The night before an important German oral exam I asked my father – whose first language was German – whether he had time to have a bit of a warm-up, practice chat with me. Without putting his newspaper down, he replied: “You haven’t really got anything to say in English, so what’s the point in speaking German?”
I am not settling any old scores here. It was a good line and essentially accurate. The truth is I don’t think I had a proper conversation with my father about anything serious until I was about 18 years old. The good conversations came later.
It wasn’t that he was away from home a lot when I was young. He was usually there, in the corner, reading his paper. But for normal Freudian reasons most of my attention was focused on my mother until my late teenage years.
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