“I was a war baby,” said Dad. “Your nan was evacuated before she had me and that’s why my birth certificate says Cardiff. Luckily for you she unevacuated us back to Stepney before the end of the war.” Or we might have been Welsh, in my dad’s eyes a fate worse than Scottish.

He said that growing up in the London of the late 1940s it was like the war was still going on in people’s heads, what with the bomb sites, the rationing, and the patronizing voices of the BBC Home Service. “Minus the high explosives of course,” said Dad. “In them days people still talked about Bowlly getting blown up on Jermyn Street or Glen Miller’s plane going missing in ’44. Did you know he was a proper American air force major?” said Dad. “To this day he’s still listed as Missing in Action.”

But to be young and talented in the 1950s was to live on the cusp of change. “First time I heard ‘Body and Soul’ was at the Flamingo Club,” Dad said. “It was being played by Ronnie Scott just when he was becoming Ronnie Scott. The Flamingo Club in the late ’50s was a magnet for black airmen down from Lakenheath and other U.S. bases.

“They wanted our women,” said Dad. “And we wanted their records. They always had the latest stuff. It was a match made in heaven.”

Mum came in with dinner. We were always a two-pot family, one for Mum and a considerably less spicy pot for Dad. He also likes slices of white bread and marge rather than rice, which would be just asking for heart trouble if he weren’t as skinny as a rake to start with. I was a two-pot child, both rice and white bread, which explains my chiseled good looks and manly physique.

Mum’s pot was cassava leaf while Dad had lamb casserole. I opted for the lamb that evening because I’ve never liked cassava leaf, especially when Mum drowns it in palm oil. She uses so much pepper that her soup turns red and I swear it’s only a matter of time before one of her dinner guests spontaneously combusts. We ate off the big glass coffee table in the middle of the living room with a plastic bottle of Highland Spring at its center. There were pink paper napkins and bread sticks in cellophane wrappers that Mum had swiped from her latest cleaning job. I marged up some bread for Dad.

As we ate I caught my mum looking at me. “What?” I asked.

“Why can’t you play like your father?” she asked.

“Because I can sing like my mother,” I said. “But fortunately I cook like Jamie Oliver.”

She gave me a smack on the leg. “You’re not so big I can’t beat you,” she said.

“Yeah, but I’m so much faster than I used to be,” I said.