Many of the songs my father composed when I was a boy are about states on in-between – desire, dream and twilight – while his tone-poem for pianoforte, The Distant Isle, a response to the old Irish poem about Bran’s voyage, might as well be about Avalon. 

I do remember listening with my father to Bax’s orchestral tone poem, Tintagel, but what’s surprising is that I didn’t comb the library for children’s versions of Arthurian legend, and that my father did not introduce me to passages of Malory or Tennyson, or show me medieval or Pre-Raphaelite paintings.