Take Me Home: Parkinson's, My Father, Myself (Hardback)

When Jonathan Taylor was eight he began to find his father puzzling. The first thing that happened was that his father couldn't remember Jonathan's sister's name. Then he began to shake, to drive badly, to forget who or where he was, and to mistake his son for someone else entirely. 'Help, help, help, help, help', his father would say, on and on, but there seemed to be no helping him. Doctors diagnosed Parkinson's disease and dementia, and Jonathan gradually became one of his father's carers, taking it in turn with his family to look after him for the next thirteen years. Take Me Home is the story of a son's struggle for recognition from a father who is being transformed mentally and physically by a ruinous disease, and a writer's search to discover a father's strange and largely secret past - who he was before he became a disappointed headmaster in Stoke-on-Trent and, at the last, a trembling Parkinsonian who sometimes mistook his son for Humphrey Bogart or a giraffe.