Choices Posed by Jim

Jim and I first became aware of one another one Bank Holiday during my second year in training college. He was a student in the Divinity School of Trinity College. A group of us seniors from college borrowed bicycles and Jim, who then was dating Doreen, a fellow-student of mine, joined us on a picnic trip to Powerscourt and the Waterfall.

We had to be back in college by 9 pm for roll call but we didn’'t give ourselves enough time so we had to pedal really fast and I became breathless and panicky so Jim rode alongside and propelled me forward, telling me to stop pedalling and relax. He was strong and kind and fit and we seemed to react instantly to one another.

In due course my year in college all scattered but my first teaching post was in Dublin and one other girl in our year, Beryl, also obtained a post in Dublin while Jim's divinity course would last for three more years.

Beryl and I shared flats over the years and it was about 1948 when Jim invited me to the Divinity students annual dance in the Girl's Friendly Society Oak House in Stephen's Green. Also present was a student called John who, I'd been told, admired me over the years but never plucked up the courage to ask me out. In those days we had what was called Ladies' Choice when any girl could tap a man on the shoulder and take him from his partner. This very pretty girl did just that to Jim and he began to tease me and I was angry as I didn't liked being teased and having my partner taken so I turned around to tap someone else on the shoulder and spotted John! At the end of the evening I accepted John's offer to see me home while still sulking with Jim. Years later, on one of my visits to meet Jim at the weekend, he produced a cutting from a church magazine that was headed 'Rector Bans Kissing Games' and asked me to read it! Then he said: 'Don't you think our John has changed since his student days?' That was the first and only reference he'd ever made to that silly night at the dance in 1948!

Time passed after that episode and Jim persevered till I agreed to go out with him again. We spent some happy times together and then it was time for him to be ordained as a curate in the north of Ireland and we agreed that we would marry when he became a rector. There I was, in Dublin, and there he was, in Coleraine. Mostly, our subsequent meetings were at weekends in Belfast but Pearl, another college friend of mine, invited me to spend a week with her in Portrush and a further week staying with her uncle and aunt in Londonderry where they ran a post office in Waterside, the Protestant area. Each evening during the first week Jim collected me after his day's work and took me for rides on his motor bike, including one evening to the theatre in Portstewart. As we sat on a rock by the water's edge that evening, cooling our feet in the sea, it was the one moment in my life that I wanted to hang on to for all eternity. Never before or since have I experienced anything like it. It was a happy time but I was restless and still searching for excitement in my life.

The regular letters between us continued as did the weekends. One Friday I was travelling on the 6 pm Enterprise to Belfast when a girl I had been in school with passed through my carriage and we chatted. She was Amy Cole who had left after Intermediate Certificate while her twin sister stayed on into the 6th form. Amy had suffered from polio when she was 16 but had recovered. As we left the train, I spotted Jim at the barrier and made a beeline for him and noticed Amy rushing towards the same spot. As we drew near, I noticed another clergyman with Jim - Rev Jamieson - and it was he whom Amy was going to meet. They married and had children but Amy died in 1966 at the age of 39. My father had known her Aunt, Amy Cole, in his youth and when he saw the announcement of Amy's death in the Irish Times in London not long before he himself died, he seemed to have lost all sense of the passing of time and thought it was the aunt who had just died.

Jim and I talked about the family we would like to have - two boys and two girls - but always there was this indecision at the back of my mind and I finally had to face up to what it was. My home was a pretty miserable place and the thoughts of introducing any boyfriend to my father was something I just couldn't cope with. It wasn't just the poverty. When my Uncle Dick discovered about Jim, he recognised the dilemma and said we could marry from his home and the wedding would be in Trinity College Chapel and he would marry us. To me that would just be a temporary solution and where would I find myself when finally Jim found out?

His parents were wealthy farmers and he had one brother a solicitor and a younger one also training as a clergyman. The crisis came to a head when in 1956 I had enrolled on the HDipEd course in Trinity. At the time I was living in Sandymount as one of the family with Captain and Mrs Tyrrell and their son was home on leave from the merchant navy and he arranged for six of us to go to a dinner dance in the Gresham Hotel while Roy Rogers was staying there! Ivan would take my cousin Aileen and his cousin would take a girl who had sat her BA same time as I had and I was to go as partner to the Professor of Education in Trinity who was a friend of Ivan's cousin.

This man had a reputation for chasing female students around the table and he knew I would be studying under him from September. Ivan promised to look after me that evening so off we went, me in a beautiful white ball gown! Ivan and I drank rather too many brandies and at one stage he asked the band to play a tune for Patricia and her partner and there we had to stand, alone in the middle of the dance floor dancing to a soppy tune and my uncle heard about it afterwards.

The Chaplain to the Missions to Seamen, who lived a few doors down our road, came and said my aunt wanted to speak to me on the phone! She said my uncle wanted to know what Jim would think of it when he heard. The professor asked me out again and again but I soon told him I was not another string to his bow and when he invited me to go away for a weekend with him I really let fly and then he threatened he'd give me a rough ride all year on the course so I just told him I was not one to be threatened and that there was a second university offering the course and that was National University, the Catholic University, and I just applied there. That started something going. My uncle, I think, contacted Jim's bishop and asked him to offer Jim a parish, which he did, telling Jim he wanted him and me to be married before he could become rector.

Jim wrote asking me to meet him that weekend and he said he was borrowing his Dad's car to take me on a drive around the Glens of Antrim and it was to be a special weekend. I went and then he told me it was now time to plan our marriage to take place shortly. Suddenly, the thoughts of home and how ill-prepared I was at such sudden notice panicked me and I had been really keen to spend the coming year studying and the big change that would occur in my life seemed too daunting. I loved Dublin but how would coping with parish life in the Maze suit me? It was one of the moments in my life when indecision and confusion overcame me and it was a truly traumatic moment. I told Jim I wasn't ready! We were both 28 years old and still playing hockey, he for the YMCA in Belfast, me for Railway Union in Dublin.

We parted, not knowing what our next move was going to be. But on my return to Dublin my uncle began to exert undue pressure on me. It irked me and I felt I was losing control over my life. I felt challenged over the prospect of not being able to enrol in Trinity for the HDipEd and then my future marriage was being forced on me and I wasn't ready. My uncle even assumed I was feeling physically unattracted to Jim and that made me smile inwardly. I approached UCD, intending to study for the year there.

A Jesuit priest, Father O'Cathain, interviewed me and he asked me why I wasn't, as a Protestant, applying to Trinity. I was taken unawares and blurted out that I was interested in becoming a Catholic and he then referred me to Father Gwynn, a high-ranking convert whose father was a staunch Anglican Trinity man. Furthermore, Father Gwynn was related to Archbishop George Simms, a good friend of mine from when I stayed with him and his wife in 1943 for my uncle's wedding. It seemed to be a sure way of extricating myself from a tricky situation but that is a separate tale. Here I need just to add that hearing what I was doing made Jim aware that he had lost me. We wrote one another a few more letters and it was to be many years before I heard news of him again.

When Anna and I visited Roger, her Beach Mission mentor, in Belfast in the mid-80s, Roger told me I could look up any old friends I liked so I rang Maureen, my friend from Training College days, and she was out but I spoke to her husband, Canon Noel Jackson, and he was really excited hearing from me as we'd never met but he said he'd heard so much about me. He knew about Jim and said they were good friends and that Jim had six sons and he'd be telling him he'd spoken to me and he asked me what children I had so that he could tell Jim. I said: 'Tell him I have one beautiful, gifted daughter who is the centre of my life'. A few years later I was visiting Beryl, the teacher with whom I shared lodgings in Dublin for many years. She told me Jim had contacted her and asked if he could visit her and hear about me.

Then, in the summer of 1990 I was on the Isle of Coll with Project Trust, the organisation under whose auspices Anna went on her gap year. One day a sailing ship from Belfast came ashore, and it was a Sailing School. The owner had been an officer in Burma with Major Maclean-Bristol who owned Project Trust, and he had taken his students across the sea and called to visit the major. They joined us in the Bar and I got talking to one of the students who said he came from the Maze and I told him I might have been the rector's wife there. To my surprise, he said he was the best friend of one of Jim's sons who was, like his Dad, a motor bike fanatic! He said he couldn't wait to tell his friend that he'd met his Dad's ex on the Isle of Coll.

Before Beryl had the stroke that she died of last year, she told me that Jim had died. Beryl herself and Maureen and Noel are now dead, too.