Bird’s words
The impact of loneliness on health is supposedly equivalent to 13 cigarettes a day. It’s certainly one of the most pernicious destroyers of life, and it’s apparently on the increase. Yet often it is not about not having people around you, but about whether you belong with those around you.
Each Friday night a group of ill-educated young men met in The Scarsdale Tavern behind the police station in the Earls Court Road, in the London Borough of Kensington. We were all about 22 and did manual work. Did not shine at school, had been in and out of trouble with parents, police and the public and might have been seen as unruly. Yet we were a group, not a gang, but young men who had known each other since school.
I was the one who had not grown out of getting into trouble with the police. I left London to avoid courts and went to Paris. I was transformed in Paris politically and socially, and often talk about my transformation. Not only did it make me a political espouser of world revolution, it got rid of the racism and chauvinism I was born and grew into. I became a militant anti-racist almost overnight. Which was the most important transformation I have ever been through. But it also exposed me to loneliness. And a sense that I did not belong anywhere.
My parents’ casual racism, my brothers the same, and all the people I had been brought up with, including the Scarsdale pub mob who saw me now as a “red, Jew-loving, black-loving piece of rubbish”: If I ever turned up on a Friday night I would be ridiculed and ignored, talked over and told to piss off.
Being rejected by family was one thing. Being rejected by those who had shared 15 years of adventures and misadventures with me was too much. I stopped going.
But added to this I had joined a revolutionary group to develop my thinking and prepare for the world revolution. Yet they were largely the rejected or troubled children, unloved by their middle-class families. They did not see where I fitted in – and I didn’t. I was loud and opinionated, a major trait since childhood, and was not educated; and they had been soaked in history and politics. They had passed their 11-pluses and gone on to some decent schools, yet I had no more than a modicum of education. I stuck out like a sore thumb. Now I was divorced from my roots and cold-shouldered by those that I joined for the cause of humanity.
But humanity wasn’t recognising my existence. I got a job in a factory b
