She got up to make tea, and I followed her into the kitchen. She still retained that uncouth Second World War habit of brewing tea directly in the strainer. The sight of the swelling tea leaves brought back acute memories of childhood when the pouring of the boiling water would be the only interruption to her storytelling. The melodramatic ferment in which she lived, the astonishment she reeled under when such a thing happened, the outrage she experienced when such a thing didn’t, made her a spell binder. We literally sat at her feet by the hour, watching her eyes roll and the colour come flaming into her cheeks, marvelling that Auntie Lotte could actually have said that, scarcely able to believe that Uncle Melnick had dared to imply this. For wild incident and pure rage of passion, no Brontë novel could rival an average winter morning by the Fugleman fireside. But it did mean that our own lives, once the time came around for us to leave the house and lead them, were a bit of a let-down. Where was all that vehemence and exhilaration? Where were those acts of blackguardly treachery, followed by those sudden unaccountable explosions of apology? Where were the never-to-be-forgiven slights, the secret hopeless heart-rending infatuations, the murderous wrongs, the never-dare-darken-my-door-again ruptures between cholesterol fathers and their good-time daughters? Suddenly, watching my mother pour more hot water into the strainer, I thought of the man with no fingers. ‘Am I something of a disappointment to you?’ I asked. But casually. As if it were a question she might take up or leave alone.

She stopped what she was doing. ‘You?’ She rolled her eyes. The colour flamed into her cheeks. ‘Darling, I couldn’t be more proud of you if’ – if? if what? if I were somebody else? if I were her real child? – ‘if you were President of the State of Israel.’

She’d said the first thing that came into her head but it was nonetheless a salutary reminder. Asked the same question, my father would have given the same answer. Of course that’s who they would have wanted me to be, supposing them to have wanted me to be anybody. Standing on a jeep in the Negev, blessing the returning troops, not a no one in a crowd in Dorchester, looking up at a swinging shikse.