Poverty and prison at a young age gave the Big Issue founder John Bird a strong insight into the issues facing the homeless. He explains how his magazine idea helped them to help themselves - and redeemed him too

When John Bird was five years old he "invented the tea-strainer". Or so his father told him. He came up with the idea one evening after the family had just had "goody" for tea - a meal they had only "when there was nothing else to eat, when the money was gone". It was bread in a cup with tea and milk and sugar.

"I loved goody," writes Bird, "but I didn't like the tea leaves that were left in your mouth when you finished the cup."

He tried to talk to his mother about this, but she was busy, drying sheets. She told him to talk to his father.

"'Dad, I've got an idea,'" he said. "If you have something with holes in it, dad, you can pour the tea over the holes. The tea goes through the holes and the leaves get left."

His father laughed. His mother laughed and when they told him he had just invented the tea-strainer, the young John asked if they cost a lot of money.

"'No, son, not a lot of money.'

'So why can't we have one?'

He laughed again, bubbling, stopping, starting. 'Because, son, we are piss-poor. That's why'."

The anecdote is recounted in John Bird's autobiography, Some Luck, just as it was. It betrays no sense of self-pity but something of the sense of puzzlement in a young child who couldn't understand why, just because they were "piss-poor", they couldn't have something if they could in fact afford it.

Speaking of the incident now, Bird says he has thought a lot about it since.

"There is, you know, a culture of failure that goes with being at the bottom that acts almost as a coping mechanism.

"When my dad laughed, it was that he couldn't even conceive of us having something like a tea-strainer. A tea-strainer just didn't reflect his social position."

It was not, says Bird, an item to which a family of six - his parents and three brothers - who had been evicted for non-payment of rent, who had lived for a spell in one room all sharing one double bed, and whose mother used to hammer brown pennies to fool the gas meter they were half-crowns . . . it was not an item to which that kind of family should aspire - so his dad thought.

"It's a mentality that gets dished out with poverty," says Bird. "Blake wrote about 'mind-forged manacles' and it's a type of coping mechanism, because if you don't have the mindset to match, to accept, the poverty, you can't cope."

He has seen it repeatedly, particularly in his work with the homeless - a sense that some things just aren't meant for some people.

"And it was this aspirational mentality that I always had, to get out of the working class, that got me continually beaten up and into trouble."

That and "some luck", brought him to founding the Big Issue in London in 1991. The magazine is sold by homeless people, giving them an opportunity to, in Bird's words, "transcend their own deprivation".

The Big Issue model has been adopted across Europe - including Ireland, albeit, he agrees, with a chequered life - Australia and in parts of Africa.

When the magazine was launched, at a meeting in St Martin's in the Fields church, off Trafalgar Square in London, a man scowled at Bird after he delivered his speech. "I need the money. My 'Big Issue' is that I ain't got a pot to piss in."

Bird writes that he replied: " 'That's why we started it up.' He flared up again. 'Yeah? I f**king hate you do-gooders. You middle-class arseholes. What d'you know about hunger and homelessness? Eh? Public-school tossers.'"

"In earlier days I probably would have hit him," he writes.

Bird was born in 1946 to Eileen Mary - who had left her native Mallow, Co Cork in 1939 aged 18 - and Alfred Bird, an English Protestant who worked in a bakery.

He writes that by the time he was born, "dirt and poverty were everywhere. The gardens were a mass of black earth and the trees and flowers had long gone, replaced by dumped bedsteads and old prams. Street children played in mud and filth among broken bottles and the like, and were always cutting themselves on the glass. "

This was Notting Hill, long before it became posh.

His dad had a weakness for drink and changed jobs frequently. Mum had to give up work as a barmaid in Portobello to look after the kids who kept coming. Three more came after John - each pregnancy greeted with fury by his father.

"He said to her we were stupid, we should just take the wages and pour them straight down the f**king drain. He couldn't keep up with all the f**king mouths."

There is one heart-breaking passage in the book when his mother, having concluded that they could not afford to keep John and his three brothers, puts them in an orphanage.

"Tommy and Pat clung to her. Richard the baby was picked up by one of the nuns. My mother pulled away and stood wiping her eyes."

Though there for less than two years, Bird says now "something happened to me in the orphanage".

"The kind of dislocation that I felt led me into my 'life of crime' which came from the whole family-breaking-up thing."

From that point there was an ever-present sense that he was looking in at the world, an outsider, "a bit of an observer". When he went to school after the orphanage, he was drawn to the "troublesome rump", the kids who got up to no good.

"It was, I think, because they were the only ones who would deal with me mouthing off about everything, they were the ones that had the same edginess I had."

His form head said to him at one point: "You're bright. I can say that. But there's trouble all round you."

Soon he was playing truant, shop-lifting, stealing money at school and starting fires. He was in and out of Chelsea Juvenile Court and frequently ended up in, variously, Stamford House Remand Home, Capsfield House Detention Centre and Ashford Boys' Prison.

In between, he ran away from home several times - "I'd had enough of living at home. It was killing me. They had no life." He was sleeping rough, writing poetry and meeting characters such as "Nick", who worked for CND. Nick said he was strange.

" 'Well, you write poetry and you talk like a delivery boy.' He said my class weren't interested in those kind of things - just football and darts and stuff like that." In one of the detention centres he began to nurture an interest in art, and on his release, at 18, he got a place at the Chelsea School of Art.

After art school he got a job selling ads for a start-up magazine, his Scottish girlfriend became pregnant, they married and moved to Edinburgh. But they split up and he returned to London to sell beads. He made a hasty exit to Paris when he was about to be caught for social welfare fraud and mixed with Bohemians and social revolutionaries.

Back in London, in 1967, he joined the Socialist Labour League and during a trip to Edinburgh met a bloke called Gordon Roddick in a pub called Paddy's.

Drifting through various jobs, he grew disillusioned with revolutionary politics. He taught himself printing, remarried, had two more children. And kept in touch with Gordon, who in the meantime had married Anita, who later founded the Body Shop.

It was Gordon Roddick who, in the late 1980s, pushed Bird to use his publishing skills - and experiences - to found a street magazine for the homeless.

"I thought he was crazy," he writes. "What would I do with some charity idea? I hated charities. I had had my bellyful of do-gooders."

But he researched it, talked to hundreds of homeless people about it and as one said to him: "Selling? Anything's better than begging." The fact that a number of homeless charities were dismissive of the idea spurred him on.

"Some said homeless people couldn't be trusted to spend the money wisely."

The Big Issue, he says, offers the homeless something charities do not - an equal footing.

"The magazine doesn't pull at middle-class heart strings. People buy it because they want to read it. It's not begging. It equalises the relationship between the homeless person selling it and the person buying it.

"So many people are drawn into charitable work, or revolutionary politics, because their heart-strings have been pulled. And that is just so patronising, so damaging. It makes the homeless, or whoever, deferential, destroys their spirit."

He says it's no good leaving it to such people, such "men in armchairs, removed from the reality of society", to come up with the theories to make society better.

"Society is organic," he says. "You can't just impose theories. You start with practice and build up the theory. If you want to change it you have to get near it to understand it," he says.

He is, he agrees, irrepressible, something he attributes to his Irish background. Irrepressibility was something he saw in his mother, not his father. "But in my opinion, I'm quite an ordinary person. There is no rocket science in my life. All I did was survive.

"But I talk to people every day now who have university educations. And I thank God, because I know I came from the shit and it proves there are geniuses among the common people. My obsession is to convince as many people as possible with me."

Some Luck by John BIrd is published by Penguin, £16.99 in the UK