EXTRACT:In this extract from his essay in 'Trinity Tales', Roy Foster remembers a visit from the Special Branch as he protested against Ted Kennedy
IN 1967, Trinity’s relation to its immediate surroundings was still faintly exotic. My first lecture from Professor Otway-Ruthven that October was interrupted by the arrival, a careful ten minutes late, of two girls, one red-haired, one honey-blonde, both in purple miniskirts, purple feather boas, floppy hats, and heavy eye-liner; both English, both called Sally. It wasn’t exactly the light of evening, Lissadell, but it was refreshingly different from Waterford. Professor Otway-Ruthven looked less impressed than I was.
Trinity, as I would find, was divided into tribes. Looking back I can distinguish Posh English, Boho English, Local Intellectuals, Politicos, and Clever Country. The Posh English bred a small subset of Irish Sloane Rangers (though that nomenclature was yet to come). Northerners tended to make up tribes of their own, divided between those who had long hair, and those who came into the Buttery carrying motorbike helmets protectively in front of them.
Some managed to slide out of either rank and adopt a local tribe. The gap between arts people and scientists yawned like a chasm: the latter were seen, rather unfairly, as people who slipped in and out of the Lincoln Place Gate wearing anoraks.
Mathematicians and engineers, as in all academic communities, were a law unto themselves. The trouble with tribalism was that you went through four years never meeting people with whom – you might discover in afterlife – you had a good deal in common. One of my best friends nowadays turned out to be an exact Trinity contemporary whom I never encountered at the time.
Girls like the Sallies tended to live first in Trinity Hall, then in flats around Dublin 4, before it had become ’Dublin 4’. My own domestic progress took me from chilly digs in Glasnevin, with a vaguely psychotic landlady who locked everything up, on a zigzag odyssey south, never quite reaching Dublin 4. There was a bed-sitter in Great Denmark Street off Mountjoy Square, owned by one of the area’s many madams, a flat above The Old Stand pub in Wicklow Street,where everyone I knew seemed to have lived, and eventually a rambling place perched high up in the beautiful Corn Exchange Building on Burgh Quay, where Daniel O’Connell had held Repeal meetings. Here, our landlord was the louche tenor Josef Locke. Other tenants included a straggle of sad-faced ladies of a certain age whom he called on late at night, leaving his yellow Jaguar E-Type run rakishly up on the pavement outside. Once I found him asleep in it when I was leaving for a morning lecture, an imposing figure in his loud check jacket, canary waistcoat and silk cravat.
From 1969, a Foundation Scholarship brought me free Commons with all the stale stout I could drink, a stipend, and rooms in College – rescuing me from flat life, which I rather regretted.
The atmosphere, if not monastic, tended to the boys’ boarding school; women could not live in college and were supposed to leave the precincts by midnight. Worldy-wise skips with an eye to a bribe for an overnight guest knew different. “Five shillings for a boy, ten shillings for a girl.”
But from my eyrie at the top of Number 3 I could see everyone who came in and out of Front Gate, and watch the Internationalists selling Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, famously torn up in a ritual protest by someone called David Naisby-Smith (Posh English, he wore a cravat too), and observe the progress of Local Intellectual Ros Mitchell’s sit-down strike or hear another Maoist protester, David Vipond, intoning “Junior Dean, Explain Your Actions!”
Number 3 had other advantages too. When Trinity received a regal visit from Senator Ted Kennedy, hastily substituted for his assassinated brother Bobby and trying to salvage his reputation post-Chappaquiddick, it was felt to be worth a protest. Both speakers of my stereo were directed out the window and as he entered college the words of Private Eye'slatest Christmas record were played at surprisingly effective max volume into Front Square: "Poor Cold Ted! He took a wrong turning on his way to the beach and landed up to his neck in trouble! You can't expect a man to drink, drive and make up a good story afterwards!"
Faces turned up to my window as to the Pope on Sundays at noon in St Peter’s. But the spell was broken by the sound of thundering feet on the stairs, my door was kicked open, and the Special Branch detail who had been positioned on the roof above stormed into the room. They probably expected to find Sirhan Sirhan.
I suppose I was lucky not to be shot.