"I was born in London in 1984, the youngest of four; Gus, my eldest brother, is ten years older than me, then there's my sister Olivia, my brother Harry and then me - we come in gaps of roughly three years.

My father, Philip, grew up mainly in London and my mother, Clare, is from Leicestershire. My father was a writer and after they married they lived in a few different places but then came to Dorset on the advice of friends, to the house my mother still lives in outside Salway Ash.

“I come from Chipping Sodbury, between Bath and Bristol. My Mum and Grandad still live there. I went to school there, to a pretty rubbish comprehensive, and I was always in trouble. I’m dyslexic so I struggled, and eventually I got expelled with no qualifications. Probably the only thing that kept me out of Borstal was the Scouts and the Army Cadets, which I excelled in.

Robin Mills went to Cattistock, West Dorset, to meet Merrily Harpur. This is her story.
“My upbringing was in Surrey, although I was born in Buckinghamshire. All the while I lived in Surrey, I was wishing I lived in Dorset, and it’s taken me this long to get here.

“I was actually born in Bournemouth, which was Hampshire in those days, but my mother’s side of the family was very West Dorset. Grandfather was called Robert Wakeley, and he came from Loders,

“I was born in Bristol but when I was eight we moved to Castle Cary. I’ve always thought of myself as a South Somerset man. We used to go to Yeovil to see the optician or to go to the cinema. On rare occasions we’d go back to Bristol or cross the county line to Sherborne, in Dorset, to buy school uniforms. I went to school at Hazlegrove House in Sparkford and then to Kings School, Bruton. I felt just as much at home in Dorset as in Somerset, as we’d often go on day trips and outings to Weymouth or West Bay.

“I can remember wartime as a very small child, seeing my mother in a tin hat going off on her bike to do ARP work. My father worked in the War Ministry reinstating the gas lighting in places that had been bombed, like Coventry. At night I watched Very lights and tracer bullets on the nearby firing range; the front garden was dug up to grow vegetables. I used to be in Sunday School Nativity plays, progressing from being a white angel to a pink one, which meant you could be part of the Shining Throng, although I never got to be the gold angel, Gabriel.

Fergus Byrne went to Beaminster, Dorset, to meet Michael Feasey. This is his story.

“I was born in Portsmouth, a navy brat. But we never had exotic postings, we always ended up in places like Plymouth and Faslane in Scotland. I did spend a lot of time in Weymouth as a youngster. I remember Weymouth very distinctly as a summer place with peeling paint and windswept sand blown streets My mother was German born, married my father after the war, he was a Yorkshire man. And in deference to her continental background, he would let her keep the rural Germanic traditions in the house. We celebrated Christmas Eve, for instance.

I was born on 21st July 1939 in the pottery cottage belonging to my grandfather Bernard Leach, in St Ives, Cornwall. My boyhood in St Ives was pretty idyllic; our playgrounds were all the coves and beaches round West Penwith, and I can remember when the distress rockets went up, running down to the harbour to watch the lifeboat go out, which was the most exciting thing for a small boy. It was wartime, my father was away in the army with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, and mother invited a friend she’d met at the bus stop in St Ives to bring her two little girls round to have a bath, because we had a proper one, and they only had a galvanised tub in front of the fire.

“My Dad loved music, especially jazz, although his interest kind of stopped at bebop. He loved Oscar Peterson, Bennie Goodman, Fats Waller, people like that; Mum taught me to widen my taste in music, and encouraged me to take my playing seriously. I have two sisters, one eight years older than me, and one ten years, and I think they really got me going with music. Being that bit older than me, they were into the Beatles, who they’d seen play in 1963, the Stones, and Bob Dylan of course. They had loads of Bob Dylan records. We lived in south London, although I was born in Sutton, Surrey, and brought up in Merton. You couldn’t say I had any musical influences from where I was brought up – if it had been Brixton I’d have been into reggae perhaps – it all came from the Dansette record player really, one you could put a whole stack of singles on.

“I’m the middle one of three children. My parents both went to Cambridge after the war – my mother read history, my father mechanical engineering. He’d been wounded in the Normandy Landings. Talking with my mother only recently, she said that today my father would be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but then there wasn’t a name for it. Most of my childhood I was aware of him painting; he was painting around the theme of war, as if he was trying to paint his way out of trauma. This really carried on for most of his life, although he switched from painting to writing and back again; his surreal imagery was all around the house as we were growing up. I was also aware of his rather dark presence – this person who could be unpredictable and sometimes explode. My mother was the opposite, as if she was trying to counter that; she was sunny and bright, and tried to protect all of us, including my father, from the outside world. So it was quite a strange upbringing; it was very privileged, but in another way kind of deprived, in that we were always a bit cut off from other people.

“I was born and brought up here at Manor Farm, but my father’s side of the family had Cornish roots. He grew up in Bournemouth, but his father was a GP, who came from Cornwall. He was the son of a shopkeeper, had lots of brothers and sisters, and one of his sisters was the housekeeper on St Michaels Mount, home of Lord and Lady St Levan. So my grandfather, who was in his forties and unmarried, happened to be visiting his sister at the castle, where a female relative of Lady St Levan was staying. The relative was taken ill, so Grandfather’s sister suggested he, as a doctor, take a look: the unwell relative, also in her forties and unmarried, and my grandfather got on rather well, and a sort of upstairs-downstairs romance blossomed.

“If I say to local people my name’s Townsend, they often say, ‘What, the Fair people from Chickerell?’ Which is true, that’s who I am. My family’s been here in Putton Lane since 1933. When my Granny bought the land it was a turnip field in winter, and of course it was very, very muddy; we had heavy traction engines to put in the field, so we bought cartloads of ‘bats’, which are reject bricks, from the local brickworks and made a road right down through the field. That was the beginning of our showman’s yard. We had traction engines for many years, with dynamos powering the rides and lights. We bought two which came from the Portland stone quarries. My Uncle Tom paid £25 for the pair, and we converted one into a showman’s engine, with the canopy, and all the brass work. This one was originally called Nellie, after a servant girl who worked at Portland Castle.

“My childhood home was in Tunbridge Wells, on the Kent and Sussex border. My father was the headmaster of the senior school, what would now be called a comprehensive. I found it something of a disadvantage, growing up, to be the son of the headmaster; it’s a bit like being the son of the vicar, and I suppose I felt I had to try a bit harder to be delinquent. I went to the local grammar school for boys; there was a separate grammar school for girls opposite, and I can’t say I really enjoyed it.

“My father was an army officer, and it was when he was posted to China that he and my mother met. She was quarter Chinese, quarter Spanish and half German. Later my father was posted to India, so my sister and I were both born there. Life for an army family in those days in India was very different to home life in England. We had servants, an increasing number as my father rose in rank, so by the time I was four, I was really being brought up by Indian people; I had an ayah, there was a bearer, there were gardeners, cleaners, a cook, and people who did the washing up. As a result I became fluent in Urdu, and because I spoke it rather better than my father, I became an underage translator for him. He would sometimes have to interview Indian soldiers, for example when they requested compassionate leave, and would haul me in to translate what they were saying.

“I was actually born in a village called Sherston, in 1952, which is in Wiltshire near Malmsbury, where my Dad was a teacher at the village school. When I was about 4, Dad became headmaster at Fontmell Magna School, near Shaftsbury, so we moved there, and lived as a family in the Victorian school house. That was where I grew up, and because there was a door which led straight from our kitchen into the classroom, of course I was never late for school. In one of the kitchen cupboards was an old metal handle which in former times would have rung the school bell.

“I was born in Wimbledon, in 1948, so I was a suburban child. My upbringing was very conventional; I went to a minor public school, and left it with no clear idea of what I wanted to do, as long as it was something to do with the arts side of things because that was what I’d concentrated on, and enjoyed, at school. I think my parents were fairly desperate to get me into “the professions”. My father had a very difficult working life: he was in the RAF during the war, then worked in the motor trade, in various management positions, and was made redundant several times.

“My Mum and Dad came over from Trinidad in the early fifties, to better their lives, like so many West Indians. It was actually Enoch Powell who was advertising in the Caribbean for workers to come to the UK to do the work British people weren’t able to do. They came from different areas in Trinidad; Dad was from a rural background, Mum was brought up in a town, but they met here in the UK, and I was born in Croydon. Dad was in the RAF at the time, and my Mum was nursing. However I spent 3 years of my early life in Singapore. We came back to north London, where Dad qualified as a solicitor, and Mum moved into midwifery.

“Originally I come from Hythe, in Kent, where I was born 83 years ago. My father was a builder, and I had two brothers and a sister. We lived there until 1940, about the time of the evacuation of Dunkirk. That was when my school was evacuated also, but we went to Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, where it was thought to be a lot safer for children in case there was an invasion. I was there for two years, and when I came back, I started my apprenticeship as a plumber, working for my father. When I was old enough, I registered for National Service.

Julia Mear met Yvonne Burton at her home in Morcombelake, Dorset. This is Yvonne’s story:

“I was born in the farmhouse at Westhay Farm, Stonebarrow, Dorset, in 1943, named Sylvia Yvonne, but I am known as Yvonne. My grandparents and great grandparents, on my mother’s side, farmed Westhay and Stonebarrow Hill between Morcombelake and Charmouth. They grew a lot of wheat on the land and milking must have been very hard work in those days – I remember how cold the cowshed was in winter, all the milking was done by hand.

Robin Mills went to West Bexington, Dorset, to meet Michael Michaud. This is his story.

“I was born in 1950 in Maine, USA, which is closer to the UK than it is to California. I always wanted to get away from Maine, but not too far away, which is maybe why I finished up here rather than California. My background, like so many Americans, is multicultural; my mother was Lebanese, and my father French Canadian.