"Of course, with your maturity you'll have no difficulty adjusting to life in Trinity. It's the youngsters that have the trouble." With such assurances ringing in my ears, I passed through the Front Gate of Trinity in Freshers' Week, 1989. I had left the Army after 21 years to fulfil a long-standing desire to study English literature and history.
As I entered the college that bright October morning, I ran a gauntlet of stalls manned by confident, shouting young people, all entreating me to join their particular society. Stretching to the Campanile was a bewildering array: fencers fencing, dancers dancing, canoes, mountain-bikes, targetshooting rifles, pot-holers, hang-gliders, jazz trumpets competing with cellos, actors in 18th century costume strutting on the lawns. Had I given up my safe, secure job to become a spectator at an on-going youth-fest? I parted with a pound here and a pound there and joined societies whose meetings I never attended.
When I met the professor, an angular, middleaged man with grey beard and swept-back grey hair, my reaction was: this guy looks like an Oxford don straight out of central casting. Over the four years that I spent in Trinity, I came to know and respect him - I made a mental apology for so glibly tagging him on first acquaintance.
I was twice the age of most of the students and very diffident in my relations with them. But the diffidence was all mine and I found their friendship when I made the effort. Ironically, the age-gap between us turned out to be to my advantage. I could be treated with the indulgence normally reserved for an eccentric uncle and, consequently, found it easier to mix with 19 and 20-year-olds than if I had been 10 years younger.
A native Dubliner from Clanbrassil Street, I discovered a city-within-the-city inside Trinity's Front Gate. Lectures were complemented by impromptu seminars in O'Neill's, the Stag's Head, Keogh's, and other time-honoured hostelries which I had formerly treated with a native's disdain as `tourist-pubs'.
Within Trinity, the Buttery Bar under the Dining Hall was for us `arty-fartys' with the occasional foray allowed to the `rugger-bugger' haunt of the Pavilion Bar in College Park, to watch the aspirant engineers fly their paper airplanes. With my hand on my heart I can say that I learned a great deal about literature and history over a convivial pint with my fellow students. An experience gleefully summed-up by David Norris in a comment on student life as "education through the process of intellectual osmosis."
Were my well-wishers right? Did `maturity' confer advantages over my more youthful colleagues? Not in my experience. The bonding-power of youth turned `tyro students' into local experts with astonishing speed. While I still struggled to find the location of the Junior Common Room, my youthful fellows chatted airily about their evenings in the JCR. Acronyms and buzz words tripped off their tongues with ease. The Pav, Players, Schol, Botany Bay, Lincoln Gate, 2.1s, 2.2s - the arcane lexicon of college life was second nature to them. They became my guides and mentors and soon I knew my way around and could bandy buzz terms with the rest of them.
I joined Players, the college theatre group, and appeared as a nurse in a cross-dressing production of Moliere's. Luckily no photograph of me in wig, long black dress and army boots made its way to my former comrades in the Defence Forces.
Over the year shared experience obliterated distinctions. We raced to have essays in by the deadline, borrowed each others notes to prepare for tutorials, suffered the same baleful eyes of lecturers when deadlines were missed or poor tutorial preparation exposed. Exams came and went - and shrieks of joy or groans of disappointment when results were posted outside the Exam Hall, followed by post-mortems in the pubs.
Too quickly the four years were up. In my final year I had become the secretary of the College History Society. During Freshers' Week for the 1992/1993 year I sat at the society stall in Front Square, bawling out our wares and trying to entice pounds out of the pockets of the bewildered freshers, my own bewilderment a few years earlier a fading memory.
The final act came after the final exam. An idyllic, hedonistic afternoon drinking chilled lager on the steps of the Pavilion Bar while College Park basked in the early summer sunlight was all that was necessary to blow away the remnants of exam nerves. I was glad, for so many reasons, that I had resisted the impulse to dodge the bedlam of Freshers' Week and fly back to my job on that first October morning. Thank you, Trinity.
