in the chair next to his bed, wearing a faded towelling robe someone had found for him, and wedged in behind a movable tray-table that had been jammed under his bed.The ward sister told me this was to prevent him from trying to get up and walk, which he had showed signs of attempting. Also he had caused some disturbance in the night by pulling out his drip and trying to hit the nurse who replaced it. He was still staring fixedly at the tube bandaged to his wrist, and turning his hand from side to side. He seemed to recognise me, but looked with much more interest at the tea trolley when it approached his bed. He was allowed to have drinks with supervision, and I held a non-spill cup of tepid tea to his lips. He sucked thirstily, but much of the liquid dribbled from his mouth and down the front of his hospital pyjamas. He said very little, and that was unintelligible.
I met Dr Kannangara, the geriatric consultant responsible for Dad: a short, plump Asian with rimless spectacles and a round, impassive face, who confirmed the diagnosis of stroke. He said they would keep Dad in the ward for a few weeks and then he would be moved into a local geriatric unit with nursing care. There was a procedure for this which the hospital’s welfare department would explain to me. I asked if he could be moved by ambulance to a private nursing home near us, if I found one, and he looked surprised but said he thought it was feasible. I asked if Dad would recover his speech, and he said probably not to any great extent. He has some paralysis down his right side, indicating that the stroke affected the left lobe of the brain which controls language functions.
It was depressing to reflect that I would probably never have a proper conversation with my father again, but it was a consolation that when I had called on him two weeks earlier on my way to Poland he had been calmer and much more lucid than of late, and surprised me with feats of long-term memory, like sunbursts through cloud suddenly illuminating small patches of a dark and obscure landscape. I asked him what his earliest memory was, and he said it was being carried on his father’s shoulder to the tobacconist to buy cigarettes. ‘He asked the man in the shop for twenty Wills’ Gold Flake and the man took them down off the shelf and gave them to him. Well, my father was called Will, remember, so I thought the cigarettes were made specially for him. That made him laugh. And he had a brother called Alf, who had a real boozer’s nose, you know, all broken veins, and I called him “the uncle with the writing on his nose”. That made them all laugh too.’ He even dredged up some stories about his early musical career that I hadn’t heard before. ‘For a time I used to do two jobs of an evening - the band at the 53 Club off Regent Street, which opened at about nine o’clock, and before that, on my way to the West End, I used to do a session at a dance school at the Elephant and Castle - they called it a dance school, it was really a way of running a dance hall without paying entertainment tax. It was just a three-piece band, piano, drums and me on sax and clarinet, strict tempo stuff, quick quick slow, I could play the tunes in my sleep, in fact I used to read a book while I was blowing, had it propped up on the music stand, nobody on the floor could see . . . but the money was useful. I was saving up to get married. Not that I was in a hurry, but your mother was. One day, she said to me, “When are we going to get married? Mum and Dad want to know.” So I named a date, and then I had to think about putting a few quid in the bank. But I gave up the dance school when we got married. I wasn’t seeing enough of Norma.’ The thought seemed to make him melancholy. ‘I suppose she never had much of a life, being married to a musician, out at work every evening, and Jewish weddings most Sundays. Especially after you came along. But she never complained.’ I remembered