By the time I began school, we had an Old English sheepdog called Chum, who was big enough that I could ride on his back all the way to St Matthew's, a few blocks away. Art and music were my passions from an early age and my teachers encouraged me to take them further.

Both of my brothers went off to Ealing Art College and our house was thriving with artistic endeavours. I was always sending my artwork into the BBC's Sketch Club. That was the first art show on TV and starred a man named Adrian Hill. On Thursdays, just before dinner time, he'd stand in front of an easel in his white smock and talk about watercolours and oil painting while showing the viewers how to draw. I watched him on our tiny black and white telly, and when he asked kids to send in their drawings I bombarded him with mine.

I was ten years old at the time and he started showing my drawings on the telly. A few years later, I won the show's main prize for a picture of an audience in the cinema, shocked and scared, looking at them from the screen out, as they reacted to a horror film. Winning that prize got my drawings into an exhibition and that was my awakening to art. I sometimes look back to this picture as the seed to both the worlds I ended up in. Depicting an audience in shock and awe meant my two worlds of art and performance came together in this little picture and preceded my night and day jobs. I won the art cup at School and the teachers told Mum I was wasting my time and talent at their school. So off she went to see the headmaster at Ealing. He asked why her youngest son wanted to come there and she said, 'Because my other two sons came here and I want Ronnie to have the same chance.' That's how I got in. Mum and Dad supported us like that. Whatever crazy job we wanted to go into, or whatever silly hairdo we had, they would both smother us in love.

It was Art who bought my first record player for me, a grey and maroon Dansette. This was modern technology, with a swing arm so that you could stack records to play automatically, one after the other. The Dansette could play 45s, 33s and 78s, which my mum used to call 79s. This Dansette became a doorway to a world of sound for me. Art bought me my first few records, including Jerry Lee Lewis singing 'Great Balls of Fire' and the first record I ever bought was Big Joe Williams with Count Basie. The first time I ever heard Elvis was when Cousin Dougie came by with 'Hound Dog' and 'Blue Suede Shoes' and put it on. I also heard one of the first fade-out records on that Dansette. It was 'I'm Walking' by Fats Domino.

Legend has it that Fats wrote the song after his car broke down and some fan called out, 'There's Fats and he's walking.' Fats thought to himself, yeah I'm walking, and wrote the song. The thing about it was that it didn't end like any other song we'd ever heard, it simply disappeared. I can still see my mum and Rex leaning over the Dansette, with their heads close to the built-in speaker at the front, wondering where the music went. And I can still hear Mum tell Rex, 'Take the record back and get one that finishes properly.

Maybe thirty years later, after I got to know Fats, he was showing me around his house in New Orleans, and in his bedroom he had exactly the same old grey and maroon Dansette that I did.

The music, the art, the theatre, the humour and the girls were what made my brothers' lives so appealing. That's what I wanted to do and I wanted a bigger piece of it, so I took it upon myself to learn how to play all the instruments that my brothers' friends brought with them to the parties. There were clarinets, cornets, banjos, guitars, saxophones, trumpets, the comb and paper, kazoos, harmonicas, a home-made drum kit with Chinese wood blocks and the washboard, which became my first instrument. I learnt it well enough that in 1957, when Ted got a gig with his Candy Bison Skiffle Group at the Marlborough Cinema in Yiewsley High Street, he brought me along. It turns out that Ted's washboard player was sick that day and you can't play skiffle without a washboard. So I got up on the stage. That was my first live appearance. I was nine. We were the interval act, between two Tommy Steele films. I was very nervous walking out on to the stage, but once I was there and got into strumming my washboard, and saw all the threatening potential of an audience, I knew this was a very good job.

It was clear to everyone how interested I was in music from an early age, and how anxious I was to learn guitar chords. Two of my brothers' friends, Lawrence Sheaff and Jim Willis, noticed this and kindly drew stripes and frets on a piece of paper for me, putting little dots on the stripes so I would know where to put my fingers on a guitar. I always carried that piece of paper around with me, and my son Jesse would eventually learn that way too. They let me practise on their guitars, until Art gave me one I could experiment on. I thought it was mine to keep, not knowing that it belonged to his mate Peter Hayes who lived down the block. No one told me that Peter had only loaned it to Art. I was just getting used to it when Art said sorry, you have to give it back. My brothers must have seen I was gutted and chipped in to buy me my own guitar. It was a lovely acoustic, and a blessing from above, although the action was a bit high on the neck and it hurt my fingers to play it. My hands were ready to deal with the blisters and cramps and I wasn't going to let the pain stop me from getting to know my new spokesman. When Art handed it to me he said, 'This one is not going to go away. It's yours.

Until I was thirteen or fourteen, I was still playing that guitar. But once I had some odd jobs, I started saving some money. I went to Franklin's music store and bought myself a new guitar on what we used to call the never-never; instalments so small with interest so high that you would never-never pay it all back. My parents signed for me and I faithfully paid Franklin's two and six every week for the next however many years. The guitar cost £25, which was a fortune at the time.

It's going on forty years since any of us lived at Number 8, and today there's a little porch built on to the front of it. The man who lives there now told Cousin Beryl that everyone still refers to it as 'the Woods' House'. He dug up the back garden one day and found 1,700 Guinness bottles. I'll admit to using a hundred of them to build homes for my terrapins but the rest are down to my dad.

My mum was a great judge of character, a wonderful woman. Just before she died, just before she had her last sip of Jameson's, she told me that number 8 Whitethorn Avenue had a crack down the middle of it. She said she thought it came about when the house breathed a sigh of relief when the Wood family finally left. But I don't think so. It might have been a tiny house, but it was a happy, rocking house and I think the crack is one big smile from all the parties.