My Father’s Typewriter

My tiny office is hidden away from the rest of the flat like a secret. I come through and admire the changes. A new bookcase, one or two new paintings that hang proudly on the walls and the smell of new carpet still lingering faintly in the air. But the one thing that always catches my attention is the thing I cherish more than anything in that single room. It sits there still and silent, my father’s typewriter. Black but rusting at the screws, paint rubbed clean at the edges to reveal the steel below. Keys yellowed with age and the cylinder tattooed with letters that had seeped through the pages. It is an old thing, worn down from travel and smelling of dust and time. A heavy thing from an era lost, my father’s typewriter. 

It has always been in my life. But most of the time, it has been hidden away, first under the stairs and then a year in storage and lastly, the attic in my mum’s house for the past twelve years. Following us wherever we went, the typewriter was a silent companion that remained always out of sight. But it no longer sits lonely in the attic all by itself. Now it sits proudly in my office by the desk where I will take my laptop and write. 

After a very long time, I have found a home for it. Somewhere where it can be admired and loved. When I began to use the spare room as a little office, I knew I wanted the typewriter in it. It must have been last year when I asked my mum if she could possibly bring it up with her the next time that she visited me. I had the space for it and I wanted it close to me instead of in that crowded, dreary attic. It’s here now, out of the cold and somewhere where it can be admired and loved. When we got it into the office, we did a little bit of research about it. It’s an Underwood portable typewriter, estimated to be nearly around a hundred years old. Compared to other typewriters, this one is light, as it was made to travel back and forth to different locations. The case is rather battered now and if it was ever used for work or luxury, I have no idea. I’m sure there is a story somewhere in its keys and buttons. I wonder about the many fingers that have pressed on the letters and stories that they had composed. Were they ones of formal and direct business letters or was there ever a heartfelt letter written to a loved one, connecting two people together over distance?

It wasn’t really his. Somebody else’s before him, but I’m not quite sure whose. I knew he couldn’t possibly have used it himself as he had dyslexia, something that he struggled with all his life that he compensated for by drawing art and fixing motorcycles. I wonder if that is how it all started maybe, the bad black seed of depression sprouting its ugly roots from his inability to process words. He was called stupid at school and bullied by teachers. He was born in 1958 when dyslexia was still a new word, a concept in its infancy. Combined with being from a time when a man had to swallow his feelings down like a heavy stone and never receiving the help he much needed, I wonder if maybe that is where the seed was planted and thus germinated. 

My dad killed himself in 1998. I was two years old. The typewriter was one of many of his possessions which had been left to collect dust in the attic. Including a collection of small toy cars still in their boxes, old vinyl discs, and a folder filled with his artwork and sketches. I recognise a couple as cartoon characters from Looney Tunes or Jessica Rabbit. Others, I didn’t know, like strange demonic flowers that I later discovered were from a Pink Floyd music video. They all sit there where I used to take them out, one by one, and admire them. But I always came back to the typewriter. I wonder if it’s just my love for old things that always drew me to it, or if it’s because I liked to imagine myself writing letters or stories on it. 

Either way, I always came back to it. 

I knew he was supposed to be in my life, but the memories of him are like faint shadows pouring through a frosted window, distorted and evanescent. I never see his face in clear detail. His voice is lost to me, and for some reason that hurts me more than anything else. He was supposed to be our dad. He was supposed to be a part of me. Instead, he was a part of my dreamy memories one second and then a ghost the next. He wasn’t here anymore, and I wondered why. 

The typewriter sits with one purpose only, to be a memento of the man who was supposed to be. I have replaced the ink wheel but kept the original. I have written a few letters on it to one of my close friends, just for the sheer novelty of it, till my fingers were sore. The slamming of the metal keys on thin paper was music to my ears. Satisfaction when the bell dings. Sound like a zipper when I push the cylinder back. Smell of ink on my hands. I think about his fingers on the keys and wonder if he ever sat stooping over a desk, concentrating hard till his eyebrows knitted together to piece together the letters of the words he wanted to express. I think about the burning ball of frustration in his temples, I think about him scrunching up the paper or ripping it up into slithers. I think about the words lost on the ink wheels, I think about how this typewriter either knew him or was forgotten by him, merely an artifact to his collection of things he liked to keep. His many lost things. 

I sometimes think about writing him a letter, but I always put it off. I suppose this is my way of contemplating it, fleshing out the idea into something solid and tangible. Something to touch and to hold onto. 

How do you begin to write a letter you know the recipient will never read?

Maybe I fear where my mind will wander if I try to write to him. Maybe there’s a part that worries about the feelings hidden deep within me that will come out if I try to write to him. Things that I try not to think about because if I do, I will get angry at him instead of sad. I get angry at him because I think about everything he has missed out on because he was too afraid to get help. He missed out on us growing up, our first days of school and walking us down the aisle. He will never get to meet his grandchildren, and as I watch them grow up and explore the world, I grow frustrated knowing that there is someone else who should be witnessing them growing too but can’t because of a choice they had made to leave that future behind. 

I’m scared that as soon as I start writing that letter, all the worst things will come out, and I will not be able to stop thinking about them.

I have been thinking about him a lot recently. I keep thinking about what it would be like to talk to him, just to hear him. I wonder what his voice sounds like? I wonder if he would be proud of me, I wonder if he would be impressed with my short stories, I wonder if he would like my husband, I wonder if we would have ever played videogames together, if he would draw the things I liked. If he would critique my little doodles. I think about him on his motorcycles and if he would still have them and if he would ever have taught me how to ride one. I think about his hands stained in oil, the smell of it cloying and familiar.  I think about, if he was still here, if he would have given me the typewriter himself, if he would have encouraged me to have it in the little office that I have made for myself. I wonder how it would even go if he would even still have it if he were still around? I try to imagine the man whose face is frozen in photographs and aging him to fit the scene better. Greys in his hair and wrinkles in the corners of his eyes. Would I have to pester him countless times over to give it to me? Would he be reluctant to let it go, would he treasure it? Or would he be more than willing to hand it over, would he be more than glad to get rid of the heavy thing that is just sitting in the corner as decoration or as a collectable item. Would he make the journey in the old car from my memories with it jangling in the boot along with other various rubbish? Him taking it into the lift with it cradled in the crook of his arm, the weight not a problem at all. I imagine him standing in the centre of the office, tall and proud and curious. Would he like the paintings I have hanging on the wall, of witches on broomsticks and dried flowers preserved behind glass? Would he chuckle at the ever-growing pile of unread books that I tell everyone I will read through? Would he even care?

 I think about him nearly every day, about the gaps he should have filled in my life.

Problem being, when I think about him, my mental health, too, plummets into unfathomable depths. Lockdown, furlough and troubling nightmares all make me want to hide away in a dark corner. I want to shut the world and everyone who belongs in it behind closed doors. I wonder if he ever felt the same way I did sometimes and if he were still here if he would guide me out of the darkness. I wonder if his hands would be caring. I wonder if he would hold me still and let me cry tears into his shoulders.

The typewriter is more than a bit of decoration for my office. Yes, it helps to bring something to an empty corner, but it also helps in connecting a part of my life to a man who can no longer be in it. It is more than something to take pictures of and to simply admire.  The typewriter will always bring me back to my dad. 

Maybe I will write that letter to him one day, though I know it will go unanswered. Maybe I will have the courage to take that typewriter and sit it on my desk, paper ready and clean, a perfect blank slate for new beginnings. I wonder if it would just be the one or the start of a series. I think about them sealed in envelopes, never to be opened. I think about him too much sometimes, like a virus that follows you around. A changing figment of possibilities inside my brain, no longer a person, but a representation of all futures lost that will never happen. He is nothing but a story lost. Like the words on the typewriter, the ink on the paper, the words in a voice never to be heard again. 

Dad, wherever you are, you are loved. You are safe. You are mine. 

And so is the typewriter.

Jennifer Elmslie is a writer from Aberdeen, Scotland. She has studied creative writing at the North-East College and loves to write short stories and has one flash fiction published in Tiny Molecules. This is her first personal essay.