Iain Quinn: What are your earliest memories of music?

Ian McEwan: I don't come from a cultured background. Both of my parents left school at fourteen. My father was a military man who joined the ranks of the army in the early 1930s. Like a lot of British soldiers, he had a mouth organ and played old favourites in the vamping style. He was a sociable man and liked to get together with mates in the sergeants’ mess. Whenever he was encouraging me to take up an instrument he would tell me that I would always have friends if I could play the piano. What he had in mind was being surrounded by twenty mates singing ‘It's a long way to Tipperary’. So at the age of thirteen I began teaching myself the mouth organ – I had one of those chromatic Larry Adler instruments. It was extremely frustrating. I was starting to listen to the blues and couldn't understand how harp players made the wonderful sounds they did. Later, I realized you could buy blues harmonicas in different keys with scales of flattened thirds and sevenths.

My mother liked what she called ‘nice music’ and although she didn't know the names of composers in general she did have a record of Grieg's piano concerto that I remember playing from when I was ten.

I also recall listening to Family Favourites on the radio in North Africa. People would write in and say something like ‘Please play whatever for Henry and Doris stationed in Singapore’. I think my sister, who is ten years older than me and was living in England, asked me to choose a song. I thought hard about it. I had a secret pre-sexual crush on Doris Day. It seemed natural to ask for her ‘Secret Love’. It was a thrill to hear it, and to hear my name on the radio.

The 1944 Education Act spawned a number of important song books for children and even in a primary school in far away Tripoli we had an hour or two a week singing English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh folk songs.