JOHN BIRD FEATURE
racist – my mum and dad had done a good job of making me hate everybody, Blacks, Jews, Indians, even English people." He was a "pretty poisoned,
And John knows plenty
about poverty. He grew up with his three
brothers and parents in two rooms in a Notting Hill slum just after the war, which had the highest infant mortality rate anywhere in the country. His father, a local Protestant had married an Irish Catholic from the countryside. They drank, fought and neglected with racism, classism, and a disregard for education. "It was a terrible place to bring children to – rats, dirt, one toilet shared by 12 families... it was a really horrible introduction to life." Yet it was "the most
wonderful place I’ve ever lived," he says without irony. "It was extraordinary, the depth of the community. Everybody just looked out for each other."
family were made homeless after missing the rent, so for six months they lived in a condemned house. When he was seven, his parents split up and he moved to a Catholic orphanage in North London. After three years, he came out and "immediately started shoplifting, stealing cars, daubing swastikas and all sorts into a lot of grief very quickly." By age 14 he was in a
detention centre. At 14 and a half he was excluded from school. "They just signed the register because I was so much trouble. I wouldn’t accept the authority, I was a
BELOW
The Big Issue vendor in Neal Street, London
ABOVE
Bernardo Moya interviews John Bird
screwed up person" who left school with only one asset: a "Napoleonic complex" meaning he believed he was the most important person on Earth. "I still do,” he adds with a grim smile. "I always thought that I was here to save the world, even though I was a little geezer who couldn’t read or write."
A stretch in Ashford
Boys' Prison for receiving money under false pretences prompted his turnaround when learn to read. On leaving prison, he returned to reformatory school where he was "saved" because he'd "at last got some education and had started to paint and draw." To his mother's surprise,
at the age of 18 he went to art school, where she feared half-jokingly he would learn to become "middle class" and "homosexual." Then, after getting a girl
pregnant and marrying her, he was thrown out of art school. with the police, he ran away to Paris at the age of 21.
It was here that he got
ideology. "I met these really posh Marxists, all going on about the working class and smashing capitalism, and I thought, 'Socialism… they’ve already got socialism, what do they wanna smash capitalism for?'” But his new Marxist friends challenged his racist views, and he began to listen. On his return to England, he joined a revolutionary party, before. "I’d been a Catholic shoplifter, and now I was a Marxist shoplifter," he shrugs, recalling how he lived under false names and addresses to avoid the police. This turbulent remarried and got steady work as a printer, which he got by "I’ve always believed that if you can’t achieve something because you haven’t got the degree or whatever, then tell them you’ve got all the degrees in the world, get the job, and then prove yourself." By the early 1970s and
through the 80s he was earning a decent wage running his own business. Then The Big Issue came along to change everything. It was the idea of Gordon Roddick, the multi- millionaire head of the famous
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