Custard Creams

I am spending the night away from both midgets, going to a friend's party in Oxford.  It is a long boring journey, improved no end by TfL choosing to close almost every line for improvements (pffft!), queuing for ten minutes to get onto the Central Line platform, and by the general ennui of my fellow tube passengers, some of whom appear to have forgotten they are travelling for pleasure rather than to work (that'd be you, overly made up cunt in the faux fur coat who jostled a kid in the face to get on to the tube with her mum. You should note that she in no way looked like she had been to the Beaumont Society. Ahem).

Once at Paddington, I happily mill about, revelling in the luxury of being without a miniature escort and going to shops that don't sell anything I need. I buy the World's Worst Hot Chocolate (TM), a concoction so vile tasting I want to scrape my tongue with a dead rodent to improve the flavour it's left behind. 

The train arrives and I lumber aboard, smiling and talking to my fellow passengers, and generally scaring the shit out of them by being humane and pleasant. 

I settle down and play catch up on my phone.  A fit of pig snorts brought on by successively more hilarious messages from a friend puts paid to that, and I take to people watching.  I worry about the man who has been in the toilet since departure, through Slough and Reading.  I stare out of the window.  I grin broadly at others. 

An automated announcement comes over the tannoy.  We are arriving at Didcot.

When I was 20 or so, I used to make this journey with semi regularity.  After my Nan died, I wanted to re-connect with my past and part of that had been to "find" my biological father, to see if what I remembered was right; if he had been so awful, so violent.

The first time I saw him, I hated him but the stubborness that my children show, that I deny has any root or derivative from me kicks in, and I have to continue to be in contact with him so that I do not lose face.

He had not changed. He remained as controlling as he had always been over those around him, still displaying the levels of violence and unplesantness; the same cloying degree of malicious malevolence and manipulation.


His nature takes hold, and he is soon acting in the ways that make me uncomfortable.  That level of discomfort soon makes way for his attempt to supply his own particularly twisted brand of fatherly love.  The four year old me is bigger now, stronger, and no longer in a position where she has to comply. She is in a position to help herself.  Neither she nor I will ever see him again.

That, really, was the end of that.  He tried to contact me a few times to "explain" himself.  I wasn't interested.

It is a shining example of a case being closed, an event that happened and would not happen again.  Not for this a series of imaginary boxes labeled with emotional post it notes in a wardrobe that was kept in my memory.  It was done, over, and I did my best to protect others that he could have access as I shut the door on it.

My deadpan report that I had arrived at Didcot, that I hadn't been there in ages, that I had heard that my father had died a few years back was correctly described as an Alan Bennet moment.  At the time I found out about it through a phonecall from my sbbing mother whom he treated appallingly, several years after he had died and some time back, my response was "oh".

His existence or not is of no consequence to me, bar the fact that he put me on the road to distrusting all adults, espcially male ones, and it has taken me many, many years to deviate from that path even slightly.

I would ask then, should we chose to take it as an Alan Bennet moment, that when you pass the custard creams that you place a sparkler atop the pile, not to celebrate his life, nor what he did, neither to mourn his passing, instead to celebrate the exit of an evil bastard who can't hurt anyone anymore.