I left England for New Zealand at the age of 18 in 1957, and the England I remember was not exactly monocultural even then. The first song I can remember was Irish - "McTavish is dead and his brother don't know it" from my Glasgow-Irish grandma - next after that was my mother singing "Bobby Shaftoe", and from then on it was mostly tunes and songs from the radio, which was mostly set to the Home Service. My father was a Jimmy Shand fan, and the one from his band I remember was Mickie Ainsworth's version of "The March Hare" (Irish), and versions by players I couldn't name of "The Minstrel Boy" (Irish again) and "The Girl I Left Behind Me".

And the three songs that stuck in my head from that time more than any others were: Charles Trenet's "La Mer" (in French; Bobby Darin's English one was later); Eartha Kitt's version of the Turkish song "Uskudar'a gider iken"; and my father singing "Bhair mi o" very badly in the bath - he'd probably learned it off a Glasgow Orpheus Choir record.

Probably my dad's best friend at the time was a Polish emigre. We had one of his watercolours (of Skye) at home but never got to hear any Polish songs. We had a few bits of Indian and Egyptian paraphernalia around the house from my father's war service, some African things from his uncle's work as a diplomat in Zanzibar, and with his aunts being involved in supporting Methodist missionary work as well, we could never really dismiss the wider world as something not worth knowing about.