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My parents, of Belgian-German extraction, were Belgian nationals who had taken refuge in England during the war. They returned to Belgium in 1920, and I grew up in the cosmopolitan harbour city of Antwerp, at a time when education in the Flemish part of the country was still half French and half Flemish.

My parents are both Belgian-born, and so am I, actually.

With my mother, I moved from one household to another before settling in the eastern part of Finland, in the city of Kuopio.

My mother arrived in Brussels in 1938 from a small town near Krakow. But strangely enough, in 1942 or 1943, she was taken back to Auschwitz, which was just 30 miles from where she grew up. Her parents died there and a lot of her family.

I was practically born in Cameroon; my family moved there when I was two weeks old.

I was born in London, and went to school in Scotland - I used to be dead tired when I got home at night.

I studied for my degree in London and consequently ended up spending five years away from Cornwall. I deliberately moved away from the coast to experience a different way of life.