desk and a radiogram and in due course a television, and it was there that we mainly lived as a family. In those days Dad used the front room to practise on the saxophone and clarinet. He was scrupulous about doing an hour’s practice every day, in the late morning, to keep his fingering supple and accurate, playing over and over again what sounded to me like fragmentary scales and phrases with no continuous melody. It was maddening to listen to and I wonder if that wasn’t one reason why I never seriously tried to learn an instrument myself when I was young - there seemed to be no pleasure in it. It was a revelation when I first heard him on the bandstand, playing a proper solo on the tenor sax. Later I got interested in jazz through listening to his records and had fantasies of playing the trumpet like Harry James or Dizzy Gillespie but I was on an academic track at school by then, aimed towards university with loads of homework, and not sufficiently motivated to give up any of my meagre spare time to music lessons, so I never learned to play an instrument, and now that I have plenty of time to spare it’s too late because hearing impairment has taken most of the pleasure out of music for me.
For Dad too, I think. He doesn’t play any more of course, he sold his instruments some years ago - his teeth have gone and he has arthritis in his fingers - and he doesn’t listen to music as much as he used to. The turntable and the cassette player of his music centre are broken and he won’t replace it or have it mended. When I offered to buy him a new system with a CD player last Christmas he flew into one of his irrational fits of temper: ‘Are you mad? What would I want with a CD player? You think I want to waste my money buying a lot of CDs, and they cost a fortune, a complete take-on if you ask me, when I’ve got a marvellous set of records like those?’ (Making a sweeping gesture towards the shelf that holds his modest collection of LPs.) I said, all right, I would get him a hi-fi with a turntable, and he said, ‘Where would I put it? I don’t have room for any more clobber,’ and I said you can put it where the music centre is now, and he said, ‘What? You mean get rid of my music centre? I paid a hundred quid for that.’ And I said, but it doesn’t work, Dad, and he said, ‘The radio works,’ though in fact he never uses that radio, because he can’t turn up the volume loud enough without annoying the neighbours. He has one in the kitchen which he plays so loud it rattles the crockery, and a smaller portable which he listens to in the dining room or in bed through a pair of lightweight earphones, mostly to talk radio. He might try Classic FM occasionally but gone are the days when he would sit down and listen to a whole symphony or concerto by one of his favourite composers, Elgar, Rachmaninov, Delius - late Romantic stuff, no Mozart or Beethoven for him (‘can’t stand the bloody Germans, too heavy’) - recording it on to a cassette for future use, an economy which gave him great satisfaction. Modern jazz no longer seems to interest him, though he does like nostalgic radio programmes about the big swing bands of the Forties, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey. Electric guitar-based rock and pop music he despises, needless to say, and always has done since it put an end to the dance-band business, though he made an exception of the Beatles. They were real musicians, he would say. ‘Clever tunes and songs you can understand, with proper rhymes.’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was his favourite.
‘So how are you?’ I said when we were seated in the two easy chairs each side of the hearth, where one bar of an electric fire was switched on. Although I forced him to let me pay for central heating to be installed at the time of Mum’s last illness he has never taken to it; he keeps the radiators turned off in the house most of the time for economy’s sake, and uses an electric fire in the dining room because he doesn’t really feel warm unless he can