First the war, then medicine, came between my father and myself. In my first years and his most receptive years, my father had more things to do than hang around attending to me. He went to the war, he went to the Royal College of Surgeons. I stayed behind. He had chosen his ground, and I wasn’t on it, then or ever.

So now, each from the safety of his own territory, my father and I circle round one another. We don’t have much time and the questions are pressing. My father wants desperately to be proud of his children. I have reservations about his criteria, but I cannot resent the wish. He is becoming less certain about this writing business. He has always thought it an amateur affair — an after-hours activity anyone should be able to do. He has been writing all his life, he says, dozens and dozens of articles in medical journals. But now I hear him say, ‘My son is a writer.’ Old friends and colleagues tell him when they read something I write and find it a little less incomprehensible. He offers no opinion himself. But he offers me subject matter. ‘Come and see this operation,’ he says. ‘You might like to write about it.’ He holds in his hand something I have written, and gestures with it. But he comments by way of something similar that happened to himself, or by recalling his presence at some event I have mentioned. He does not engage. Not that I demand he should. His feints are quite eloquent enough. He’ll come closer in his own good time, I think. He has his own approach, his own style.