His mother, Winifred, met his father, Frank, when Frank was a soldier during the Second World War. They married in 1943, while Frank was on leave, settled in Croydon, and McTell was born in 1944. McTell often thinks back to the basement flat they lived in for the first 11 years of his life. That awareness came at around the same time as the death of his father and McTell began acting out. Instead of telling his mother he needed money for sports gear — money the family didn’t have — he would skip sports class entirely.