How Roger Waters' childhood loss and move to Cambridge forged his anti-authoritarian worldview

Roger Waters was only five months old when his father, Eric Fletcher Waters, was killed in World War II at Anzio. He never knew him. What he did grow up with was a mother who rarely spoke about the loss, a stepfather who disliked him, and a quiet resentment toward the myth of heroism and state-sanctioned violence.

After the war, his mother moved the family to Cambridge when Waters was two. That town — rowing, grammar schools, middle-class English order — was where he met Syd Barrett and later formed Pink Floyd. But the move also placed him in a world that expected gratitude for his father’s sacrifice. Waters refused to feel grateful. He turned that absence into the central emotional wound of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and The Final Cut, and channeled it into decades of anti-war, anti-authority activism that ranges from the brilliant to the bombastic.