I spent my earliest years in Colwyn Bay in north Wales with my mother and grandmother, while my father was stationed with the RAF in India.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My mother was a product of World War II. My grandfather was on leave in Edinburgh when he met my grandmother.
Mum told me stories about her time in the Women's Royal Navy, and about her dad, who had died before I was born - he'd been sent to Australia as a child, then joined the Australian Army in the First World War and fought at Gallipoli.
I was born in London 1947, after the war. A real wartime baby. I went to school in Brixton, and then I moved up to Yorkshire, which is in the north of England. I lived on the farms up there.
My father was raised with brothers, he was a football player and a boxer, he was a chief petty officer in the Navy, he was a man of his times.
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.
From the big mountains in the north to the valleys in the south, all through my childhood and teenage years, my family would always holiday in Wales.
My family was in Singapore when the Japanese War started. We were in Singapore at the time of Pearl Harbor, and by the beginning of 1942, the Japanese invasion of Burma and Singapore had started.
When I was little, I grew up in a place called Hertfordshire, which is just near London, but out in the country, and I visited Pakistan in the summers to go and see my family on my dad's side.
My parents were born in Norfolk and spent their early years working in the big houses of that rural English county, my mother as a cook and my father as a handyman and chauffeur.
My mum lives near Holkham Bay in Norfolk, and with my dad by the coast in Suffolk, I spend quite a bit of time by the sea.