I never knew my father.

When people say “I hardly knew my father” (a lot of people say this, I promise), is this cliché worth responding to? I’m often tempted to reply that perhaps he preferred it that way, seeing as how to him, you might have seemed a bit dull. Perhaps your father had different tastes, standards you couldn’t possibly meet or a short attention span. Maybe he was pre-occupied by something more meaningful to him, something to do with money or collecting something else equally dull.

That’s just me being horrible. Forgive me.

There are other more complex reasons as to why people hardly knew/know their fathers. Perhaps you just didn’t get on. That’s simple enough and needs no explaining, no apologising. You hardly knew your father because until you were twenty seven years old and having your first baby, he just didn’t seem that interesting or interested. Maybe this stranger who slept with your mother was a foul and selfish idiot, who had only ever given you a surname and your sticky-out ears. Perhaps your mother had developed a way of ensuring that you and your father had never shared the same physical space, as doppelganger legend demands that were you two to ever meet, you would instantly be obliged to fight each other to the death. This does happen.  

I though, am allowed to say “ I hardly knew my father “ without hesitation or self-analysis. I have my own watertight qualifier; because I only met him once. 

But this is not watertight really, I’m referring to meeting him once post-babyhood. I think that as a baby you can’t really claim any significant experience of emotional, social or psychological relationships, people were just those fleshy puppets that swung into view from time to time, dangled a toy or shoved a spoon of tepid pap into your mouth. There was an animalistic comfort in recognising the same puppet there every day. Vaguely amusing. Always useful. Some of them smelled nice which helped you sleep in their arms. Apart from that, nothing of any note to a baby.

So I met my father once post-babyhood. He gave me a huge plastic machine gun, which caused a massive ripple of respect for me in the school playground. The machine gun had “real” plastic bullets, which you placed into a spring-loaded cartridge, although they never actually launched from the gun, you would simply take them out to reload them again. It was a huge and multi-featured gun, probably the most up-to-date toy machine gun on the market at that time.

Was there a Freudian message there? My father appearing to me as a complete stranger, handing me a gun, and then disappearing again forever. Was this to arm me for the long fatherless future ahead of me? No. It was just a bit of plastic cack utilised as a kind of pay-off. Nice one Dad. The gun broke within a week, and so did my gun-based status in the playground. In Freudian terms, I was back to square one. Only the bullets survived, and I swopped those for a few sweets. Clearly, I had abandoned an oedipal penis envy for infantile oral gratification. That’s the story of my life.