World War II remains one of the defining events in human history. We’d already endured one catastrophic world war, and then spent two decades watching the slow, public rise of Nazism. We’ve all seen the newsreels, the documentaries, the endless analyses. We learned that complicity — the silence of ordinary people — was as powerful a catalyst for horror as the atrocities themselves. The world came together, quite literally, as Allied Forces to defeat an ideology that served no one. We said never again. And for a time, we meant it.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s easier to lose a parent when you’re young, before you really know them, or later, when the love is layered and complex. There’s no right answer. Losing him early spared me the friction that comes with growing up, but it also robbed me of the chance to meet him adult-to-adult — to see who he’d become, and to show him who I did. That sense of unfinished business has been a quiet companion all my life.

While the rest of postwar America was busy rebuilding its idea of what a man should be — strong, stoic, silent — Kaye was twirling through the cracks, singing about ugly ducklings and inchworms. He wasn’t selling rebellion; he was offering permission. Permission to be odd. To be soft. To take up space with joy. I didn’t realise it then, but I was seeing a reflection of what I might become — not the man I was told to be, but the man I actually was.

Picture the scene. Northern England, the dawn of the 1980s. Thatcher reigned, the air smelled of toast and coal, and I was a five-year-old kid whose life was already caught in a messy domestic subplot. My parents’ marriage had collapsed, and my mum’s new partner — a wretched, abusive man — was already the villain of the piece, though no one knew the extent of it yet. My brother and I were separated, and the trauma and chaos of those years would spool out for decades, like an incriminating home movie on repeat.

The last few years have been, to borrow a cinematic cliché, a rough cut. A dip in mental health here, a pandemic there, a slow global descent into fascism playing like a bad dystopian sequel no one asked for — and, somewhere amid it all, the business of untangling my own messy, complicated backstory. Not exactly a golden era for empaths. There were moments I thought the credits were about to roll. I’d lost the plot, and with it, the joyful, absurdly optimistic spark that used to define me.