In 1951, a five-year-old boy came home from school to find his family’s possessions out on the street.
His dad was fighting with the bailiff.
“Then three coppers turned up and beat up my dad,” Lord John Bird remembers.
“It was all very shocking. We’d been hiding from the rent man, me and my mum, and now we were being evicted.”
Fast forward seven decades from the slums of Notting Hill, and a nine-year-old boy in Newcastle-under-Lyme is in the same predicament.
On January 6, Enzo will lose his home, along with his mother Monica Cru-Hall and his three siblings.
At 4pm, the bailiffs will come and remove their belongings, and repossess the house.
Bird, the founder of the Big Issue who became a crossbench peer in 2015, can’t bear for it to happen.
“I’m embracing what Monica is going through because I have never forgotten what happened to me and how it affected my whole life,” he says.
“We ended up living with my grandmother in a one-bedroom mews cottage. We kids had to live in a void in the roof, four of us in one bed. No windows, just a skylight. My smallest brother slept in a drawer on the floor. I caught scarlet fever and nearly died.”
Later, the Bird children were sent to an orphanage. The effects were deep and damaging.
“I was in and out of custodial institutions,” John says. “I became a thief. I was angry and aggressive. It took me years to straighten myself out.
“In my maiden speech I said that I had got to the House of Lords by lying, cheating and stealing because it was going to prison that led me to become educated, and to get to here.”
On Wednesday, Bird used a speech in the House of Lords on austerity to highlight Monica’s case.
“This is a miscarriage of common sense,” he told an audience of peers on their last sitting day before Christmas.
“This family are being evicted on Epiphany, which is traditionally the time of the three wise men. Well, there seems to be a great lack of wisdom here. It will end up costing a council £30-50,000 to house them.
“It’s exactly what happened to me when I was five and when I was seven… that’s why I hate this idea.”
He turned to the minister. “Can you stop the bailiffs? I’m not blaming the council, I’m saying – can you rethink? Don’t destroy the lives of these children and this young mother.
"Don’t allow this injustice to happen. What we need is to protect our safety nets – strengthen them, make sure people do not fall into poverty, are not evicted because of the increase in the cost of living.”
As Bird spoke, Monica was packing in the Potteries, gathering up her children’ s belongings, and pieces of their life.
Her children are nine, seven, 13 – and she has a 22-year-old who lives with them in the university holidays.
“It’s hard for adults to understand, so how can children?” says Monica, 44, a former prison librarian.
“We’ve been packing things away and they don’t understand why. They’re getting distressed asking why the trampoline is going, why am I dismantling things?
"Everyone is trying to enjoy Christmas and my kids are anxious and worried. My youngest doesn’t understand, she wants to know if she’ll have to change school and I can’t tell her that won’t happen because I don’t know.
“All I can say to them is, ‘we might not have a house, but we are still a family’.
Monica says she is just four months away from paying off her mortgage – but she is losing her home because of a bankruptcy order that began with an overpayment by her former employer Stoke City Council.
The £9,000 overpayment came at the same time as multiple bereavements, including the death of Monica’s father.
Since then, that £9,000 debt has become over £60,000 because of court fees.
“I’ve only got four months until the house is mine, and now they’re taking it,” she says.
Bird met Monica when she was working in a prison library and found her immediately impressive.
“She was working on the sex offenders’ wing,” he tells me. “Trying to do something good as well as raising her family.
“I know sometimes people are at fault in their own story. My mother was. She was trapped by the myopia of poverty. She made bad decisions.
“But it will cost the state so much more to make this family homeless.”
A spokesman for Stoke City Council said: “This is a long-standing case which dates back to 2016, when Mrs Cru- Hall received the same payment twice, in error.
This payment should have been paid back straight away, and we have since set out ample opportunities, over a number of years, to repay this money.”
He added: “We consider that all action taken against Mrs Cru-Hall to recover public money has been carried out in a reasonable, fair and timely manner.
"We have tried to communicate with her, however, with no reasonable offers of repayment, ultimately this has led the case to progress to court.”
Yesterday, Bird was in eleventh hour talks with the Conservative leader of Stoke City Council, Abi Brown, still hoping to stop the eviction – but to no avail.
To Lord Bird, Monica’s story is a symbol of generations of broken housing policy, and the brutal failures of austerity.
It is also the oldest Christmas story in the book. A mother at Christmas with no place to go.
