(I,2) Trinity College Dublin 1970-74

Trinity College Dublin


On a personal level, like Campbell, the Trinity experience was for me pretty miserable. To be frank, most of my personal experiences in educational institutions as a student have been miserable-and quite a few of my experiences as a teacher as well. In fact, it seems like I really have been pretty miserable for most of the time!

People have always been telling me to smile. They still do. Dad was the first.

I’ve gotten fed up with it, actually. Why can’t people just leave me be? I don’t go around telling people to be miserable do I?


In 1969 whilst still at Campbell, I applied to three Universities –Durham: (because my geography teacher was a graduate) St Andrews in Scotland: (I don’t know why) and Trinity College, Dublin. I was offered a place in all three and chose Trinity in the end because although it was away from home –it was not too far away.

I remember being very nervous at the idea of leaving home and my brother taunting me with

“Do you feel a bit diffident about going to Dublin?"

"Yes", I said naively. He thought this was very funny. I didn’t. I remember saying to him at such moments:

‘You seem to have no moral standard to which I can appeal’

This made him laugh at me even more-and and he he would taunt me with

‘No! that’s right!’

There were many such moments with my brother in those days..


I stayed with Auntie Bea in my first year in Dublin. I can see now that it was a masterstroke on the part of my parents but I didn’t think so at the time. Auntie Bea, my mum’s sister ,was recovering from a heart attack and she used to spend a lot of time in bed. Bea was a tall, elegant, strikingly handsome woman –but a lonely old spinster and rather a sad figure in some ways. Mum used to say she had plenty of suitors in her youth but that a Prince wouldn’t be good enough for Bea. And Mum was probably right.

In the evenings I would cycle home and she would be in bed waiting for me. She liked me and enjoyed my company. She had a great sense of humour and I was able to practise my skills as a comedian on her. It wasn’t difficult as she giggled like a schoolgirl at everything I said. If only all the other girls had giggled like she did I would have been in seventh heaven at Trinity. But they didn’t.

I liked Auntie Bea -but she could be cold and cruel. At times she would say the most hurtful things. I remember one time she reduced me to tears. (I was a sensitive little fellow). I went to see my brother , who was in an apartment on Campus to look for a shoulder to cry on but he wasn’t very sympathetic. I think he was embarrassed by me.

I decided I had to leave Auntie Bea and strike out on my own.

In my first year I was lacking in self- confidence and wouldn’t or couldn’t speak to anyone – not even students let alone lecturers. I purchased an ‘autosuggestion’ correspondence course to build up my confidence. It consisted of repeating mantras over and over to myself such as “I am good, I am confident , I can do this, I can speak to this person etc” It was based on suggestion of the subconscious mind. I don’t really know how effective it was but at the very least it distracted for a while me from my almost permanent introspective obsession with my social incompetence.

At the end of the first year I was so depressed I decided to speak to my Methodist Minister Wesley Gray about my chronic shyness. He was very sympathetic, wrung his hands in genuine anguish, and referred me to a Psychiatrist. I had one visit with Dr James at which nothing much happened. I think she asked me how many ‘O’ levels I’d passed at school.

I went back to Dublin and started visiting the Psychiatrist at College. He seemed to think there was nothing much wrong with me. Not surprising perhaps because he seemed a lot more nervous than I was. I remember him saying that I should not chose my friends on the basis of my emotional needs. I was desperate for friends –I certainly didn’t ‘chose’ them. I’m sure he was right about me anyway. I think he needed a few friends himself.

Trinity was the first place I had ever really seen girls. Coming from a boy’s school and a boys only family, I was not confident at all with girls. Much to my disappointment, I soon came to realise that girls weren’t interested in much really except flirting with confident men. They didn’t seem to realize, (like I did) that all these men just wanted to get into their pants. (Maybe I just didn’t realize that the girls did realize that this was what boys wanted and were quite happy about it although they pretended to be shocked).

I certainly wanted to get into their pants too. There was no doubt about that. But I expected foreplay: such as talking about important things like education, philososphy, the existence of God, religion, the origin of the universe and cricket.

It came as a surprise to me that most girls seemed not to be disgusted by men’s lasciviousness. I expected them to be. I was disgusted by men’s lasciviousness. I was disgusted by my own lasciviousness. On the contrary many girls seemed to encourage and enjoy it.

I decided girls were weird. But I still wanted desperately to get into their pants to find out what was really ‘there’.

I was a frustrated young man..

This didn’t stop me from plucking up enough courage to approach my first crush –‘Maggie’ .

God, Maggie was a stunner! The Angelina Jolie of Trinity.

Tall, she had the most beautiful black curly hair and sensuous cherry lips. Her voice was so sexy I almost blubbered when she spoke.

As it happened, I did weep out of frustration one day after about a year of waiting to speak with her.

Things did not quite go as I had planned.

I had finally plucked up the courage to speak to her one day and asked to see her.( I must have been reading a particularly powerful ‘Mantra’ that week). Maggie, mature and perfect young lady that she was, agreed to meet me. We sat together for about half an hour while I carefully and logically explained the reasons why she should ‘go out’ with me.

Maggie was very probably terrified by the intensity of this unsmiling northern Irish Nerd. But, perfect lady that she was she let me down gently and let me know that she didn’t want to.(She didn’t mention Paul Newman but I was pretty sure it had to be him).

On many occasions I have found fact to be stranger than fiction in my life.

Accepting her decision with as much grace as I could, I made it to the far side of College Park and, when I was well out of public view, cried my eyes out for half an hour.

It didn’t end there-the obsession I mean. I took to stalking her at her home. I would park my car outside her home and wait for her to enter the house in order to catch a glimpse of her. This all took place when I was twenty. The obsession stayed with me for several years –even when I was in Africa.

It was my introduction to the dark side of passion.Maggie was my only love interest in four years at Trinity.

You think that’s not much of a love life? You’d be right - it wasn’t. and you’d be wrong also because I thought Maggie was worth three or four ordinary love interests.

As time passed I made good friends with several males including K H and PG from Dublin, T H from Wicklow and J F from Birr. Some of them I am still in touch with thirty years later.

J F was a kind of mentor at Trinity. He was a mature student in his late twenties. He was a red headed son of the soil from Birr , County Offally. He was a freethinking radical. Very shy, he had an intensity about him. He was passionate about a wide range of subjects from education to politics and religion.

I was strongly influenced by him. In my third year he invited me to an ‘Encounter group’. This was a ‘seventies’ invention: a group of strangers would meet for a weekend and sit around in a circle telling each other their intimate and innermost feelings about each other.

Sounded like a good idea to me. Unfortunately mine turned out to be a very painful experience.

One of the girls in my group made some negative comments about me which I had a great deal of trouble in dealing with. I had to continue seeing the group leader for several months after the event in order to resolve this and other related problems relating to my shyness that had surfaced during this encounter group week-end. Insecurity with the opposite sex and hypersensitivity with all and sundry were now firmly entrenched traits in my personality.

I shared rooms with P G at Trinity 1974-1975. This was our final year. P and I had been good friends since first year and had met playing cricket. In the first year he was a quiet, thoughtful fellow. As time went on he changed and by the fourth year he had become a real go-getter. He rushed about from place to place like there was no tomorrow. He seemed to me have lost his ability to reflect –he just did things without thinking. I continued to think but not do much. P was ambitious and went on to have a very successful career in teaching –eventually becoming Headmaster of Kilkenny College.

I also shared a flat with T H-a history student. Much of T’s time was spent painting. He was a talented artist and went on to have a very successful career as an artist in the USA. I enjoyed the verbal jousting with T on all topics from religion and politics to art, science and education. I spent many delightful weekends at his mother’s farm in Wicklow in T’s company and with his mother, brother B, and sister R. I’m still in touch with T by E-mail.

I’m also still in touch with K H. I met K in first year at Trinity.. Sadly for K he had a dreadful time with his Chemistry and ended up having to repeat his first year in Natural Sciences. He ended spending five years getting a degree. This particularly irritated him as he had to stay at home and be dependent on his father at the time.

K and I were soul mates and would spend days and weeks at Lough Mask in his parent’s caravan fishing and discussing everything under the sun. He was kind, generous and eccentric and I appreciated him as a friend very much. K was a rabid atheist - as rabid as any evangelical Christian. He entertained me with horror stories form his days in boarding school. He was an outsider like myself. After a brief career in teaching he became a Principal of a school in the Kuwait which was destroyed by Saddam Hussain’s army when it invaded Kuwait in 1990. This traumatic event had a dramatic effect on his career as he didn’t work again for many years. K is happily married and living in the USA.

K2 was a Campbellian friend who went to Trinity with me. He was streetwise and a very sound and reliable fellow with a dry sense of humour. I seemed to amuse him. I think he thought I was naïve and this seemed to endear me to him.

I was naïve of course. . I‘v e had a many friends who have befriended for what they have perceived as my naievity. One anecdote is worth telling about K2-it will give some idea of the type of relationship we had.

One night K2 and I were leaving college on foot. I was carrying my brief case and K2 was to my right. We were walking in tandem having an innocuous conversation when I suddenly pitched headlong downwards and forwards into the night.

I tumbled and crashed into the cellar of a building and disappeared entirely from public view. As I picked myself up from the ground I realized K2 was peering down at me in the cellar and asking me if I was OK. After dusting myself off, I was able to tell him that was unscathed whereupon he immediately disappeared from view and collapsed in a wild fit of hysterics. When I finally climbed out of the cellar I could see K2 clinging to the ivy of the walls of the building to support himself and prevent himself collapsing with laughter. We went for a drink and K2 simply could not stop laughing for the rest of the evening. He was beside himself.

Over the next few days every time we saw each other he would just dissolve into hysterical laughter. I realized then at last that I was finally good at something- I had a talent for making people laugh! I haven’t seen K2 for about thirty years-but I am sure if I met him today and mentioned that incident he would dissolve into hysterics again.

K2 had a girlfriend W who I could half speak to because she was passionate (like myself) about education. But she occasionally made insensitive remarks about me so I came to thoroughly dislike her. I was envious of K2 for the sex he was having with W. Everybody around me seemed to be having sex except me and my friends. I seemed to have friends who couldn’t get any sex either. Although I couldn’t really be sure of this because we never talked about sex to each other–except in a highly abstract way. We were all too intellectual to have sex, except K2.

Sex wasn’t the only thing I envied K2 for

I worked bloody hard at Trinity –studying every night in the library. I had an elaborate revision program for examinations. But K2 didn’t go to the library and he read through his notes one night before his exams. This was all the work he did and it was enough for him to pass.

I considerd K2 to be a lucky bastard.