REFLECTIONS ON MY FATHER

I have never celebrated Father’s Day for the simple reason that I never knew or saw my father. To me he is the Irishman from Galway who drunkenly made the mistake of getting involved with a woman whose mother had wanted to return to Ireland from Aldershot in England when her soldierly husband (originally from the North of Ireland) whom she had originally met while serving in Ireland died, but whose daughter had no such desires.

Unfortunately ‘Mary Aldershot’, as my father’s family apparently called my mother, soon proved incompatible with their Shamus, who got cold feet and ran out on his marriage, returning to his mother as a sort of proverbial Irish Catholic SOB.

So I grew up (until I was taken away to England at the age of two-and-a-half) in one part of Galway while he lived in another, his parents apparently crossing the street when they saw my mother coming along with me in the pram.

When Shamus subsequently died of pneumonia, probably from over-drinking and over-smoking or at least partly in consequence of that, I was in Aldershot, where my mother and grandmother had been obliged to return when their pub license fell through or they could no longer manage to run the pub, as the case may be. But there was no mention of Shamus ever having married or produced a son, back in Ireland. No way! All that was conveniently brushed under the proverbial carpet when it came time for local obituaries or whatever in Galway. As far as they were concerned, my father’s family, I didn’t exist. And I have remained kind of persona non grata to what remains of his family (mostly resident in Galway) to this day.

Not that I make a point of going back there and risk being singled out by some knowing folks and smartarses as Shamus’s effective bastard, or anything of the kind. I keep my distance, since I despise everything those sort of people stand for, not least religious bigotry and social hypocrisy. If I had a father he was one in name only, without parental substance. He remains for me a nonentity, and I rarely waste any time thinking about him or what he might have been like.

I don’t dote on my mother either, since, born and bred in Aldershot, she didn’t really want to go to Ireland with her mother in the first place, and when the mother died and was returned, post-mortem, to Ireland for burial, she lost little time in packing me off to a Protestant children’s home and effectively washing her hands of the whole sorry affair.

When you don’t have a father to protect you, when you have only a mother and grandmother whom you saw too much of as a child and didn’t like much of what you saw, when you’re not in your rightful country but in one that has traditionally always been at variance with it if not its avowed ethnic enemy, there is no reason to suppose that your mother is going to be greatly thrilled to have the burden of bringing you up without the benefit of a husband or that she will greatly relish having you there in the first place, other things considered. The death and repatriation of her mother cleared the way for her to address that problem and address it she did, even though I ceased to attend a Catholic school and became a reluctant Protestant in the institution (Baptist) and schools (Anglican) to which I was sent in Carshalton, Surrey.

Parents? I detest them! They screwed one another over and up and they screwed me over and up, leaving me with nothing to inherit, not even a low-earning business from a father who apparently wasn’t smart enough to own one. I don’t have any interest in either of them, and I have not become one myself. How could I? I never had the benefit of a father to play with or teach me anything, and, growing up solitary and sedentary, I certainly couldn’t play father to anyone else without having had such a benefit personally. It would be asking too much of me, be too much of an imposition and unreasonable responsibility.

So I am an outsider (in England) and a loner, and, I might add, a philosophy genius second to none. But that is the result, in part, of having come from a deprived background, and from knowing that you are anything but a regular person in consequence.

As for the Irish ... forget it. To me, who is as it were reluctantly and in spite of himself Irish if only because of his father’s genes, which I can do little or nothing about, they are guilty until proven innocent and, because of their sin-wallowing traditions, innocent they very rarely are, especially of narrow-mindedness.