Trinity Tales by Sebastian Balfour

Author:Sebastian Balfour [Sebastian Balfour, Laurie Howes, Michael De Larrabeiti and Anthony Weale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843512417
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

JUST FUMBLINGS

john wilkinson

‘UNWISE,’ they said when I told of my plans for a visit to TCD after a forty-year absence. ‘All has changed, both Trinity and Dublin. You’ll feel a total stranger and will leave disappointed. Don’t go! Best cherish those glorious memories of the golden days that were yours in the TCD of the early Sixties.’

So I bought my ticket – Toulouse to Dublin, Aer Lingus – with the lowest of expectations, fully prepared to face the certain sadness my friends had categorically predicted. And there I was, within a few hours, standing before Front Gate, as familiar and friendly as it always had been all those years ago, and through which I had last strolled at the age of twenty – educated (well, degree-bearing, shall I say), Rastignac-like, ready and eager to fight my way through life in the big, wide world outside.

But, ah! Where were the equally familiar and friendly Front Gate porters of yesteryear, so distinguished in their coachmen’s uniforms? Oh yes – replaced by security officers. Never mind. A mere detail and sign of the nervous times in which we all now have to live. The rooms I’d booked were fine – No. 6, Front Square, also now provided with a security door at the foot of the staircase; but with running water, hot and cold, and a loo on the same floor. What luxury! No longer the need for Mick, the skip (i.e. College manservant) who daily used to toil up and down bringing us both water for washing and peat for burning in the open grate, giving off both heat and the smell which, as with Proust’s lilac, when fleetingly recaptured, at once transports me back to those brilliant days of life in College.

Within minutes I was out and about. Yes, the Fellows’ Garden had been translated into a Conference Centre, but no, College Park had not been concreted over. In fact, on that particular hot, late-June day, it was host to hundreds of sprawling, half-naked students relaxing in the sun. The cricket pavilion was now a bar and the pints were flowing fast. So too was the conversation. I joined in. Polite interest turned to evident surprise when I let slip that I’d met Éamon de Valera on that very spot during College Races in Trinity Week all those years before. I was clearly part of history.

Time had certainly moved on, as a glance through the list of College societies clearly showed. Never in the early Sixties, for example, would one have found the Anarchists featuring on it. However it was comforting to see that the musical scene, my scene, was still very much the same – Choral and Orchestral Societies, on whose committees I had served: the Cherry Cup Quartet competition, in which I regularly competed. In those days, however, there was no College Chapel Choir. The choir of St Patrick’s Cathedral came into College then, sang the Sunday service and promptly left. That was it!

The keen undergraduate singers of those

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