I went to Liverpool searching for my father, but the city had other surprises

I know that my dad loved me, because when I was little he used to bounce me on his knee and sing the Beatles' hit She Loves You.

My dad was born in Liverpool, England, and he liked everything Liverpudlian, from the Beatles to the singer Cilla Black to the comedian Ken Dodd and his Diddy Men from Knotty Ash.

When I was 10 years old, my mum left my dad. He was a simple man, abandoned and embittered, and he was no help to me when I was growing up. I stopped speaking to him for almost two years, a self-inflicted wound that never heals.

My dad died when I was 24.

But I know that he loved me because he used to sing She Loves You to me, and that was as close as a working-class bloke would come to sharing his feelings for his son.

Recently, I went to Liverpool looking for anything that might remind me of my dad. I don't know the address of the house where he grew up, only that he lived with his family in the suburb of West Derby - and I learned that from ancestry.com.

At the Liverpool Lime Street railway station I was met by a bronze statue of Ken Dodd with a Diddy Man tucked into a shoulder bag, and I knew that I was in the right place.

Not far from the station I glimpsed the Ken Dodd Happiness Mural, and the nave wall painting sparked a tiny miracle: I remembered my dad singing Happiness, happiness, the greatest gift that I possess - and an echo of his voice was all that I had hoped for from my journey.

I stayed in the city centre, in the Hard Days Night Hotel (just around the corner from Eleanor Rigby Apartments), where statues of the Beatles balance on window ledges, and photographs of the band decorate every public area and bedroom.

I tried to move into my room at 2pm, but was told to come back at the official check-in time of 3pm.

Every new guest was given the same instruction, so there was a long line at the reception desk in the middle of the afternoon. It was as if management were trying to re-create the huge, unruly screaming mobs that famously awaited the Beatles in their heyday, but using grumbling old men instead of yelling girls.

Somebody in charge might like to rethink this stupidity, as it is barely possible that none of the rooms were ready an hour earlier.

While I was waiting irritably for my key. I phoned my dad's cousin, Roy, to whom I had not spoken for nearly 50 years.

My dad loved Roy's late mum, his Aunty Sarah. When my grandparents were sick (which was often), my dad used to stay with her in a terraced house in West Derby.

But Roy seemed belligerently uninterested to hear from me.

He insisted that my dad, Gerald, had never slept at his home and wasn't his friend. He made the unlikely suggestion that Gerald had married a woman named Geraldine.

Eventually I persuaded Roy to give me Aunty Sarah's old address, the terraced house that I remembered visiting as a child and the only place in Liverpool that held solid memories of my dad.

He told me not to bother calling again.

Once I had finally prised my room key from the receptionist at the Hard Days Night Hotel, I squeezed into the half-sized elevator with an American who asked which Beatles song was my favourite.

I confessed that I wasn't much of a fan.

The day was warm and clear as I walked down to Pier Head, where ferries cross the Mersey beneath the gaze of the extravagant Georgian Royal Liver Building. A busker blared Love Me Do beside a sculpture of the four core Beatles, while tourists queued to have themselves photographed as the unlikely fifth band member.

I visited the smart and engaging Museum of Liverpool, where the collection includes a possibly unique (and frighteningly realistic) sound re-creation of a slum toilet; and a Wall of Scousers such as John, Paul, George, Ringo, Cilla and Ken, among less likely Liverpudlians such as Kim Cattrall.

I caught the 10B bus from Queen Square bus station to West Derby: I think it is safe to say that I was the only tourist using that particular service.

The street where my Aunty Sarah once lived backs onto the yard behind the offices of South Liverpool Probation Service. The door to her house was open, and a woman cleaning her hallway told me she had lived there for about eight years. I tried to explain what I was doing and she called her husband, who came to the step carrying a PlayStation handset.

Neither of them had ever heard of Sarah, but they were happy to let me stare at their house and give me directions to Knotty Ash.

"Strange one, that," muttered the husband as I left.

I was surprised to realise two things about West Derby. Firstly, it is the neighbouring suburb to Knotty Ash. Secondly, I had been there before as an adult.

About 15 years ago, when I returned to Liverpool for the first time, I hadn't known that my dad had lived in West Derby.

I was writing a story about a company named Liverpool Beatles Tours, which offered itineraries devoted to each individual Beatle - including Pete Best, the drummer who had been kicked out of the band in 1962 and replaced by Ringo Starr.

More as a joke than anything, I booked the "Pete Best - Come With Me to the Casbah Tour".

I was the first customer ever to do so.

My guide took me to the former Casbah Coffee Club, where the early Beatles often played. It had been owned by Pete's mother, Mona Best, and I was shown around by Pete's brother, Rory Best, who shared with me his perhaps unique opinion that the Beatles had been at their greatest in early 1962.

Last year, the Casbah Coffee Club became an Airbnb in West Derby, five minutes' drive from Aunty Sarah's house.

Knotty Ash, meanwhile, is a 10-minute bus ride away - and if I had ever known that the home of the Diddy Men was a real place, I had long since forgotten.

I tried to reach out to him, but the dead don't know you're there.

I returned to the Hard Days Night Hotel, which stands sentinel over Liverpool's "Cavern Quarter" named after the Cavern Club, where the Beatles famously played and Cilla Black worked as a "hatcheck girl".

The small precinct houses a facsimile of the original Cavern Club, as well as the Cavern Pub, the Cavern Restaurant, a bar called Sgt Pepper's and another named Rubber Soul. There are statues of Cilla and John Lennon, and long lines of dutiful tourists, but the area is also popular with bucks' nights and hens' nights that seem to begin at breakfast.

It feels alive and real, if not especially attractive to the vintage of traveller who can remember Ken Dodd on TV and Cilla Black in the charts.

The next morning I took a last look around my bedroom before checking out of the hotel, where every room and suite is dedicated to a different Beatles song.

A framed notice on the wall named my "Classic Room" as "Room 121 - She Loves You".

I swear I didn't ask for that particular room, and I wasn't hiding the punchline in my pocket.

And I know it wasn't a message from my dad.

The writer travelled at his own expense