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I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.

I'm crazy about my father, he's an amazing man, a real adventurer. He took us with him to travel all over the world. We were in places that were so remote, that white people hardly ever reach them.

I think my ancestors had to be enormously strong emotionally and very courageous.

My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.

I was brought up largely by my grandfather because my father only returned from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1947 and worked in the nearest small town, so I hardly ever saw him.

My maternal grandmother had what might be described in a school report as a 'lively imagination.' She told us that she was a direct descendant of Sir Christopher Wren.

I went to Cork, Ireland, and stood on the dock some of my ancestors had left from. I felt their ghosts gather round me, and I cried to imagine what it must have felt like - leaving that beautiful land and those beloved people, knowing it was forever.

My mother's family came from the British West Indies. And my father's family came from, well, my father's father came from the Montana/South Dakota area. They were Blackfoot Indian.

I came from a very, very small valley in the middle of South Wales. I grew up there with my father, who's a coal miner, and my mother worked in a normal factory.