MY MOTHER DIED WHEN I WAS JUST FOUR YEARS OLD. She was in her mid-thirties and had tuberculosis, and I was too young to really grasp what had happened. We lived in Penclawdd in Wales and I was sent to stay with my mother’s sister and her husband in a nearby village. Still, it was a happy childhood. My father and I eventually moved in with my grandmother and another widowed aunt. It was a big family with lots of love from many ladies—aunts and cousins—but there was always something that felt like it was missing because my mother wasn't there.
He was a music teacher, a chapel organist and a choirmaster. I started having piano lessons when I was five or six years of age and I became fairly proficient but not brilliant. I was also exposed to a lot of music at that time because it was the beginning of LP vinyl records, just
