I think his dad wanted him to be a real man. He had an obsession with military things, but he always wanted to fly.
"I remember one time he put on his full army uniform with boots and a bloomin’ great big pack and went on a march up the motorway. He was a very nice guy and very stimulating company, and he turned me on to a lot of very interesting things, like William Burroughs and JP Donleavy, all these weird books, but he had some real difficulties. He’d always have breakdowns he’d have one every 18 months according to his mother. “He used to come by my house and blabber on… people were scared but I never was. “My mother was frightened of him,” says Turner.
His erratic behaviour veered towards the manic. Calvert suffered from bipolar disorder at a time when the condition was poorly understood by the medical profession and the public at large. It soon became clear to Turner that there was something profoundly different about his friend, and it wasn’t just his eclectic interests.
Robert’s mother was a state-registered nurse and she had a cupboard full of drugs, so he and his brother used to steal them and sell them to the mods on the seafront.” They’d throw a dustbin through a window, grab what they could and then I’d look after them for them. "I was working on the seafront at the time selling naughty postcards, ‘Kiss Me Quick’ hats and holding drugs for mods. He’d go and do these poetry readings down in Thanet and Margate, these happenings. I remember knocking around with him, it was maybe 1966, and we’d go boogie to Born To Be Wild and get stoned and have a great time. “He wanted to be a poet, really, but he also had these obsessions, and that was one of them. “Flying was an obsession with him,” says Nik Turner, Calvert’s sax-toting future bandmate in Hawkwind. It was a disappointment that Calvert would never shake. But his dream of becoming a fighter pilot was crushed by an inner ear defect. In his teens, he would join the Air Training Corps, where he reached the rank of corporal and played trumpet for the 438th Squadron band. The stream of fighters and bombers and their crews taking off and landing would leave a deep imprint on the young Calvert’s mind.