Hughes was born at 1 Aspinall Street, in Mytholmroyd, West Riding of Yorkshire, to William Henry and Edith (née Farrar) Hughes, and raised among the local farms of the Calder valley and on the Pennine moorland. Hughes's sister Olwyn was two years his senior and his brother Gerald was older than him by ten years. His mother could trace her ancestry back to William de Ferrières, who came to England with William the Conqueror in the 11th century. One of her ancestors had founded the religious community of Little Gidding. Most of the more recent generations of his family had worked in the clothing and milling industries in the area. Hughes's father, a joiner, had enlisted with the Lancashire Fusiliers and fought at Ypres. A bullet narrowly escaped killing William Hughes when it lodged in a pay book in his breast pocket. He was one of just 17 men of his regiment to return from the Dardanelles Campaign (1915–16). The stories of Flanders fields filled Hughes's childhood imagination (later described in the poem "Out"). Hughes noted, "my first six years shaped everything."
© Copyright Wikipédia authors - This article is under licence CC BY-SA 3.0