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Patrick Maguire |
‘My childhood ended when the police arrived’
Patrick Maguire, who spent four of his teenage years in prison after being falsely labelled an IRA terrorist, tells Tom Foot how art has been his salvation
PATRICK Maguire was sleeping peacefully when a “giant” visited his aunt’s home in Kilburn.
Not the Big Friendly variety – far from it. This giant was a very tall policeman and he was arresting the 13-year-old for helping make two IRA bombs that killed five people in a Guildford pub. In the van to Paddington Green police station, the giant told him: “By the time you get out of prison, you’ll be an old man and you’ll not see your mum and dad again.” “That was the moment my childhood ended,” says Patrick, now 49, the youngest of a family that would later become known as the “Maguire Seven”.
He spent four years in prison following a shameful miscarriage of justice at the Old Bailey court in 1974. The evidence against them – nitro-glycerine residue, used for making bombs, and discovered beneath their finger nails – was later found to have come from kitchen gloves.
It’s hardly surprising to find Patrick fixated on his “stolen” childhood and that his favourite word is “bollocks”.
In 1991, the convictions were finally quashed and Tony Blair later apologised. But no apology can bring his childhood back or the years he lost. “I never really felt like I had been released,” he says, puffing furiously on a fag.
With a family behind bars, and his education at Quintin Kynaston school brutally cut short, the 18-year-old tumbled inevitably into a life of crime, violence and drugs.
“I left prison an angry man,” he says. “I was like an unguided missile.”
He later suffered a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with manic depression before checking into the Priory clinic for rehabilitation in 2005. It was there that he picked up a piece of charcoal and began drawing. A compelling exhibition of his work is on display in the Kingsgate Galley in West Hampstead.
Mr Maguire says he is a “natural loner”, something that comes from being in prison. He is intensely introspective and clearly quite heartbroken by the way his childhood was taken away from him.
He says: “Picasso said: ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up’. Well the adults got hold of me too early mate. I think that’s what my artwork is about – it’s me going back to a childhood.”
He says he would like to work with children in the future and offers me tips on how to keep a child’s mind working in the mornings – by talking to them about their dreams on the way to school. His own children are 16 and 20.
At a talk about his book in the Kilburn festival earlier this year, Ags Irwin – a self-confessed “Kilburn busybody” who runs the gallery – got talking to Patrick about his art. During six-months recovering from a mental breakdown in the Priory, he told her, he had created dozens of charcoal drawings that were hidden away in a wooden box. Ags persuaded him to show them to her.
He seems overjoyed about his exhibition and talks at length about what each drawing means to him and how they are interpreted by people coming into the gallery.
They are open to a multitude of interpretations: ghosts of family members, mothers, fathers, bars, numbers (he says he is obsessed with numbers) prison bunk beds. Some are more abstract, and there are brighter images of “hope”, nature and the outside world. These later ones are infused with colour as his rehabilitation gathered pace.
Patrick says that art had always been his “salvation”, from the doodles he did at Queen’s Park primary school to the cartoons he tagged onto the end of prison letters to his mother.
“When I arrived in prison I was locked up 23 hours a day with my thoughts,” he says. “All of a sudden you have to write a bloody letter to your family. I didn’t have a clue how to.
“I was sharing a cell with this really posh bloke. He had blown up his public school – lovely bloke. He could see I couldn’t write letters so he helped me. I was in a macho-dominated world. The cartoons I sent, some of them I can’t believe. There was one of a body builder holding up his weights with no hands, if you know what I mean. I sent that to my Mum! But they were mainly childish cartoons – it was a way of showing my mother that I was still a kid I suppose.”
Maguire talks about “baroning” in prison, where he would cut deals with non-smoker inmates for their tobacco, proudly revealing he had amassed 30 ounces of tobacco at the time of his release.
“You could only have two ounces, max. And I had more biscuits than Sainsbury’s,” he adds.
It is quite a story: the child turned convict, turned criminal, mental health patient, writer – his biography came out at the end of last year – and now celebrated artist.
“We could have sold some of these drawings three times over,” he says. “I think people find their own meaning in them. We’re all trapped in some way, you see.”
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