‘Mr Katzenberg draws his bow, and the walls start to bulge with the sound he makes. He does this little étude by Sarasate, and I almost pass out, can’t believe what I am hearing. The room has grown as big as Tawburn Cathedral. His eyes are shut – not in concentration, the way you or I play, but sort of looking inwards, inside himself.

‘ “Teach me,” I say.

‘ “I don’t take pupils,” he replies – just like Jascha Heifetz.

‘ “Teach me,” I repeat, “or I won’t be your Shabbes-goy” – that’s what they call anyone who lights their Sabbath fire. I’m amazed at my nerve – I’ve never talked like that to a grown-up before. He could throw me out, or drown me in his Passover soup. I can see that he, too, is a bit startled.

‘ “You’re a good boy,” he says – meaning, Don’t make me dislike you. “Come back next Sunday and maybe I will show you something.”

‘So the following Saturday I light fires at three houses in Canning Street, and on Sunday, I ring the bell at number thirty-two and march into the parlour with my fiddle under my arm. “Teach me,” I say.

‘ “Just listen,” he replies.

‘And that’s all there is to it. Every Sunday for two years I’d go to his house at the end of my round and he would play something – Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Debussy, Vieuxtemps, Ysaÿe, anything he fancies, he knows it all by heart. And the way he plays is out of all time. A minute étude can seem to last an hour, a whole sonata is over in a flash.

‘Afterwards, he’ll pour me a fizzy drink and talk about the violin – the only instrument, he says, that reveals everything about a player: his good points, the nasty side of him, everything down to the way he wears his pyjamas, if he wears pyjamas, that is. “What you hear on the violin,” he explains, “is the naked truth about a person. It cannot be faked and, like a fingerprint, it cannot be mistaken for anyone else.” I might try to imitate him, but my own character will always stick to the sound I make.

‘After six months he lets me play him some Mozart. He is not impressed. “Take your time,” he keeps saying. “Ignore the score. A musician is the master of time – subject to God’s will, that is. Imagine you are holding the arms of a clock on which the world turns and that you can make them rush ahead, or stop dead, as you wish. Do it now, in your own time.”