All Growed Up Read online

  6

  BECOMING AN INTELLECTUAL

  I had three years to make it as an intellectual, so I had no time to waste – but before navigating ideology, philosophy and sociology, I had to find my way around the university campus. There were two libraries at either end of the longest bus shelter in the world and the main library was the size of ten Shankill Libraries and had more shelves than a thousand Ormo Mini Shops. I spent many hours in this library trying to keep warm, chatting up lovely girls from the Christian Union and looking up fascinating books and articles about ‘the ideology of mass communications’ and ‘the gender politics of Hollywood’ on the same microfiche machines they used in science laboratories on spaceships. The university had a huge concert hall with thousands of windows called The Diamond. It was like the university’s good room because it had expensive curtains and a piano and was only used on special occasions. In Belfast they had ceased the construction of buildings with lots of windows long ago because of all the car bombs, so it was a rare wonder for me to stand in a building with so much light allowed in. To reach The Diamond from the main library you had to walk across an indoor bridge with a shop, a bank and big pot plants. Marty Mullen winked and nudged me when he told me they weren’t the only pot plants on campus, as if this was some big secret. I was surprised because Marty didn’t strike me as an enthusiast of domestic horticulture.

  There was so much to learn and so little time to learn it before your next assignment was due. University was not like school; if you didn’t turn up or do your work, no one gave you detention or phoned your parents – you just failed and that was that. I was determined not to fail so I tried hard to understand everything and pass all my assignments, but becoming an intellectual proved to be even harder than I had expected. At school, you just learned things off by heart and tried to remember it all for the exam, but here they didn’t always give you the answer and sometimes the lecturers said there was no right answer. In seminars you were expected to have an opinion and someone always argued that whatever you said was wrong. My head was spinning with the new language of semesters and modules and 2:1s and 2:2s and trying to have an opinion on everything.

  Every semester I was allowed to choose some of my own modules, so as well as studying mass communications and media production, I was able to study social psychology and the conflict in Northern Ireland. I even had another go at the War Poets. Every new subject demanded more time spent in the library, struggling to understand everything and being terrified someone might ask me a question which would expose how little I had grasped. Byron Drake was always asking me demanding questions. I bumped into him in the second week of term in the Students’ Union café after a particularly challenging game of Frogger.

  ‘Hey, Tone,’ he said.

  ‘I remember you from the interview day. You’re Byron,’ I replied.

  ‘Thanks for the reminder, Tone.’

  He was dressed even more like a New Romantic now, with a long tweed coat and a frilly shirt and suede ankle boots like Steve Strange, who probably lived up the street from Byron’s house in England. Byron had also grown a fringe that permanently hid one of his eyes even though he flicked it away constantly, and he wore a scarf like Yasser Arafat during the bongs on the News at Ten. As he sat down beside me, I noticed he was carrying a copy of the Guardian newspaper and a paperback book, the title of which I couldn’t quite make out.

  ‘What’s your book?’ I asked.

  Byron removed his Walkman headphones as if this question required a considered response and showed me the slim volume he was carrying. The book was titled The Catcher in the Rye.

  ‘Classic,’ he pronounced. ‘J. D. Salinger. Have you read it?’

  ‘No,’ I answered, deciding that a modicum of honesty might be necessary if we were to become friends. ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘Oh, it’s very, very deep,’ he said somberly, ‘and very, very, dark. Almost Nietzschean. Changed my life. What are you reading?’

  The 1982 Doctor Who Annual and my Everyday with Jesus bible reading notes, I thought.

  ‘Oh a wee bit of Tolkien and quare bit of C.S. Lewis,’ I replied.

  At least this was true. By this stage in my life I had borrowed everything hobbit-related and all of the Narnia books from the shelves of the Shankill Library, but Byron seemed unimpressed. I wondered how I might claw back some credibility, then I remembered that I had been renewing my loan of War and Peace for months now in preparation for this moment.

  ‘I’ve started reading War and Peace too. Classic, so it is.’

  ‘Listen, Tone,’ Byron said. ‘The world is full of people who have started reading War and Peace.’

  I noticed that Byron had a habit of exaggerating his fringe-flick every time he said something particularly clever.

  ‘Some of Tolstoy is really, really dark …’ I attempted before Byron interrupted me.

  ‘I’ve always preferred Anna Karenina.’

  ‘Is she better than Tolstoy? I’ve never read any of her stuff,’ I said innocently, assuming Anna Karenina was like a Russian Enid Blyton.

  ‘Dostoyevsky said it was flawless as a work of art,’ said Byron, ignoring my question and flicking his fringe yet again.

  Who? I thought, concluding that I had another Russian to look up on the microfiche machine in the library before my next encounter with Byron Drake.

  I nodded knowledgeably every time a professor or student mentioned a book or a writer or an ‘-ism’ or an ‘-ology’, but inside I was fretting over how little I knew about anything. Was this what all the other students had been learning at A level while I was failing Physics and coortin’ round Glengormley? I had so much catching up to do, and it wasn’t just a matter of knowing the most important people and ideas in world history; at university they insisted on you having your own opinion and being able to prove that you were right. I wasn’t used to having my own opinion on anything apart from who was the best pop band ever and who was the best Doctor Who. Up until this point in my life I was secure in my understanding of how the world worked – knowing the goodies from the baddies, who was right and who was wrong – but in my first semester at university this certainty was turned on its head.

  It had always been satisfying to know that I was one of the goodies in the world, but in lectures, discussions and tutorials, I quickly learned that I had been a baddie all along! First I discovered that, in spite of all I had heard from heaven and earth, Protestants in Northern Ireland were actually the bad guys, like white South Africans and Israelis. Apparently Protestants were the ‘dominant elite of British imperialism in Ireland’. It had never occurred to me before that I was an elite anything, although it was true that I had once been a pretty elite paperboy, and Geordie Best was an elite footballer and he was a Protestant from the Cregagh Road. In all my years of laughing at posh English twits in It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum on BBC1 I had been blind to the fact that I was part of this ruling class. One of my lecturers even compared Protestants to the Raj of the British Empire in India. Obviously the university lecturers knew a lot more about life than me, but I was certain none of them had never been up the Shankill as most of the people there could barely afford a car on hire purchase, never mind an elephant and a wee man to fan them.

  Just as I was coming to terms with my new-found privileged status I made another major discovery. I learned that the IRA were not terrorists after all, but freedom fighters against the British invaders, which now included me! I found it very hard to stop calling the IRA terrorists because I had been terrified of them all my life. If the Provos decided you were a legitimate target and wanted to kill you then you had no chance, and freedom fighters were allowed to kill people if a country refused to give them equal rights, even after they had asked nicely. I was even more shocked to learn that the UDA and UVF were actually secret agents of the British state, because I could not imagine anyone less like James Bond than Big Duff in the estate, and Mrs Big Duff wasn’t remotely like Pussy Galore. I was prepared to reco
nsider many of my opinions but I was still a pacifist, and I still took the position that it was wrong for anybody to blow you up at the shops or shoot you at your front door, no matter what you called them.

  As if this re-education wasn’t traumatic enough, I then had my eyes opened to the fact that Russians were not the worst baddies in the world after all. You see, being left wing or right wing was even more important than being Catholic or Protestant, although I noticed at university that Catholics were generally more left and right and Protestants tended to be more right and wrong. I learned that left wing was clever and good and right wing was middle class and bad. Left was right because of Karl Marx and Vanessa Redgrave. Right was wrong because of Adolf Hitler and Margaret Thatcher. Communism was left and because left was right and Russians were communists, it turned out Russians were right after all. I decided that I was probably more left than right because helping poor people in the Third World and being a blessed peacemaker sounded quite left wing to me, and I got very angry when the Sun, a right-wing newspaper, gloated over killing Argentinians in the Falklands War.

  But I was in for another intellectual earthquake: Christians were baddies too! No one at Ballygomartin Presbyterian Church had ever told me that religion was a drug to stop people asking questions of bourgeoisie capitalists. Christianity was apparently a tool of oppression responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people throughout history, though this had never been mentioned in Sunday School while I was colouring-in pictures of Jesus feeding the five thousand. My father was an atheist, but he just thought my faith was harmless nonsense. At university it seemed that Christians were murderous monsters – unless they were freedom fighters, of course.

  ‘Religion is for weak people who cannot think for themselves,’ announced the professor at the beginning of a lecture on how to edit a video. He was looking straight at me, and I was sure an informer had spotted me at the Christian Union and I was about to be thrown off the course before I could oppress someone. Outside lectures, I met lots of clever students who made jokes about the Christian Union being full of boring squares who didn’t know how to enjoy themselves. I thought this was most unfair because the Christian Union had a welcome supper for freshers in the church hall with tray bakes and lemonade. Billy Barton from Bushmills had a motorbike so he couldn’t possibly have been considered a boring square.

  ‘Hey, boy, what’s the craic, hey?’ Billy would say every time he met you. He was always on the lookout for some craic, so it was most unfair to label him as boring. I once tried to engage Billy in a discussion on the Palestinian situation but his eyes glazed over. For Billy there was clearly very little craic in the Middle East, but that didn’t mean he was boring.

  Once I had recovered from the initial shock of my world being turned upside down, I accepted that if I wanted to fit in with my peers I would have to keep my head down. If I was exposed as a wee good livin’ Protestant from up the Shankill I would fail university for a cert! But I could only pretend to be someone else to a certain extent, so I had to find a way of becoming an intellectual while also staying true to myself. After reading lots of books in the library and thinking so hard my brain hurt, I found the perfect solution; I would become a Christian socialist. My mother’s grandfather had been a member of the Communist Party, and my father used to vote for the Northern Ireland Labour Party before the Troubles swept it away, so there was socialism in my blood and I knew my family would be happy. But I wasn’t prepared to give up my faith just to satisfy everyone else, so Christian socialism was the answer. Malcolm Muggeridge was a very clever intellectual on TV and he seemed to be a Christian socialist so it was obviously possible and intellectually acceptable. This proved to be a difficult tightrope to tread, however, because most socialists I knew hated Christians as much as they hated Maggie Thatcher, and most Christians were suspicious that socialists would try to ban them and put them in prison like in Russia and China. I risked upsetting both my lecturers and the lovely girls in the Christian Union. I was still trying to make new friends and not alienate everybody and I didn’t want to end up sitting on my own in the canteen at lunchtime like all the weirdo students.

  Whenever I needed to work it all out, I abandoned the library and took long walks along the beach. I loved the solitude of Portstewart Strand when it was cold and dark and windy. There I was alone to come to my own conclusions – or at least the conclusions that would keep most people happy most of the time. As I trudged along the sand, the churning waves reflected my inner turmoil. It was really, really dark and really, really deep – almost Nietzschean – but sometimes I just wanted to just go for a poke in Morelli’s.

  Once I had built an ideological foundation it was easier to cope with the daily dismantling of my worldview. I was able to put up a few arguments in my defence in my essays, if not in public in front of a hostile audience of peers and professors. As my re-education progressed, I noticed that minorities were always goodies and majorities were always baddies. I felt like a minority every day at university, but I longed to be part of a socially acceptable minority where I could be the victim and not just the wicked oppressor all the time. Then one day, while studying for a test in Social Psychology, I stumbled upon an article in a psychology journal about how left-handed people were a minority that had been discriminated against throughout history. I had never been so glad to be left-handed in my entire life. At last, I was part of a minority and a victim of discrimination! I had suffered like many thousands of left-handed people before me. I remembered my granny’s stories about back in her day, when left-handed people were forced to write with their right hand in school and got caned if they disobeyed. It seemed that when it came to handwriting, left was wrong and right was right. I had never been able to afford a proper left-handed guitar like Paul McCartney and had to settle for restringing a right handed guitar and playing it upside down with the plectrum guard in the wrong place. I realised now that this was what John Hume called ‘injustice’. The article also said that left-handedness was a result of minor brain damage at birth. Although I was slightly offended by this theory, it meant that I was also a sort of disabled person, and this put me in another official minority category that no one would dare to question. I could argue that the government never did anything to help me with my disability like giving free left-handed scissors to schools and therefore left-handed people were discriminated against and this was typical of Thatcher’s Britain. I decided to write an essay on the human rights abuses of left-handed people, but I ran into trouble when I read some articles that said discrimination against left-handed people came from the Bible and was propagated by the church. This was so unfair! Just when I had found an oppressed minority where I belonged I discovered that I was probably oppressing myself. There was even a technical term for this – I was suffering from ‘internalized oppression’. I looked up a Bible reference book and found one example in the Old Testament where God chose left-handed people over right-handed people, but that was because they were good at throwing stones. I decided not to use this reference in my essay as I assumed that I would lose marks for quoting the Bible, and I didn’t want to suggest that God approved of stone-throwing as there was enough it going on where I came from.

  After many months of struggling I eventually found an ‘-ism’ I could agree with. As part of my Women in Film Noir module, I had to read all about feminism for the first time. In between watching movies with sexy black and white femme fatales played by actresses like Rita Hayworth, I learned that women had always been discriminated against and were never allowed to hold power – except for Margaret Thatcher, but she was worse than a man. Some of my professors brought up feminism in almost every lecture. They explained that power structures were patriarchal and excluded women, and gave lots of examples from the media and big companies and politics and churches (who were the cause of it all in the first place). Inequality for women seemed very unfair to me and I had always enjoyed Cagney & Lacey, so it was great to see all my lecturers – who were
all men, every single one of them – standing up for women. I assumed that becoming a feminist would impress the more politically astute girls on my course who fancied Billy Bragg and Che Guevara, but this didn’t appear to work for our most outspoken feminist lecturer. He appreciated women so much made that he made lots of suggestive jokes and leered at them, like Benny Hill when he chased women around in their underwear on UTV. One of the cleverest girls described this feminist role model as ‘more lecherer than lecturer’ and accused him of being a bigger hypocrite than a Christian, to which I smiled and said nothing.

  The following weekend when I was home in Belfast, I decided to inform my mother that I had become a feminist. I was certain she would appreciate that, now I was an intellectual, I was going to argue for greater equality for her and my granny. This would prove to her the benefits of the education that she had worked so hard to secure for me. I waited until Match of the Day was on in the living room and she was alone in the kitchen doing the dishes.

  ‘I’ve become a feminist,’ I said proudly, handing her a plastic bag containing two weeks’ worth of dirty clothes.

  ‘You’re a what?’ she asked, looking startled by the revelation.

  I assumed she would appreciate my newfound solidarity with her in the fight for women’s rights, so her reaction confused me.

  ‘I’m a feminist,’ I repeated.

  ‘Oh dear God, don’t be tellin’ me that and don’t be tellin’ your father,’ she said. ‘Don’t you be gettin’ any funny ideas up there at that university. You can forget about that right now and get yourself a nice girlfriend like your big brother.’