My father sings in my head

One morning in 1918 my father woke up right-handed, and went to bed left-handed. In the hours between he had clambered up onto a milk cart - the kind attached to a horse at the front - and had fallen off, breaking his arm. It was a micro-second that changed his life.

With his arm still in a sling, he contracted polio - then called infantile paralysis - and his arm did not recover when he did. At least he did not get the flu that year.

Bizarrely, though most family photos were lost in a fire, the two plates of the x-rays on his arm remain, a sepia reminder of the force of unexpected change.

He was four years old.

The educational route for him was to go to a 'school for delicate children'. My father and the word 'delicate' don't really fit well in the same sentence, and somebody thought so at the time. As a result he never went to school. (Think of that. Bliss.) Instead he educated himself in libraries, and remained a voracious and joyfully ill-disciplined reader all his life. 

Age brought asymmetry, the years and his physical lopsidedness accompanying each other step by step. While one half of his body remained under-developed, his arm a flaccid and alarmingly white icicle, the other was unusually muscular, and if he did get hold of something, it didn't get away easily. He had a climber's strength in his hand, and the physique of a bowman - short, squat, powerful, little neck to speak of. He would have fitted in well at Agincourt given a different century and an extra arm.

As a kid, his arm bothered me, and I made up constant recipes to fix it for him. It was a riff of childhood, so I must have felt constantly uneasy about his disability.

The accident had made my father into a problem solver.  Having one arm did not stop him doing things. He was a small adventurer, determined not to be limited. He saw boundaries as things to be crossed. He thought prohibitions were laughable.

He had a motor scooter, and in my head is the picture of him driving up the road on his scooter in heavy snow, wrestling with the bars, all the controls on the left handlebar.

He found ways round most things. His tool kit consisted of a selection of hammers, a screwdriver, and a poker, which he used for boring holes by making it red-hot in the fire. DIY was something to see in our house. And something to smell, too.

Clearly, he was not a hugger. Or not an effective hugger. To overcome this, he intensified a hug by patting. The first stage of hug-plus was to flap his hand from the wrist with a gentle patting motion. A turbo-hug involved flapping noisily from the elbow, and clapping your back as if beating a carpet or chastising a horse. It took me to the age of 20 to realise that this hugging technique was neither normal nor widely appreciated, especially by startled women who did not understand the background.

He ran an off-licence in a tough part of town. Those were quite violent days, and a refusal to serve could result in a brick through the window, and sometimes did. But you did not tangle with my father. He was placid and pleasant, but when he said something, nobody doubted that he meant it. And he kept guns, one of which was under the counter, just in case. 

His typewriter was down there, too. He was never a great writer, and his large letters sloped backwards at such a rakish angle that you feared the whole sentence might collapse at any second like dominoes too hastily stood up.  So between customers the typewriter was constantly and slowly clacking. It was a huge thing. He needed the weight to keep it stable. When it came to writing personal letters, his choice of notepaper was often the white paper bags he served sweets in. I still have a few bag letters, some of which he sent me when I was at university, usually accompanied by a £5 note. (The letters, not me.)

He was a keen driver. He drove pre-selector cars, which had an early version of an automatic gearbox. We had a long series of Lanchesters. They were upright, decorous, black, and had suicide doors at the front. The last one we had was two-tone, the tones being black and a sort of grey pretending to be blue. We went all over in them, though I do remember having to descend some hills backwards as the car couldn't quite cope with the slope, or boiled over.

In 1960, my father inherited a little money from his aunt, who had emigrated to the States nearly 70 years previously. He was her main legatee, but the majority of her estate was shared between the medical fees of her last months, and her attorney who managed the estate. When my father's legacy arrived, he knew exactly what to do with it.

He lashed out on a Ford Zodiac. This vast car was a riot of modernity. Fins out at the back, chrome eyelids on the headlights, it was a riot of colour after the Lanchesters. This was a car that knew how to party. Pale cream bench seats, light interior, and outside two-tone again, but this time blue and cream. Decorous it wasn't. It looked like a huge Neapolitan ice-cream on wheels.

And it was a step too far. Before power steering, a car like this was heavy work. And my father, even with a busman's handle on the wheel, found it impossible. Parking was a nightmare. Driving along was fine, but any slow-speed manoeuvre was physically demanding. Was the Zodiac ambition or desire ? Either way it had to go. My father loved it, but it was a folly. It went, and we had to slum it with Hillmans after that. 

When I was fourteen, and he was beginning to suffer ill-health, he became a little depressed. I was already working with tools, and one day my mother asked me quietly if I thought I could modify his guns to make them incapable of firing. I knew what she was driving at. Some research at the library turned up the best method, and I surreptitously shortened the hammers, wondering guiltily what might happen should he ever find himself grabbing for them in extremis. 

Before mobile phones, before even landlines, a policeman came in the middle of the night to wake me to tell me that he had died. I was 20, and it was 42 years ago, but I still have the note he gave me. It was a scrap of paper that would have appealed to my father, casual, ragged, portentous. I can remember howling. Not crying, but more feral. It was a howl. 

After the funeral, I was relieved and pleased to turn the guns in and see the back of them.

Though he died in 1971, it is only very recently that I have lost the sound of his voice in my head.

If I am not thinking, though, I can still end up patting people.