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.