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Christmas. ‘Shhh!’ he would say and hold his breath, his forefinger pointing heavenwards, when we got to the most important bit of the news – the weather forecast.
    Father came home for lunch on the dot of half-past twelve and sat down to a hot meal, and in the evening I would hear the car drive up Hans Ditlevsensgade and come to a halt in the garage. Then the front door would open and close, and Father would call ‘Hello there!’ and hang up his hat and coat in the wardrobe. We would hurry up into the kitchen, where Mother would be beaming and saying
‘Ach, Väterchen!’
and kissing him on the cheek and loving him beyond all saying. We laid the table in the dining room, where everything had its allotted place and stood on the table in systematic order – the porcelain, the napkins, the salt and pepper, the vases full of flowers – and Father had eyes in the back of his head. When I opened a drawer in the sideboard to take out the knives and forks, he was on to it in a flash.
    â€˜What do you want?’ he’d ask, and then he would shake his head and tell you what to do and how. ‘The forks are in the top middle drawer. No, not there, the middle, at the back.’ And so it would go on. Father pursued his insurance business at home and went into the minutest detail. It was impossible to do anything right – and he would forever be adjusting the grandfather clock even though it kept perfect time.
    To move was in itself to challenge providence. ‘Careful!’ he would say before you had even taken a step, and if you asked him for something – never mind what – he would say no. For him there was nothing worse than a draught. ‘Shut the door!’ he would shout as you opened it, and, when you closed it behind you, he would ask you to do it again – and do it properly. Father always thought there was something not quite shut. ‘There’s a draught,’ he would say and would walk around testing the air, checking the windows, drawing the curtains, until every last hole was plugged and all movement ceased. The floorboards creaked, the doors groaned, the walls had ears, and I was silent and careful and did as he said. I longed for the day when he would stop it and just let things be, but that day never came.
    There was no chink in the iron control that Father exerted over his surroundings. If he so much as glanced away, everything would disappear, never to be found again. All he ever did was to keep checking, reassuring himself that reality really did exist, that everything was in place and happened at the right time. When he spoke, it was to state accepted truths – ‘They say… ’, ‘What people do is … ’ – and all he expressed were self-evident truths. For him all talk was in one sense a telling, a kind of counting, and when he wanted to recount something it turned into a catalogue of prices and shopping lists, inventories of our possessions – the centrepieces, the bronze clock, the carpets – balanced against what they had cost. And that was a long story. In the most literal sense what he did was register life. For him it consisted of facts and figures, and he would observe thatit was cloudy, or that it was late – that was just how things were. Afterwards he would sit and write it all down in his Mayland diary, duration and location, income and expenditure, price of petrol, mileage, time and temperature. He counted the days and added them together, smiling each time they added up to a year he could draw a line under, and the diaries were set side by side on a shelf, where they provided accounts of every year from 1950 onwards.
    Father watched over us twenty-four hours a day and 365 days a year. It felt as though our lives would collapse about our ears if he relaxed for one moment. After dinner he would begin all over again, brushing the crumbs off the tablecloth and putting the cutlery back in