Honor
researched the Portugal book in 1953, travelling on a shoestring with
eight-year-old Robert and his older half-sister Prue. «We travelled by bus a
lot of the time,» remembers Prue, «although sometimes we were lucky enough to
get a lift in a truck or cart or something like that. We slept wherever, in
blankets that my mother had stitched up – they were old army blankets of George’s.
We were just camping, but we had no tent. We’d sleep under the stars: in woods,
in florests, wherever we could.» Robert also remembers the trip with affection.
«I absolutely loved the place,» he recalls. «Dirty poor, I now realise, but
magical to me at the time.»
[…]
Though
he hides it well behind the beard and avuncular grin, Wyatt is a worrier. When
in Portugal with Honor and Prue, he had been so embarrassed at the poverty he
witnessed that for a period he refused to wear any shoes That empathy has
remained: it’s almost as if he failed to develop the so-called compassion
fatigue with wich the rest of us slowly become inured. Alfie describes Robert
as missing a layer of skin, and that quality is perhaps what makes his music so
affecting. But it also left Wyatt, as a human being, vulnerable, and quick to
blame himself when things go wrong. His constant self-effacement is not merely
English ‘after you’ etiquete.
Marcus
O’Dair, Different every time: The
authorised biography of Robert Wyatt
