Library of Wales: So Long Hector Bebb

Ron Berry was born in 1920 in Blaen-cwm in the Rhondda Valley,and he worked as a miner from the age of fourteen. Although he served in both the Army and the Merchant Navy in the Second World War, his consistent attitude to all authority was to absent himself from it. He was a gifted sportsman who had played for Swansea Town, and was an occasional boxer, but it was a year in adult education at Coleg Harlech in the early 1950s that released him from sporadic casual work to concentrate on writing. Against all odds he never flagged in this determined pursuit.In addition to So Long, Hector Bebb, he published four works of fiction, including Travelling Loaded (1963); The Full-Time Amateur (1966); Flame and Slag (1968), and This Bygone (1996).

When a single-minded, sexless fighting machine becomes a killer he discovers who his real family are and how far they will go to protect him.So Long, Hector Bebb recounts in Ron Berry's sparse and uncompromising style the story of a boxer from Cymmer in South Wales ready to make his comeback.Abe has ensured that Hector is nurtured into a single-minded fighting machine. He is ready to take on the world, but where do the true dangers lie?Through a series of first person accounts a compelling tragic-heroic story unfolds. The traditional values of family and friendship are stripped bare-knuckled naked by the relentlessly violent world of boxing. Some are savaged and others liberated, but the consequences of these stark principles leave deep scars on everyone in Hector Bebb's life.Ron Berry's great Boxing novel is a dazzling multi-vocal exhibition that Mailer would recognise and Joyce Carol Oates too...a novel from the Rhondda, the Heart of American Wales. Dai Smith, Series Editor