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all over the country. Faded, dog-eared photos show him smiling at the piano, unbelievably young and as yet unscarred by the conflict to come, although he always said he had an easy war. Once they discovered he could play a variety of instruments, he was seconded to Ensa. But that wasn’t the whole truth. There was a period about which he’d never talk, working as a medical orderly on the wards. It gave him memories which I think coloured him thereafter. When he was demobbed and with marriage on the horizon my father began working at the café owned by my grandfather, a temporary arrangement which imperceptibly slipped into permanence, although he continued his music, supplementing our income by playing the piano at an unending succession of weddings, bar mitzvahs and ladies nights.
Throughout my childhood, my mother contributed to our household budget as one of a team who answered problem page letters for Woman magazine under the name of agony aunt Evelyn Home. Her portable Olympia typewriter was kept on the kitchen table, fully loaded with paper and carbons so she could write between household chores and the staccato tap rap tap was a comforting and consistent background to family life. Our postman daily delivered fat, brown parcels forwarded from the magazine and crammed full of anxiety. Many of the letters were easily dealt with, others she agonised terribly over. She had a rule-book, which laid down strict guidelines on what was allowed to be written and what was verboten . My mother believed in calling a spade a spade and allaying misplaced anxiety wherever she could but waged a constant war of attrition with the magazine editor who was inclined to red-pen anything she considered ‘Too biological!’.

Chapter Four
It took me a long and puzzling while to understand what other people could and could not do. Children learn by influence and example but that rather presupposes we’re all marching to roughly the same tune. And whilst it was simple enough to grasp picking your nose in public didn’t come under the heading of good manners, other issues often proved more elusive. After the distinctly negative reactions to my virgin flight at the party, I instigated cautious investigation amongst peers.
“Do you fly?” I’d ask friends. Most were gung ho to go but if the spirit was willing, the flesh proved disappointingly earthbound and I’d watch in bewilderment as they ran around, flapping their arms wildly. It pretty soon dawned on me it wasn’t so much they didn’t want to fly, they genuinely didn’t know how.
Looking back, I know my parents, not unnaturally, were more than a little put out by the incident at my party but dealt with it in their individual ways. My mother worked on the principle that she hadn’t really seen what she thought she had. Even if she had, she reasoned, it was almost certainly something that was just a very odd one-off. My father’s, bleaker view, was that it might not be.
I know they conducted casually cautious inquiry amongst other family members seeking possibly a family history of the ‘unusual’. Perhaps stories of a related crazy Sadie, flying from stetl to stetl in years gone by would have made them feel better, but there didn’t seem to be any such precedents lurking. So, for their different reasons, they adopted what could have been viewed as a somewhat ostrich approach to the issue. And, of course, they made it as crystal clear as they could, without actually nailing my feet to the floor, that flying was out – not to be done – under no circumstances, never. Ever!
We were though, did they know it, only at the beginning of what was to be a long and somewhat eggshell-treading path for us all. Because, of course, it wasn’t just the flying.

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I started school when I was five. Mrs Groom, whose cross in life it was to take the baby class, was a vague, lavender-scented lady with untidily dusty brown hair, plaited and pinned into large coils over her ears. Her mind matched