There it was. On a poster for a pub stand-up night. An advertisement for a comedian calling himself JOHN HEGLEY. It took me several seconds to take it in. I knew of no one, except for members of my immediate family who shared my surname. I was long used to the simple fact that there were no other Hegleys but us. The name on this poster must be a misprint. This Usurper had adapted his own name, or had appropriated mine! My friend scoffed. Why should John Hegley have to be either a relative or a name-stealer? I was being silly, he said. But I knew. Only our family had our name. There were two Hegleys in the London phone book and both could be accounted for. This Mummer had casually taken MY name. This name, for whose sake I had put up with so many childhood nicknames, variations on eggface and ugly. This name, which had been a source of embarrassment and of pride, was the only link I had with my long-dead father and the grandparents I had never known. I rang my sister who, though distanced from her attachment to our name by marriage, was equally shocked. There could be no other HEGLEY. Our dad was the youngest of his siblings, now all dead. He had been in late middle age when we were born. The only relatives who survived him were known to us. We would go to the pub gig. We would take a close look at this Pretender. This John Hegley was good. Part of his act was a funny piece about his surname - how it was so often wrongly spelled or pronounced. People would confuse it with other, similar names - would actually look straight at H E G L E Y and then pronounce it as Hedley, Hedgley or even Heggarty. I could see that my sister had relaxed a little. We were both beginning to weaken. Hadn't we both had the same experience? Hadn't we heard our Dad joke about people's inability or say or spell his name? Any one of us could have dined out on such a tale. We looked at each other. Could this JOHN HEGLEY really be one of us? In the interval, John was standing in the bar. We introduced ourselves and saw the disbelief on his face. He, too, had thought that HEGLEY belonged exclusively to him and his close family. On comparing notes, we found there were possibilities, an unusual woman's Christian name which cropped up in his family and in ours, and long-ago origins in the same part of London. And he was friendly, and a bit shy... like us. Shortly after that meeting, I rang to book some West End theatre tickets. I gave my name, quite used to the idea that I would have to repeat it, then spell it - that I might have had to say it several times. This time, the Booking clerk said. "Oh, yes, Hegley... as in John". ends |
