‘You don’t mind not having a Stradivarius?’ asked my father as we walked up Wardour Street, which fizzed with the sexually repressed energies of an awakening British film industry.

‘Not in the slightest,’ said Dovidl happily. ‘Strads can sound a bit flash, especially late ones, after 1720. A Guad has depth. It was the favourite instrument of Ysaÿe, did you know?’

‘And many other masters,’ said Father. ‘Arnold Rosé, who led the violins in the Vienna Philharmonic for fifty-six years until the Nazis threw him out, used to play a Guadagnini with his string quartet and bought a second one for his daughter, who led a string orchestra. Jenö Hubay, who owned your instrument, played for Liszt and studied with Vieuxtemps. He was reputed to be the greatest Bach interpreter of his day.’

‘It’s a magical instrument,’ said Dovidl gratefully. ‘It will do anything I ask.’

For the next few weeks, he practised like a boy with a new toy, testing its speeds and turns, calling me at all hours to play a piano accompaniment. He loved that violin, wrapping it in a silk shroud like a stillborn baby, closing the coffin-like case with reverence and regret. His engagement with the instrument was exclusive. It slept beside his bed. No one was allowed to touch it, even to open the fastenings on the case. When Mother asked to show it to her committee ladies, he vehemently refused. ‘It’s a musical instrument,’ snapped Dovidl, ‘not a museum exhibit.’

Over months, though, the infatuation waned. The Guadagnini slept beside him, but he made love to it less frequently. Apart from the sensual pleasure of playing a beautiful instrument, its presence failed to renew his musical absorption, his once-consuming ambition. The music he practised meant little to him. ‘What’s the point of all this pretty little patterning?’ he grumbled, after sawing with me dutifully through a Haydn sonata. ‘It was background music two hundred years ago, and that’s all it’s good for today. I’m not going to fiddle away at stuff like this just to amuse an audience of idiots. I have better things to do with my life.’

To calm him down, I produced the latest Kreisler recording that my father had just bought. Without reading the red label, I set it on the turntable and shook my head in bewilderment when it started to play. The peer of performers had surrendered to popular demand. He was playing his own arrangement of ‘Danny Boy’, Irish Kevin’s only tune, as well as something called ‘The Rosary’, with an orchestra made up of off-duty players from the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. ‘Pathetic pap for mindless masses,’ was Dovidl’s comment (though I quite liked it). ‘You won’t catch me doing that.’

He picked a coming-of-age moment to declare his defection. It was the ceremonial tea of his eighteenth birthday in May 1948 and we were cutting the cake, which Florrie had baked with more eggs than were legally obtainable, when Dovidl dropped his bombshell and all of our lives were blown off track.