![]() Much of Hegley’s early work was about his father, and there is a shocking flippancy to his descriptions of being smacked. Being able to sit there and look at your family and think, ‘We have achieved this’, I think that was very important in his being able to move on,” says Hegley.īob didn’t live long enough to see his middle child take to the stage to perform his wryly-observed poems, although he was supportive of his early experiments. It was there, but he was distant from it. “I think all the family stuff was feeding into his happiness and he was moving away from the agitation. “It was like he was the king of his domain and he looked joyful to have all his children around him.” By the time Bob retired as a clerk from manufacturer George Kent Ltd in 1970 and moved from Luton to the countryside around Bristol, Hegley says he was very happy. Each year, Hegley would buy his father a cigar and Bob would sit smoking it. There was that hurt which is, you move on, but it’s still there.”Ĭhristmas, though, was a peaceful time in the Hegley household. “I feel that we moved to a better space, but a scar is a scar,” says Hegley, now 70. That his father would lose his temper with him left its mark. “That would be the word I would use,” says Hegley. I probably caused it,” says Hegley, with a wry smile. “He only told me recently that Dad had a relapse when Marcel was 10. Hegley’s older brother by eight years, Marcel, however, was more aware of his father’s troubles (he also has a younger sister). Hegley says this was connected to an attack on his base in Nottingham, when German pilots strafed the airstrip, killing a number of Bob’s friends.īob had met Hegley’s mother towards the end of the war, and his father’s temperament was never spoken about when Hegley was a child, growing up in 1960s Luton. He worked as ground crew and a batman in the RAF, but was honourably discharged in January 1942. When the Second World War broke out, he enlisted. He moved to Nice, in the south of France, in 1930, and then returned to England in 1936 and started a cleaning firm. Raised on both sides of the Channel, he went to school in Bow and left in 1923 for prohibition America where he worked at a speakeasy. ![]() Half-French and half-English, his father was called René but known as Bob. If it were today, Hegley feels sure that his father would be described as having post-traumatic stress. The details of why his father struggled are still hazy, lost in a period when people rarely talked about feelings, trauma and mental health. (Sample verse: “For a while I was a bus conductor and one day my Dad got on my bus…In a loud voice he said to everyone, ‘Do you remember the bus conductor’s outfit you had when you were a boy John?’ and I said ‘No Dad, but I remember how you used to enjoy beating me.’”)īy the time his dad died of a heart attack at the age of 75, in 1980, when Hegley was 26, their relationship was much warmer. I was good at goading.”Īnyone familiar with Hegley Jr’s work will be aware of the consequences: many of his poems feature his father and portray him as a severe disciplinarian. “When I was eight or nine he used to lose his temper with me and he used to hit me,” says Hegley, matter-of-factly. He would, as he says today, goad his father. His father Bob’s nerves figured prominently in his childhood, although he never really understood what that meant and why he should be wary of them.Īnd so a young Hegley rarely did mind them. More poems by David Roberts can be found here.“Think of your dad’s nerves” – that’s the admonishment the poet and performer John Hegley grew up hearing on a daily basis. Published by Saxon Books in Kosovo War Poetry. ![]() A war poem by David Roberts about the moral implications of service personnel obeying orders to carry out lethal action, and the media and general public's perception of those actions.
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