‘My Mother will scold me soon/ For she has gone/ To Wimbledon/ Under the silver moon.’
These last four lines appear in verse written by Robert, just before his fourth birthday.
By 16, Robert had poems published in The Carthusian, the Charterhouse School magazine, which led to his membership in the school’s Poetry Society. Quite early on, his father recognised in his son those crucial ingredients that help form a poet: imagination, a good ear, and delight in word-play.
Alfred also included Robert’s ‘The Will O’ The Wisp’ in his own Welsh Poetry Old and New (1912). To be mentioned by name must have given Robert special pleasure.