“Really,” he said and shifted around on the bed until he could reach the keyboard. He played a couple of bars of “Body and Soul,” stating the melody before vamping and then taking the line in a direction that I’ve never been able to follow or appreciate. He looked disappointed at my reaction—he keeps hoping that I’ll grow into it one day. On the other hand my dad had an iPod so who knows what might happen.

“What happened to Ken Johnson?”

“He was killed in the Blitz,” said Dad. “Like Al Bowlly and Lorna Savage. Ted Heath told me that sometimes they thought Göring had it in for the jazzmen. Said he felt safer during the war doing tours in North Africa than he did playing gigs in London.”

I doubted I was searching for the vengeful spirit of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, but it wouldn’t hurt to check just in case.

Mum turfed us out of the bedroom so she could change. I made more tea and we sat in the living room.

“Next thing I know,” said Dad, “I’ll be looking for gigs.”

“With you on keyboard?”

“The line is the line,” said Dad. “The instrument is just the instrument.”

The jazzman lives to play.

My mum came out of the bedroom in a sleeveless yellow sundress and no headscarf. She had her hair quartered and twisted into the big plaits that made my dad grin. When I was a kid, Mum used to relax her hair every six weeks like clockwork. In fact, every weekend saw someone—an aunt, a cousin, a girl from down the road—sitting in the living room and chemically burning her hair straight. If I hadn’t gotten off at the year-ten disco with Maggie Porter, whose dad was a dread and whose mum sold car insurance, and who wore her hair in locks, I might have reached adulthood thinking that a black girl’s hair naturally smelled of potassium hydroxide. Now, personally I’m like my dad—I fancy it au naturel or in braids—but the first rule about a black woman’s hair is you don’t talk about a black woman’s hair. And the second rule is you don’t ever touch a black woman’s hair without getting written permission first. And that includes after sex, marriage, or death for that matter. This courtesy is not reciprocated.

“You need a haircut,” said Mum. And by haircut she meant, of course, shaved short enough for my scalp to tan. I promised her that I’d take care of it, and she stalked into the kitchen to make dinner.