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least he hadn't suffered much (trad, humane), and already there were details of the funeral the next day or the day after (again traditional Jewish—the swiftest burial possible allowing for Sabbath and other obstacles).
    My mother was sitting on our beige velour sofa in the lounge, sobbing with her back to me as I entered. I put my arms around her from behind and she started sobbing more. Eva, my mother's sister, was flying in from Israel. The front door was open even though it was cold outside ... people on the phone ... a rabbi being contacted ... arrangements.
    They had married in June 1952. They had known each other in Germany as children, and were very distantly related cousins (before their marriage they had sought advice as to whether their union would present any problems at childbirth, and they were assured not). As my father entered the British army my mother entered the 'Department of Antiquities' in Jerusalem as a trainee archivist, and she qualified not long after the declaration of Israeli Independence in 1948. A few years later she flew in to London for a wedding reception, and my father—who she hadn't seen for at least a decade—picked her up at the arrivals lounge. She looked like Audrey Hepburn, and I imagine they fell in love on the drive into town. They were engaged and married within a few months.
    There were condolences, for me and for her. Hers took the form of a great many friends offering all sorts of support—financial, legal, shopping, cooking. She would never be short of advice or love and—in the future—suitors. My father's death was something from which she would never recover, but initially I didn't feel so bad about it. It was just something that happened to people, and I think I found it quite interesting. This was clearly a removed emotion, a way of coping, a profound isolation. It was also something slightly journalistic; to figure out what was going on I remained heartbreakingly outside the reality. Even at the age of thirteen, I wondered if I wasn't using the situation. I was intimately involved in the grimmest of stories, but a story nonetheless. The work I liked doing most involved getting as close as possible to a story over a number of months in an attempt to get to the bottom of it. But you never do.
    My main condolences came in the form of the letters sent to my mother. Most of these began, 'It was with deepest sympathy and great shock that we heard the news about your great loss.' They always went on (and who hasn't written the same?) 'Words cannot convey/words alone are insufficient to/I cannot possibly sum up...' But they still wrote, because that's what one does; even in the age of text and email, we still write letters of condolence. Inevitably the best ones arrived last, from furthest away. Switzerland, France, Israel, Canada, United States and Africa, all stamped. I tore off the corners of the envelopes with my mother's permission, and began to steam them. The biggest haul I ever had.
    Later I learnt that my father had died alone. My mother had called the doctor, and the doctor had thought that my father needed medicine. He felt unwell in the night, felt worse in the morning, but it wasn't anything terrible yet. His heart was sounding all right, presumably. So the doctor departed, my mother went to the chemist in Market Place or maybe Golders Green with the prescription, and by the time she returned it was all over. My father had suffered a fatal heart attack. She had been spared the final paroxysm, and in the grief that followed we considered whether this was all for the best.
    My mother may have begun to die at about this time as well. Her cancer was diagnosed in hospital in 1974, but she had self-diagnosed it at least two years before. It was the classic thing of the age: I'm sure she knew what the lump meant, but she lived in fear of the mastectomy and the fall-out. Better, perhaps, to ignore it, not to worry everyone, perhaps it will stabilise.