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#1 I went to see a medium in 1977, to ask about a naughty dog. She told me that it was my dad who was behind the antics, and that he wanted me to have a few things: his watch, his wallet, and the family cricket bat.

#2 My father, Greville Philip Austin Collins, was not a faithful husband to my mother, June Winifred Collins. He had used his mundane, bowler-hatted, nine-to-five suburban commuter life to maintain a secret life with an office girlfriend.

#3 I am a divorcee, and I have three children from my first two marriages. I have always tried to be honest with them about my personal history, which affects them every day of their lives.

#4 I was the first London child, as both Carole and Clive had been born in Weston-super-Mare after the entire family had been relocated there by London Assurance prior to the Blitz. My father, born in 1907, came from then-fashionable Isleworth, a riverside neighborhood on London's western edges. His family home was big, dark, and musty.