on foot, which took him about three weeks. He finally
settled in a thick forest near Kingston, south west London, camping
there during the night, and working on the garden of a community center
during the day.
“There were three of us camping,” Malcolm recently wrote.
“They were just camping around with me because at the time I was
working in the centre and we used to go there for a wash and a shower.
No one knew we were there. It’s not well known – nobody would go in
there.”
Malcolm Applegate camped in the woods for five long years before
finally moving into Emmaus Greenwich centre, a shelter for the homeless
in Greenwich, south London, five years ago.
The man’s desire to get away from his wife was so great that he
never even contacted his family to let them know that he was a alive. He
only recently reached out to his sister, who had apparently searched
for him for years before finally reconciling with the fact that he was
most likely dead.
“It had been a decade years since I’d last seen her, and in
that time she had been to all of the Salvation Army hostels in the south
trying to find me,” Malcolm said.
“I think she assumed I was dead. I wrote her a letter once I was
settled in Greenwich and she phoned me up, in floods of tears. We now
have a great relationship again.”
The 62-year-old claims that living in a homeless shelter is not as
bad as everyone thinks, but, then again, everyone hasn’t camped in thick
woodland for five years. He has a clean room, can work on the gardens
and has an active social life.
“I love it here, my life is officially back on track,” he said.