I was determined that my presidential year would be characterised by harmony and reconciliation, so when I wasn’t trying to keep the fundamentalists and charismatics from engaging in all-out war, I decided to hold out the hand of friendship to the corpulent university chaplain who everyone said hated the Christian Union with a vengeance. Clive Ross said this man was an unrepentant anti-Christian chaplain who smoked, but Tara Grace insisted that he was simply being controlled by a demon of cynicism and if we prayed hard enough he would be delivered from this evil spirit. I thought the chaplain was just a little jealous because hardly anyone bothered with the chaplaincies. The CU was overflowing with members and it was controlled by student leaders instead of clergymen, so I wondered if the chaplain just didn’t like people under the age of fifty being in charge. However, in spite of advice from my fellow committee members that I was wasting my time, I decided to request an audience with the chaplain. To my great surprise, he agreed to meet with me between busy rounds of cocktail parties and Holy Communions. I sensed a spirit of reconciliation was in the air. This would be the beginning of warmer relations between the jean-wearing Jesus followers and the dog-collared disciples on campus.
When the day came, I knocked on the chaplain’s office door tentatively.
‘Come in,’ he called, with all the swanky authority that had intimidated previous presidents.
We shook hands and I introduced myself. Apparently, he required no introduction.
‘What does your father do?’ he asked immediately in an almost-English accent.
I was taken aback. No one had ever asked me such a question before actually trying to get to know me first.
Nothing you would think is of any importance, I thought.
I could tell that your father’s profession was very important to this man, especially if your father happened to be a proper professional like a doctor or a lawyer. The obvious snobbery of the corpulent chaplain fanned the socialist flame within me, so I took a deep breath and stated proudly, ‘My father is a foreman in a foundry in West Belfast.’
I could tell he was unimpressed as he moved swiftly on, relighting his grubby pipe as if I had said nothing of any consequence whatsoever. But I held his eye. I wanted to be sure that he knew how proud I was of my factory-working father; no son of my da would allow him to be put down by some stuck-up vicar who had never done a proper days’ work in his life!
‘Would you like to come and speak to some of the members of the Christian Union?’ I asked, holding out a palm leaf.
The chaplain set down his pipe and stifled a patronising chuckle. I couldn’t help but notice how pink his cheeks were, and his bulbous nose reminded me of a character in a Noddy book.
‘Well now, I don’t think that would achieve a great deal, would it, young man? Are you going to try to convert me? Get me “saved” and “born again”?’ He spoke in a mock Belfast accent when using this evangelical terminology and his voice dripped with sarcasm.
Dickhead! I thought.
‘Really?’ I said meekly.
My attempt to extend the hand of friendship was not going well, but I knew I should turn the other cheek and persist.
‘You see, you evangelicals are all the same,’ he pronounced.
Arrogant shite! I thought.
‘I’m not quite sure what you mean,’ I replied respectfully.
‘Well, you all think you’re so high and mighty, but I have no doubt that the president of the Christian Union masturbates behind the bicycle shed as much as the next young man.’
Given the recent traumatic experience of losing a prized possession from the bicycle shed, I could not think of anywhere worse to risk exposing my most prized possession. Why was a man I’d only just met bringing up masturbation anyway?
Pervert! I thought.
‘I’m really not a high and mighty sort of person, so I’m not,’ I replied.
At this stage I decided that my attempt at reconciliation was doomed. I knew I should be gracious and forgiving and absorb the jibes and accusations for the sake of Christian unity, but after just a few minutes in the chaplain’s office I was already having impure thoughts about telling him to stick his pipe up his fat arse. In my head I knew I should be asking ‘What would Jesus do?’, but in my heart I was thinking ‘What would Granny do?’ The Holy Spirit was prompting me to persist and pursue reconciliation with the corpulent chaplain, but the ghost of my granny was urging me to give the ignorant slabber a good dig in the bake.
‘Well the offer is always there if you ever want to engage in a dialogue with fellow Christians,’ I forced myself to say with as much sincerity as I could muster.
‘Thank you, Mister President. How gracious of you to deign to meet me,’ the chaplain smarmed, lifting his well-padded backside from his over-stuffed chair to indicate that the audience was over.
Bastard! I thought.
‘Well, thank you for your time. God bless,’ I said.
I smiled, shook his sweaty hand and left, humiliated and crestfallen. My attempts to negotiate a truce between faith rivals had failed miserably. How could I ever help children from opposite sides of the peace wall to become friends if I couldn’t make friends with one sarcastic Protestant clergyman?
That night I found it very hard to get to sleep in my freezing bedroom. I pulled the many layers of blankets, eiderdowns and sleeping bag over my cold head, and when I finally drifted off I had a terrible nightmare. I dreamt it was end of the world and Jesus had returned in the clouds like a ‘Thief in the Night’. The scene was every bit as apocalyptic as my Cliff Richard video, except it was worse because there were Daleks and Klingons on Portstewart Strand as well as panicking students. Jesus was the spitting image of Clive Ross and the corpulent chaplain was a big fat angel, and these two deities were separating the sheep from the goats. Lesley, Tara, Peter, Agnetha from ABBA and every single Heather from Portadown were all being brought up into heaven on the back of the big cuddly creature from The NeverEnding Story while Limahl sang the theme tune. Meanwhile, I was stuck in the bicycle shed at the university, and when I tried to escape, I realised to my horror that both of my legs and my jimmy joe had been chopped off. Darth Vader was standing in the doorway laughing a deep, rasping laugh and wielding a light sabre, and Buffy the hamster was running around on a squeaky wheel in the corner and singing like Morrissey. The ground was opening beneath my feet and me, Bo Derek, Marty Mullen, Byron Drake and John DeLorean were being sucked down into a flaming abyss, screaming for mercy.
I woke up in a cold sweat. My heart was thumping in my chest faster than machine-gun fire in West Belfast. Slowly, the terror subsided, and I prayed and repeated Psalm 23 until I drifted off into a less traumatic slumber. The next day I could remember every detail, so I tried to work out what the nightmare was all about. Though it was difficult to admit it to myself I knew what this dream meant – in spite of all my aspirations, I suspected I was a pitiful peacemaker, so I did.
19
CAREER MOVES
Time was running out, so it was. As my final year exams approached I realised that I urgently needed to climb to the next step on the ladder of my career. In the past I had graduated from paperboy to breadboy and then from breadboy to student with relative ease, but I knew the next step in my grown-up career was going to be much more testing. Many graduates in Belfast ended up on the dole and I was determined that this was not going to happen to me. I had worked hard to develop skills in journalism and filmmaking, so I researched further training and employment opportunities that could lead me to Hollywood in California or the BBC in London or at least to Downtown Radio in the Kiltonga Industrial Estate in Newtownards. My search proved fruitful, and in addition to my speculative letter to the BBC in Belfast asking if I could read the news like Rose Neill, I sent off applications for journalism courses in Belfast and Dublin.
My first glimpse of a possible future arrived in a brown envelope from the College of Business Studies in Belfast. This letter invited me to attend the colleg
e for a written test and an interview. The College of Business Studies had nine floors and was one of the tallest buildings in the city so was, by Belfast standards, considered to be a skyscraper – the weather in Belfast was usually overcast with low clouds so the sky itself seemed lower than it did in big cities like New York, meaning a relatively small building could in fact appear to be scraping the sky. The College of Business Studies even had a lift!
I was already familiar with this modern high-rise building because the School of Music orchestra used to rehearse there every Saturday morning. Every week, eager young musicians got to travel in a proper lift with sliding doors to the eighth floor where, on weekdays, students learned how to bake cakes. I myself had often contributed to the crucifixion of Beethoven from the back row of the second violins, performing with the ever-present aroma of self-raising flour in the air. So at least the venue for my interview was familiar territory, and I knew how to handle all the buttons and the sliding doors in the lift. Marty Mullen had warned me that the journalism teachers in the College of Business Studies didn’t get on very well with the Media Studies lecturers at The University of Ulster and he said I was wasting my time, but I was certain that once they spotted my obvious talent they would put aside any minor institutional rivalries and let me on to the journalism course.
My mother warned me that as I had already been to university and received a student grant for three years, I would be given no further money to do another course at a college that you didn’t even need A levels to get into. This led to some tension at home, and my father was appalled at the idea that securing a degree didn’t actually train you for a job. Unlike the university, the College of Business Studies taught the practical skills of journalism like how to take notes in shorthand when you were interviewing sneaky politicians and then type up your report for the Belfast Telegraph or the Guardian or the Washington Post. I had previously attempted to gain the typewriting skills required to be a reporter by signing up for a summer course at Cairnmartin Secondary School, but I arrived late for the first class and all the women laughed at a man wanting to know how to type so I never went back.
The written test at the College of Business Studies seemed to go well as I knew what to do and I had just enough time to write a report like a proper journalist. I was nervous about the interview, though, so I practiced taking deep breaths and said a wee prayer as I waited outside the office. When I was invited inside there was an older woman with glasses who welcomed me with lots of pleasant ‘-ings’ and a man who seemed a bit fed up and didn’t even look up when I entered the room and sat in front of him. It all started off very well. The woman asked me why I wanted to do the course, and when I explained that I wanted to be an investigative reporter like Bernard and Woodstein the man looked up at me for the first time.
‘What’s his background?’ he asked the woman, as if I wasn’t in the room.
She looked at my application form, frowned and said, ‘I’m afraid he’s another one from the degree course in Coleraine.’
The man shook his head. ‘So what have you learned about journalism on your three-year Media Studies degree course?’ he asked, in a tone of voice which suggested the correct answer might be ‘not a lot!’
He doesn’t like me, I thought, but this was my chance to impress. Having a degree from the New University of Ulster clearly put me at a disadvantage, but this was my chance to prove that, in spite of that, I could still make a brilliant journalist. I told him everything I had learnt about how the media was being used as a propaganda tool by the state and how journalists could never be totally unbiased because they had their own views like everyone else and whoever was paying their wages usually had an agenda anyway and how women and disabled people and all the other minorities were underrepresented in journalism and misrepresented by the media, even in soap operas. The more I spoke the wearier he looked, and every time I used the term ‘feminist critique’ he rolled his eyes.
‘But can you give me any practical examples?’ he asked.
‘Well, the media in Northern Ireland think they are unbiased and just reporting the facts, but they are of course part of the system that sustains the conflict and they are only interested in bad news because they have negative news values, and journalists have their own sectarian biases the same as everybody else and the newspapers have either a unionist or a nationalist bias and when you read them it’s obvious and you would think they are reporting on two parallel universes!’
Silence.
The woman took a sharp intake of breath.
No one had nodded since I opened my mouth.
The man coughed and put his pen down beside my application form. I had never before seen a ballpoint set down with such a sense of exasperation.
‘They ruin good young people up there,’ he said to the woman, once again as if I was not in the room.
I was pleased that he had acknowledged that I was once a good young person, but offended by the fact that I was now apparently ruined.
‘His written test is surprisingly good,’ the woman said, offering a morsel of support for my application, but shaking her head at the same time.
She doesn’t like me either now! I thought.
I had obviously got it wrong and it was clear they didn’t want me. The interview was mercifully brought to a conclusion within a few minutes. Within a week I had received my letter of rejection, which wasn’t as rude as the interview. I was dejected. How would I ever become a journalist if everything I had learnt at university meant that no one wanted me? Maybe they had looked at my postcode and noticed that I was just some wee lad from up the Shankill? Maybe they’d spotted that I had been president of the Christian Union and didn’t want a good livin’ journalist? Or maybe I was just crap!
‘Well, as one door closes another door opens, love,’ my mother said after she noticed me biting my nails and not laughing even once the whole way through an episode of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum on BBC1.
I needed a door in Dublin or in the BBC in Belfast to open very soon, or I would be consigned to Snugville Street forever.
‘I’ve got a interview in Dublin!’ I yelled down the phone when the good news arrived in an envelope with an Éire stamp.
There were a few moments of silence before Lesley replied. ‘That’s brilliant! Sure it’s supposed to be a better course than Belfast anyway,’ she finally whooped.
I could tell from her initial hesitation that she was concerned about what might happen to our relationship next year if we were to be separated by the border and the Newry hills. This was a good indication that she may not be able to live without me.
‘Do you think I’ll get in?’ I asked, seeking reassurance.
‘Of course you will, sure your wee fillums are wonderful.’
‘I know, but they say it’s very competitive.’
‘Well if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be,’ she said wisely. ‘Now I’d better go – Mummy’s taking me to the big sale in Logan’s in Cloughmills. You’ve no idea!’
Three weeks later I drove myself to Dublin in the green Simca for the first time. I bought cheap petrol with punts and followed the map in the college prospectus. After negotiating the traffic on the outskirts of Dublin, to my great surprise and relief I arrived on time without once getting lost. I couldn’t help but think that this was a good sign. During the journey I wondered about the logistics of moving to Dublin for a year. How could I ever afford to live there? Would I manage to make new friends all over again? Would Lesley forget me and transfer her affections to a farmer from Broughshane with an XR3? Of course, some of my friends’ concerns would be of a more religious or political nature. Titch McCracken would be appalled at the traitorous act of an Ulsterman moving to the Free State, but I hadn’t seen Titch around for years. Boyd Harrison from the CU would give me a hard time for choosing to live in ‘a priest-ridden country’ whose government was controlled from the Vatican. Still, I saw the chance to live in a different country of a different religion as an adven
ture rather than a threat. At least as a Protestant in Dublin I would finally be a real minority, and I could discuss the rights of minorities without everyone accusing me of being an oppressor.
I arrived early for my interview and sat outside the office practising my answers and reading a book on how to do good interviews, which I had borrowed from the library following my disaster at the College of Business Studies. The book said that a good way to calm your nerves at an interview was to imagine the interview panel naked because they would seem less intimidating with their wobbly bits hanging out. This time round I was much better prepared and ready to stand up for myself if I had to. At last I was invited into a room full of books, recording equipment and smoke, where two men with stubble welcomed me in the same accent as Terry Wogan (though they were much less charming than the great broadcaster himself). It all started very well, and when they asked me what aspect of journalism I was interested in I said I wanted to be an investigative journalist and report from conflict zones.
‘I’m also interested in becoming a consumer champion and exposing corruption like Esther Rantzen on That’s Life on BBC1,’ I explained earnestly.
All Growed Up Page 22