170,000 people go missing every year in Britain – my father was one of them

A couple of Southern Hemisphere summers ago, in January 2019, I was at the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington, New Zealand. It was an unseasonably chilly evening as I sat listening to an emotional solo piano performance by Nick Cave.

He sang a rendition of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Avalanche’, a wonderfully gloomy piece of psychology set to music about the death of a father. This rather well-known Cohen track has particular significance for me. It always prompts thoughts of a slightly lesser-known L. Cohen, my own father, who had disappeared without trace 50 years earlier.

Whatever became of him? Where did he end up? What might he have been doing at the same moment I was listening to Nick Cave that evening? You tend to wonder about these things from time to time if you haven’t seen your old man in half a century.

My father Lionel was a dark-eyed and soft-spoken, sort of good-looking, music obsessive. Presumably in the mood for a fling, he met my mother, Mary, while he was holidaying in the South Seas. They first bumped into each other in a record store. I suppose he was drawn to her honeyed Irish accent, or something else suitably musical, for I was born almost exactly nine months later.

My parents — even though this was the Swinging Sixties — were married by this point. The three of us went to England before too long and for the next four or so years life proceeded ordinarily enough in Kent, even if their relationship seemed to be, at least with the benefit of hindsight, a little frayed at the edges. Lionel took the train from Tonbridge each morning to go to work in London. Sometimes my mother would take me down to the platform in the afternoons for his return.