Part 2 Principles and Prejudices

Faith, Hope and . . .

“The danger would be that we become so watchful and

politically correct in not falling for the con men that we

may forget those who are relying on us . . .”

The woman in the red jacket did not have a closed mind. She wasn’t a killjoy, or someone who wanted to write off any celebration of Christmas. She didn’t have to go into intensive care if she saw Santa Claus in November, but she did draw the line at some things. And one of those things was charity Christmas cards.

She never sends them, she says, because only a fraction of what you pay for them goes to the cause. She says she knows this for a fact. And also, she doesn’t like the feel of it. She says, it’s like the people who used to ring bells and call a crowd if they were giving alms. Why didn’t those who want to support a charity do so quietly, as in the case of the Widow’s Mite, without drawing attention to it by sending a printed proof of their generosity to friends?

I didn’t agree. I thought that if you were going to spend maybe 50 pence on a card, many times over, then why not let a portion of that go to help a cause? And the fact that the charity’s name is printed on it isn’t really boasting and braying and saying how good we are, it’s reminding people of the charity in the most minimal way and possibly telling them of your commitment to it.

But the woman in the red jacket said that, although she accepted the purity of my motives, she felt it was a dangerous thing to do in many ways. Firstly, those of us who bought such cards were being conned because of the huge proportion that went to middlemen. Secondly, we might start feeling good and thinking that we had contributed in some significant way to a cause we believed in, whereas in fact we had only given a pittance.

The conversation was amicable and ended well. We both agreed to think about it.

To take just one charity of the many as an example, in my case I had already ordered my Christmas cards, as I always do, from the Irish Cancer Society, so I wasn’t going to think about the issue very deeply. Because, though I claim to have a terrifically open mind, this is something I don’t feel I will change my view about. But to be fair in terms of the discussion, I thought I’d ring and inquire how much of the money did go to the Irish Cancer Society, and how much got taken up along the way.

The Irish Cancer Society says that if you buy one of their cards through a shop, say for 50 pence, they will get 60 to 70 per cent of what you pay, in other words, 30-35 pence. Yes, they would get a higher percentage if you bought it directly from them, but they stress that they are more than happy to sell though the retail trade. They depend on it utterly to reach the great mass of people who go into shops to choose cards. They are happy to pay a percentage for the normal business of commerce and also to pay 21 per cent VAT. This is the way things are. It’s not as if there are any nefarious middlemen out there, hawking them around and taking a huge amount off the top.

So how much sheer profit do they make from those of us who buy Irish Cancer Society Christmas cards? They make £75,000-£80,000 profit. It’s very important to them, and, like many charities, they rely on it more and more heavily each year. They put this money into three areas, into research, into an education programme and into buying some badly needed hospital equipment for the diagnosis or treatment of cancer.

Their other big fund-raising effort is Daffodil Day and the money from that goes towards home-care services, night nurses and a freephone service. So it’s all earmarked – what they do with it and what they need it for, this money raised by people buying a Christmas card with their name on it. They sounded greatly alarmed that anyone might cease to support any worthwhile charity out of fear of being conned or of being dubbed a public do-gooder.

I was fair to the woman in the red jacket in that I thought about it a lot. She had asked me if there were any kind of Christmas cards I didn’t like, and there are. Open-minded tolerance doesn’t have to be so bland and wishy-washy that you beam at every bit of cardboard you open. I resent the male chauvinist pigs who send feminist cards as a tee-hee joke. I don’t like blasphemous cards or very big tasteful ones of buildings that nobody knows, or too many skating ladies on frozen lakes. But that’s it.

I don’t think any the less of anyone who is saving a whale or restoring the wing of some falling-down place. If my eye falls on the fact that someone’s card will give 30 pence to the Samaritans, or to fight famine, or to house the homeless, then I am pleased rather than annoyed. I certainly wouldn’t think that the sender wanted to be admired or praised for doing it.

Nor would I assume that they believed they had conquered the problem single-handed by placing the organisation on a sound financial footing. Thanks to television exposés and newspaper articles, we have been made aware of scams and false-hearted entrepreneurs who tug at our heart strings. The danger would be that we become so watchful and politically correct in not falling for the conmen that we may forget those who are relying on us at this time of year.

I advise people to buy a card in aid of charity. It’s more important really than finding a tasteful print, and some of those cards which aid good causes have many a tasteful print in their repertoire anyway.

The £80,000 at Christmas that the Irish Cancer Society will get from those of us who buy their cards will be spent on things that matter. And, at this time of year, when I think of family and friends who have died of cancer and, much, much more positively, of family and friends who have lived with cancer and have been cured on account of the research, education programmes and equipment . . . then, to me, there’s no better way of buying a greeting card.

Starkers

“I would say group sex was as far from their minds

as clog dancing”

She has a part-time job and they put all the money she earns in a kind of leisure fund. They buy the holiday from it and the music centre and the swinging seat for the garden. So this year they were looking through the brochures to decide where to go and her husband said he would really fancy two weeks on a naturist holiday. At first she thought this was looking at plants or wild life, then she realised that he didn’t know B from a bull’s foot about botany and what he was talking about was a nudist colony. That’s what he wanted, to go to some awful place with sand dunes and little huts where everyone was naked 24 hours a day.

She was much disturbed by the brochure he had sent for. There was a lot of reference to “individual” cabins, and “family” cabins. What did that mean? On a normal holiday they didn’t stress that you were going to have your own room in the hotel and not share it with any other couple who happened to be on the same package tour. Did this mean that you had the option of being an ordinary couple?

She wrote to me because her husband has gone mad and her friend has gone tight-lipped and maybe it’s the kind of thing I might have a view on. She says she’s 40 and quite ordinary, whatever that means. She has what she thought was a happy marriage; they have two children in their teens, children who have now outgrown the family holiday and want to be with their own friends, which is fine.

But was the norm group sex with people writhing away, all naked, all day and all night?

I was so flattered to be invited to get involved, rather than having to strain to hear what people were saying behind menus and in dark corners, that I wrote back immediately and asked her what her worst fear about the whole thing was and why her friend had become tight-lipped.

She wrote back. She didn’t really want advice as such, just a view. In other words, I wasn’t to make a federal case out of it. But her answers were as follows.

She was afraid he didn’t love her anymore. If he did, why would he want to go and gawp at naked women? She was afraid they would look idiotic and no one would talk to them. Or that somehow, for some unfathomable reason, they would be so desirable that hundreds of Swedish and German and Belgian naturists would fancy them to bits and want to go to bed with them all day and all night. Or that they might meet someone from home.

Her friend just said that the man was having a mid-life crisis and he only brought the matter up in order to be reassured that he was the greatest. The friend said that these things occurred in a marriage and were best slapped down and not encouraged. And that it had all to do with too much explicit sex and violence on television anyway.

She ended her letter saying: “I know you were never in a nudist colony yourself but still you might have a view”.

Wrong. Wrong. I was in a nudist colony myself, years ago in what they now call Former Yugoslavia. I was there for 14 hours and I advise her not to worry about a thing, to take no notice of the tight-lipped friend and to go with him.

It’s only a bit of wobbly flesh. Once she gets over the shock of thinking “those people have come down to breakfast without their clothes,” she’ll settle down and enjoy it fine. Let’s take her worries.

If he wants to gawp at naked women, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her any more and he can gawp at them anyway in magazines, on videos and at most resorts.

They won’t look any more idiotic than anyone else. I was so mortified at my nudist colony that I used to sit on seats with my handbag on my lap, my arms crossed across my chest and my chin in my hand, pretending I was deep in thought and sending out lizard glances through my sun glasses to see what was passing by.

And what was passing by was immensely reassuring. Men with gigantic stomachs hanging over not little satin briefs, but sort of lost, inoffensive-looking appendages. No problem for anyone there. And women with tanned skin and pendulous breasts. And of course the usual quota of Miss Worlds and Mr Universes that you see anywhere, but they are no more jealous-making naked than they are semi-clothed.

Now I was there in the line of duty so I went round with a notebook, interviewing people. And I would say group sex was as far from their minds as clog dancing. Lots of them had little naked children by the hand, they all talked a lot about being free and they referred to people who wore clothes as “textiles”. The people were textiles now, not the clothes.

It was very awkward eating meals; you would forget and let bits of hot food fall on you and somehow it seemed sort of awkward getting it off. And I used to stick to the chair. But that was all. If they met someone from home, well, then someone from home was there too, so no sweat.

On any holiday, people make compromises. For years I have seen women agree to go and watch a match on television; men agree to tour shops they find boring; friends go to the museums to please one and to the disco to please the other. We are kind to those we love and they to us; it’s not the end of the world to go on one holiday that you don’t fancy, to please someone you do. Next year she can choose.

The tight-lipped friend is another matter. The friend was no help to her at all. I advise this woman to tell her friend no more, to smile enigmatically and say “let’s talk no more about holidays”. And then she should go off and wobble and laugh with her husband in the naturist place and talk about silly old textiles, and being free, and remember to take lots of heavy duty sun cream for the bits that haven’t been exposed for a while, and not to sit down on hot benches for fear of roasting her bum.

Light Up and Live

“Today is Saturday and every time I hear a church bell ringing

I will think that it could have been his funeral Mass”

It’s great that he’s still alive. Still sailing out of side roads and lanes into the traffic. Still assuming that people who get out of their cars, shake him, shout at him and then burst into tears are just mad grown-ups. Seriously disturbed adults thinking they own the world because they drive cars. It’s much better that he’s alive and 13 and unrepentant than dead in a mortuary, awaiting burial this morning.

His parents will go about whatever they do on a Saturday morning; they will not be sitting stunned in a house, waiting for the car to come and take them to the church. His friends will be out with him whirling, swooping and trick-acting on their cycles as usual, looking for adventure and delighted to have wheels that might take them further afield to find it.

You might pass him today, he’ll be easier to see in the daylight, just as slippery and eager to get where he is going, with the same casual disregard for any rules of the road that he had on Tuesday night. But when it gets dark you won’t see him. He’ll be there all right, he’s a grown-up of 13, he doesn’t have to be in at Lighting Up Time. He can stay out way after nine, if his parents know where he is.

He will be heading home after dark in his fine dark jacket, his near-black jeans, on a bicycle without a lamp, without a rear light reflector, with no trace of luminous paint, with no glowing belt, no white scarf, no helmet and no worries. He will tell nobody about the near miss that he had on Tuesday night.

Who would he tell? Not his parents. They might darken their brows and sympathise with an unknown adult who had leaped from her car, shaken him, and then, with tears pouring down her face, assured him that he was only alive because she was driving at 25 miles an hour because it was raining. They might suggest buying some of these safety things like lamps and rear lights and they might cut short his wild and free cycling hours.

No, he wouldn’t tell them. He wouldn’t have thought it worth telling his mates. They’re all sick of us finger-wagging adults, shaking our heads, peering with our weak eyes at perfectly visible things and then blaming them because we are too feeble to see them.

They wouldn’t be interested in his brush with death, they’ve had it many a time. They tell the adult to chill out or get a life or, in the interests of speed, they say sure, yes, no problem, they’ll get a light tomorrow and thanks, just to get rid of us so that we can shuffle off to whatever geriatric unit mistakenly allowed us out to drive.

He is 13 and has no imagination. He is lucky enough not to have my imagination. Today is Saturday and every time I hear a church bell ringing I will think that it could have been his funeral Mass; whatever his parents normally do on a Saturday morning they are doing only because I am a timid driver and terrified of the rain making things more difficult to see than they already are.

I can almost hear myself talking to them, telling them how sorry I was, how hard I tried to avoid him. I wouldn’t even want to add to their grief by telling them that he was an irresponsible little devil, a danger to himself and others and that I was so much in the right it would make your head swim. Because their child would be dead and that is not the language to be used.

And there would be a picture of him on the mantelpiece and, for the rest of their lives, his brothers and sisters would wonder what he would have been like if he had grown up. And maybe his mother and father would have wondered, as the years went by, whether they could have done something more – like examined his bike every time he went out on it, or insisted that he wore reflective clothing if the little red light had come off the back.

Maybe they would. Or maybe they would have spent today, and the time that follows it, thinking about selfish motorists in big warm cars driving on a wet night and mowing down defenceless children. And there are many cases where parents are right to mourn and rage over children killed by drunks or speeders or even the preoccupied. But this would not have been one of them.

My fevered imagination can create scenes of family and friends trying to reassure me, trying to make me feel that there was nothing I could have done. I would think that I had taken up driving too late in life. Possibly, I would never get over the guilt.

So what is going to happen? I drive slowly already, I’m going to be a danger to other traffic after this. The boy? Is he kitted out in reflective gear, now astride a perfectly lit machine? Is he what? He thinks that because he sees the light of a car, the person in the car can see him.

I saved his life on Tuesday and I advise his parents to tell him that he is wrong. He is only 13 and he won’t listen to anyone else. He won’t listen to me – unstable, tearful and loud. He won’t listen to the National Safety Council – gang of grown-ups, like school and the guards and everyone else, conspiring to prevent you having any kind of a life. But he has to listen to his parents just in order to have a bit of peace.

If they say: “You don’t get on that bike again until you have proper lights and proper luminous strips” and if they mean it, then it’s going to be such a hassle every time . . . he’ll do it.

If his parents themselves wore a bit of fluorescent something on them, even if they were crossing the road to post a letter, he would see it as the norm, not as some kind of weakling nonsense, the hallmark of a nervous child instead of a daredevil grown-up which is what you are at 13.

At 13 you don’t read statistics and, even if someone else reads them forcibly to you, you don’t believe they apply to you. The latest figures the National Road Safety Council has for cyclists killed on our roads refer to 1992. That year 35 cyclists were killed; 136 were very seriously injured; 609 were just injured.

At 13 you wouldn’t think about this, it would be just one more sad thing, like war and famine and things that happen in other places. But if I had a 13-year-old child who was intending to cycle anywhere tonight, I wouldn’t care how much family aggro it caused, I’d dress him up like the Kish lighthouse. I’d have him looking like a Christmas tree if necessary – just so that he could be seen by the well-meaning folk as well as the drunks and the speeders who will undoubtedly be out this weekend as well.

In Loco Parentis

“Were they mad to let her have this fellow in her room? Were they mad if they made a scene about it?”

This woman is 47 and her best friend is also 47 and, long ago, went to live in America. The friend in America kept in touch – pictures of family, long Christmas letters, visits every three years when they came to Europe.

Then she wrote with a suggestion. Her daughter, who would be 17, would love to come to London for six months to do one of those posh secretarial courses that also involved grooming courses and learning how to arrange flowers. It would look awfully good when she came back to the States. It would give her confidence and smooth some of the rougher edges.

The friend in America said that the girl was very young and silly, and it would be a huge relief to her if she could stay in the London friend’s house – as a paying guest.

The friend in America had read between the lines; she had realised that times were hard and cash was short, and that a paying guest would be just the thing. Especially an extrovert 17-year-old girl who would love everything and be a bit of a help around the house as well.

The London friend and her husband had no children, so they inquired well in advance what time the girl should come home in the evenings, whether she could travel on the Underground after dark and if they should offer her wine at meals. They didn’t think about the one question which they needed to know how to answer.

The 17-year-old girl arrived. She was glowing with health and vitality and looked like an advertisement for orange juice and fibre. She had perfect manners and declared herself very pleased with London, her new home and her training course.

Eleven nights after she came to stay, she brought a boy home with her and took him to her room. The London friend and her husband were up all night, trying to think what to do. They could hardly knock on the girl’s door and ask her to order the young man out of the house. Would they tell her in the morning that this occurrence must never happen again? Would they call the States and ask for guidance from her parents?

Were they being ridiculously old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy? Was this perhaps the way all young people carried on nowadays? Should they just check that she had been to the family planning clinic and practised safe sex? Would their obligation, and interest, end there?

If only they had been at home the previous evening, they could have indicated that it was not the expected thing for a guest to invite another guest to her room, but they had already told her that she was welcome to bring friends to the house. They had not meant male friends, to sleep.

So the dawn came, eventually, and they said nothing to the girl because they didn’t know what to say; their ideas hadn’t crystallised.

They were torn between wanting to be the good sports, the tolerant people, the liberals who took all that kind of thing casually, and, on the other side, the middle-aged couple to whom this girl’s parents had given a daughter in the understanding that they would look after her. The words in loco parentis had been used in a letter. It literally meant in place of a parent.

So didn’t they have a duty to know what the parents would have done under such circumstances, and then done something similar? They tried to read what the parents would have done. They voted Republican in the States which didn’t give them any real indication. The father was a lawyer, the mother an interior decorator. It gave no hint of moral values and standpoint.

Years ago, when the London friend and the American friend had been together, of course they had got up to things. But they had been over 20 then. Not 17. But then, hadn’t the world changed in those years? And anyway, weren’t there always things that your parents were better off not knowing even if you were 50 and your parents 90?

As people unable to reach a decision, they did an intelligent thing. They left the house early next morning so as not to face the 17-year-old and the young man that she was either going to invite to breakfast or else bundle out the door. They asked their friends.

It’s 1993. Were they mad to let her have this fellow in her room? Were they mad if they made a scene about it? They liked the girl, they could do with the rent. They didn’t want to set the child adrift. They didn’t want to have her staying with them fuming and mutinous. They didn’t want to encourage adult, and possibly indiscriminate, relationships in a girl who might not be old enough to handle them. They didn’t want to tell tales and have her shipped home.

There was no use in saying it was discourteous to bring an uninvited guest back to stay since everyone knew we weren’t talking about courtesy, we were talking about sex. It was “asked-for advice”.

I said she should ring the American friend immediately and say that, when they were making the checklist of things, like a glass of wine with dinner and what time she could travel on the Underground, she had forgotten to ask about having guys stay over. As if it hadn’t happened yet. Then if she got an anguished squawk of “certainly not”, she could pass this message on.

If she got a laid-back “what the hell; it’s the end of the 20th century”, she could think again and decide whether she wanted to go along with it or not. That way the loco parentis duty would have been fulfilled. If she were the 17-year-old’s real mother, she’d have to make up her mind about things the way parents all over the world have to make up their minds, in the knowledge that whatever they do will be wrong.

But what she and her husband should not do is to lose another night’s sleep over it. They must decide and act. There is probably no absolute right or wrong whatever they decide to do. In six months that girl will be old enough to make up her own mind.

They should ask for no more advice. What they were getting was an almost evenly divided “of course not” or “let them at it”.

When you find yourself believing the last person you spoke to, you are in no position to make a decision. I think those of us who occasionally act in the place of real parents have as much right to make a mess of it as their own mothers and fathers do. But we have no right to dither and let them think, however accurately, that we don’t know what we’re doing.

Shady Dealers

“How is he to know that society thinks what he does is wrong, and that his fellow men and women do not believe it’s good to make money out of shady financial set-ups?”

They rang up and asked would we come to supper next week. They were having a few friends round to meet this man . . . we didn’t know him by any chance? No, but we knew his name. He was in business in a big way and then that business collapsed, owing a lot of money to people who had invested in it. These weren’t friends of his or shareholders or gamblers who had taken a chance. They were people who thought it was an ordinary place to put their savings and now they had lost them.

The thing is that this man’s lifestyle hasn’t changed very much, from what we hear.

I didn’t want to go to a party to meet him, so I said I wasn’t free that night. Oh dear, what a huge statement of moral principle there, you will say. There’s real courage and commitment in telling a social lie, right? But I didn’t have the arrogance – or what others might call courage – to say to people, who had asked me to supper, that I disapproved of their having invited such a man to their house. I don’t have the words to say a sentence about not wanting to share a room or a meal with someone who, from all reports, thinks little of having left other people’s lives in ruin.

It’s not because I am so fair-minded and generous that I’m giving him the benefit of doubt or anything. In fact, I’m almost certain he’s a selfish go-getter who would open another company in his wife’s name without a backward glance, if he thought he could get away with it.

It’s not that I’m afraid I would be unpopular if I were to say that it’s wrong to treat people who cheat as half-heroes; to nod and wink and say wouldn’t we all have done it, if we could.

But it’s the gratuitous criticism that I would find hard to say. I would hate someone to tell me they wouldn’t come to my house because they didn’t like one of my friends. Similarly, if I were to discover later that someone had a deep-seated objection to another guest, then I would greatly prefer if they had made an excuse and not turned up. So I was doing as I would be done by.

Blameless, I thought.

Three other people I know were invited to the same party. One, a woman, found the vocabulary I couldn’t find and said she couldn’t possibly go because she so strongly disapproved of his behaviour. The second, a man, said he’d be delighted to go. When he meets the financier, he is going to ask him face to face how he can live with the fact that other people now have no reasonable living, due to him.

The third, a woman, said I had gone off my head. What right had I to pass judgement on other people? Did I operate a Back to Basics policy in relation to every guest, at every event, vetting them to know were they guilty of anything that offended a chic mode of behaviour before I agreed to join their number? She said, for all she knows, half the people she meets socially could beat their wives, falsify their tax returns, drive drunk and put the milk bottle on the table and yet she doesn’t take pretentious decisions about whether or not she will admit them to her company.

“Would you seriously advise people not to go to a social gathering where they know they are going to meet him?” she asked, eyes round in amazement.

Yes, I think I would.

I am almost certain.

She says I am being judgemental in the extreme. We have no idea what is going on in his mind; he could be giving money back to people secretly, hand over fist. Is he meant to go around wearing a hair shirt with a bell around his neck announcing his unclean arrival everywhere, so that he doesn’t offend people like me who might accidentally be in the same room as him?

She said you wouldn’t go out very often in Ireland if you were to check the credentials of everyone in the room. And perhaps there are people who mightn’t like to meet you. Far better, she says, to keep an open mind about such things, meet everyone, smile at everyone. After all, you don’t have to live with them or write them a reference.

But how is he to know that society thinks what he does is wrong, and that his fellow men and women do not believe it’s good to make money out of shady financial set-ups? Does not the business of everyone accepting an invitation to meet him and smile at him not reinforce his feelings that his way of going on is perfectly acceptable?

I’m all for an easy life and, if I were to meet him casually somewhere, I think I would be civil, certainly in someone else’s home. But I wouldn’t go to meet him and I don’t think it’s despicable to pretend unavailability. I admire the courage of the man who said he would accept the invitation and then have a confrontation. But is it fair? On anyone? On the host? On the other guests? Even on the crooked financier, who may be under the impression that he had been invited for a pleasant night out?

I admire the courage of the woman who would state her reasons for not going, but she reminds me too much of another woman I know who says, accusingly, that I Speak As I Find. It has never really been a wise thing to do in terms of personal relationships.

And I’m not entirely sure that I admire myself in the middle of all this; mine is certainly the easiest option. But I have thought about it a lot. Suppose everyone had taken my advice. Suppose they had all said they weren’t free that evening. Then the gathering would not be taking place.

Suppose they were all strong-minded enough not to go out and meet him but gentle enough not to damn by association the host who had invited them . . . then there would be no supper party. Life would go on, the crooked guy would see fewer smiling faces around him than, perhaps, he is used to seeing. I’m almost certain I’m right. The only trouble is that I keep getting a whiff of the Daughters of the American Revolution, with visions of social registers and people being blackballed if they are bankrupt. It would make you think of all those years when people were not allowed into the royal enclosure at Ascot if they were divorced until, suddenly, that included all the royals and the goal-posts were moved.

He’s not in jail, he hasn’t been prosecuted, he hasn’t lost all his assets. I wouldn’t lose any sleep if he lost a bit of social life and didn’t find that everyone accepted that what he did was normal business behaviour.

Teetotal Tolerance

“Publicans, who used to collapse like a Bateman cartoon

if anyone asked for coffee, now want to know if you

want decaf or cappuccino”

A very agreeable, social sort of man, he says he won’t come to Ireland for this particular gathering because he couldn’t bear all the flak he will get about not taking a drink. He remembers Ireland in the old days, he says, when you brailled your way from the early Bloody Mary to the lunch-time pints and everyone was defined by the amount they could put away, while abstainers were mocked as Holy Joes, Cute Hoors or possibly Not Real Men.

Not the place for a man, four years into a different way of life, he says. Why draw it on himself? He’s not afraid that he’ll weaken or anything; it’s just that he couldn’t take all the explanations, the defensive attitude he will have to adopt, the rationalising, the assuring people that he doesn’t object to their lifestyle, it’s just that his own is not the same. He’s been here before, he says; he knows of what he speaks. No, life is too short to take on that hassle. He’s going to miss the reunion.

I advise him to think again and ask a few people, as well as myself, before he pleads an excuse not to meet classmates who were great pals in the years gone by. He may be very pleasantly surprised. The Ireland of his student days, 20 odd years ago, which he revisited 10 years ago, is not today’s Ireland regarding attitudes to drink.

He will not find people calling him Matt Talbot or Father Mathew if he asks for mineral water. They will not ask for an explanation, nor will they want one. And best of all, they will not turn red, watery eyes on him and sob into their own drinks about how they wished they had his strength. There are lots of nice pink livers in Ireland.

Ah, but Maeve was always one to see what she wanted to see, he says. I would like him to come and meet his fellow students so I could be expected to create a rose-tinted world for him where people are mature and wise and tolerant. This is not what he hears.

Right, I tell him, this is what I hear and see and notice. I notice that pubs, which love selling soft drinks anyway and always thrived on the mixers because they constitute almost pure profit, not attracting any tax, now have a whole rake of alcohol-free beers and low-alcohol lagers, and they are being wooed senseless by the various mineral-water manufacturers, dying to get their particular shade of bottle and label in.

Publicans, who used to collapse like a Bateman cartoon if anyone asked for coffee, now want to know if you want decaf or cappuccino. In recent years, I have not heard a barman make a joke about serving a Real Man a non-alcoholic drink. I haven’t seen a sigh, or heard a groan. I have never heard an explanation about someone being a Pioneer, it being Lent, or the breathalyser, or the price of gargle being offered. Maybe I don’t go to enough macho bars but I do go to a reasonable cross-section and in recent times I have never heard anyone being challenged after ordering the drink of his or her choice.

I agree that years ago the order would go, “Four pints, two gin-and-tonics, three large Paddies and a Cidona for your man!” Your man was thereby marked as being outside the tribe. Nowadays it’s just as often the reverse; it could be a round of white wine and soda and many varieties of non or low-alcohol drinks and someone saying apologetically, “Do you mind if I have a short, it has been a bad day?”

Like smoking. People don’t say they’ve given up apologetically. The apology is from the one who asks for the ashtray. I told the man who thinks that attitudes are frozen, that when I gave up smoking I was afraid to answer the telephone in case I had to have a cigarette before I spoke; I was unused to the experience of one without the other. Not a good example, he says. The phone wouldn’t take me by the throat and say I was no fun without a cigarette – go on, have just one.

But I told him that he was guilty of over-dramatising himself. Everyone he will meet at his reunion will have read the bad news about how many units are safe per week. Some of them, admittedly, may have decided to take no notice, but they will know about them, they will not think he is wearing a hair-shirt and chains around his middle if he doesn’t lower a bottle of sherry at the reception. Some of his colleagues and friends will have read the tests under the heading “Are you an alcoholic”? and by question three realised that they should be in treatment. Some will have done something, some will have said these questionnaires are run by some backlash pressure group. But they will have read them. There will be colleagues who have had friends die of drink-related illnesses, or passed over for promotion because of being a bit unreliable in that department.

He will discover that the liquid lunch is no longer a permanent feature of Irish middle-class life in the mainstream, as it might have been when he left. Not an eyebrow is raised if a captain of industry or a politician or even a successful journalist asks for a glass of water; heads will not wag. They will not say that’s what has him where he is, either for good or evil. It’s just one more choice people make. Like having no car and walking to work can be as high in the pecking order as having a car the size of a house. I advise him to give it a lash.

The profession that he is in has changed. Its ideas of machismo have altered greatly and not just because his colleagues have become middle-aged. New attitudes are all the more apparent among the younger generation. He may not find Ireland an entirely pluralist society but at least he will find his countrymen and women broad-minded enough to know that we owe no explanations for what forms of pleasure or madness we deny ourselves. And he will also have a great time.

Sense and Censure

“One day the mother or father will meet a sympathetic

prelate or friend who will say something simple . . . but

it will be too late”

Their only daughter was married in a far-off land last May. Neither of her parents was there. They couldn’t attend a ceremony which was a sacrilege and a farce.

The man was already married. Well, he had gone through a form of “divorce” of course. His first marriage was over. “Over” was a word people used now when it suited them to say that a binding commitment was about to be abandoned for something marginally more interesting.

They had no personal hostility toward the man himself, but they will not allow you to call him their son-in-law. They had actually liked him when their daughter had brought him home, when they hadn’t realised that he was already a married man.

They would never accuse him of having seduced their daughter, or having made false promises. She had known from the very outset what the situation was and had gone along willingly. Don’t get them wrong: they weren’t casting him as a villain and her as a helpless wronged woman.

But it’s the principle of the thing.

You have to have principles and stick to them; it’s easy to shake your head and wag your finger at the deterioration of standards in other people and in other places. The crunch comes when it’s in your own life. They are being tested, like the early Christians were tested – worship the Emperor and your life will be spared, say that you believe in the One True God and you will be thrown to the lions.

They had to stand up for what they believed was right. They had to tell her that it was no marriage and they couldn’t lend it credibility and authority by attending it, by regarding it as anything except what it was.

Now they’d like you to know that it would have been much easier to have gone. Much. It wasn’t a question of being afraid of what the neighbours would say, or what the priests in the parish would think. This was no stance taken for fear of public opinion. They are in their 50s; they don’t consider themselves religious maniacs.

They just think they have a duty to say – however hard it is to say it – that their daughter has broken the rules of their faith and they will not go along with it.

If they truly believe this, then why can’t they let her break the rules? They are not their daughter’s keepers.

They say: you wouldn’t look aside if your child stole or cheated or was a drunken driver.

But surely they couldn’t compare any of these things with marrying a man she loved, according to her own conscience?

They could and did, because the same situation prevailed: their daughter was in Mortal Sin and in danger of going to Hell for eternity. If they were to pretend that nothing was amiss, they would be helping their daughter towards damnation.

They found it alarming that people should say that Hell was all gone now in the new teaching of the church. Where did people find this comforting view? They admitted that there had been some changes: the Latin Mass, the nature of guardian angels, the rules on fast and abstinence – and they were not against these changes. Please don’t believe they were members of some Old Guard resisting every forward step.

But the whole purpose of being on earth was to work for Salvation, wasn’t it? And no one ever said it was going to be easy.

And it’s not Victorian, you know. It’s not as if they don’t mention her name, or refuse to acknowledge that she exists. They sent her a letter at Christmas and she sent them one. She also wrote in the New Year and said she was expecting a child in the summer. They haven’t replied to that letter yet.

Now of course they’re not going to take it out on an innocent child. The danger of having any kind of standards is that people will paint you as unfeeling ogres. They don’t have stereotyped bigoted beliefs that the child will be illegitimate or anything. Such a word isn’t in their vocabulary any more than it is in the law.

Yes, it would have been different if this man had his marriage annulled. Of course it would. Then it would be a question of no previous marriage having existed. Then he would have been free to marry in a church and everything would have been all right.

But would they not agree that the man was being honourable in admitting that his first marriage of seven years had existed rather than finding a series of excuses and explanations to prove that it hadn’t?

No, they could not agree with this, they would have to think that, since he knew his first marriage was a real one, he should also know that it was not capable of being dissolved.

I think I am presenting their view fairly. But I have met their daughter in a far-off land. A girl living miles from home because she could not bear the tension and stress that living near her parents would involve.

She lives in a big housing estate in a sprawling suburb of a city that she hasn’t really come to know and make her own. Her husband has a job with long hours, meaning he is away from home a good deal more than either of them would like.

She has two jobs, one in a flower shop in the mornings, and in the afternoons she types theses and manuscripts on a word processor. Her mother does not know about either of these jobs – the letters she wrote home were deliberately short and spare on detail. Her parents had told her that they could not pretend to assume a delight and interest in her everyday life when she knew how grievously they disapproved of the whole situation.

She is desperately lonely. She plays Irish music all the time. She made a journey of two buses and a train to attend an Irish book signing. Her neighbours who are having children have letters of encouragement from home. There are future grannies and grandfathers saving the fare to come out and see infants and toddlers. A group of her friends have bought a video camera to share so that they can send pictures home. She joins in because it would look so strange not to – but she will have no one to send the video cassette to. Yes, she does have friends back in Ireland; but it would seem somehow even sadder to send one to them and not to her home.

You don’t have to be super-intelligent to know that it will all be made up some day. But when? When the parents are in their late 70s? 80s? When they are old and sad at the lost years, the lack of a daughter and grandchildren?

One day the mother or father will meet a sympathetic prelate or friend who will say something simple: if there is a God then a God would not want a parent to cut off a child because of a principle.

But it will be too late. A lifetime of memories and reunions and love will have been allowed to slip away. They will take their dog for a walk and wish they had grandchildren to push along the pier on a Sunday when they came home for a visit. She will play more and more Irish tunes and make her homeland into a fantasy island. He will work longer and harder hours to buy her the things he hopes will make her happy.

And all the time a principle will have been honoured by two good people who truly believed that this was the time of their testing.

Speedy Dispatch

“That’s something we should remove from the national

psyche . . . the notion that a letter might be an intrusion”

A woman said to me the other day that she had voted Labour all her life until the last election, when she literally couldn’t give a vote to either candidate in Dublin because she was so utterly fed up with the campaign antics and the in-fighting. She also feared that Labour was sort of turning into Fianna Fáil. So she voted for the little Green girl, as she called her. But she didn’t feel good about it.

Nobody would ever know what had changed a loyalty that she would have once thought of as unswerving. The party would see its vote down and not really know what had been in individual hearts and minds when it came to voting time. What a pity, she said, that we can’t put down our reasons for voting for or against a party, or candidate, on the back of the ballot paper.

Well, for the price of a stamp, she could express her views. She hadn’t thought of writing letters to them, she said – politicians don’t want to hear long, hectoring tirades from people out there, especially people who didn’t vote for them?

That may be true, but such a letter doesn’t have to be long or hectoring or even a tirade. Politicians, if they are in touch with reality, should want to hear a brief, reasoned explanation as to why they have lost your support. Even if they think you are barking. And suppose 10,000 people wrote to Dick Spring and said that these were their views? Then he would have to take it on board. And suppose 10,000 people who once had Fianna Fáil blood coursing through their veins wrote to Albert Reynolds and said that they really felt the business of granting passports didn’t have a kosher explanation and, even though he may well be as pure as the driven snow, it had produced an aura of Banana Republicanism about it that was unsuited to the Soldiers of Destiny – well, then Albert would know that a lot of people out there were uneasy and cynical.

And suppose 10,000 people wrote to Mary Harney saying that they could no longer believe that the PDs had any new philosophy because all they seemed to do was shoot themselves, and each other, in the foot. And then 10,000 people could write to John Bruton saying that since the Tallaght Strategy had been let go, it was very hard to know what Fine Gael was for – only what it was against.

These are the kinds of things people say in conversation. They don’t meet the people who could do anything about them, all they can do is vote for them and the woman is absolutely right to feel frustrated. How will the politicians ever know the real reasons for discontent, disappointment and the eventual falling off of support unless we tell them?

Of course they can read the papers and watch the television analysis and listen to the radio programmes. But these are the views of radio commentators, chat show hosts, newspaper columnists. On vox pop or access programmes, these are the voices of the committed, the politically active, the extroverted, and often the notice boxes who want to have their say and be heard saying it. The so-called Ordinary People, whose support politicians are trying to get, are often a mystery, since their considered view is not adequately expressed.

They are wooed with promises of a better life, of lower taxes, of more jobs and ever-bigger hauls from the bottomless pits of Europe. There isn’t time in the sound-bite system to talk about idealism and hopes and dreams of what this country might be like. The speeches are a one-way business. They tell us what they think we want to hear. If we haven’t told them what we want them to do, then is it fair to expect them to know?

Most of us have some sort of idea of how we would like the country to be run, and one of the parties must come nearest to that hope. So why don’t we write and tell that party truthfully what we think it could do?

The woman who won’t write to Dick Spring dismissed this argument. He would just think it was from a crank, a nutter; he would move on through the letter wanting to know what particular favour she wanted. He would think she was a professional letter-writer, a person with time on her hands and an outsize ego. Why bother? It would be put in the wastepaper basket, or else answered courteously, in a meaningless, time-consuming way, by someone who dealt with these things.

But my point is this. If he got thousands of these letters, they could not be ignored. By nature, we are not a shrugging, cynical race which has abandoned the running of things to the cowboys. We have always been able to express our views and this is what makes us more interesting and volatile than many another race. But I think we have forgotten the art of the letter, as the old-fashioned manuals used to call it, and we have forgotten the power of many, many letters.

We are bad at writing thank you notes, cards of congratulations and even fan letters. We think they won’t want to be bothered hearing all that. This is madness. People love to be praised, they love it to bits, we all love it to bits.

So that’s something we should remove from the national psyche . . . the notion that a letter might be an intrusion.

And, if something has gone disastrously wrong, if we have stopped voting for the party we always supported, I think it’s courteous, practical, reasonable and helpful to write a letter explaining why. That way they won’t have to interpret the polls, the pundits and the rumour factory. That way they will actually know, from people with the courage to include their name and address, and the restraint to keep their tone civilised and positive.

The woman who wished she could express her views on her ballot paper was underselling herself. There wouldn’t be room. She would need at least one side of a sheet of paper and we should write the letters now.

Naming the Criminal

“Rape is a crime and must be considered one. To ignore it

and just cross the street when she sees this man again is

to diminish, even in his eyes, what he did”

She is 20 and she doesn’t know me, but I know a great friend of her mother’s. She was at a party three weeks ago, and she went there with this fellow. He wasn’t her boyfriend, but he was a friend.

There was a lot of messing about, quite a bit of drink, but she was definitely not drunk. People began to drift into different rooms. She was disappointed that the party seemed to be falling to pieces, but her friend seemed very pleased. He pulled her onto a sofa and raped her.

Nobody heard her shouting for help because there was loud music. She had been dancing with him earlier but she swears she had not encouraged him in any way. They hadn’t even kissed each other, for God’s sake. He was much bigger and stronger than she was. He told her throughout that she was dying for it.

She got away from the party and came home. She couldn’t sleep. She was frightened and hurt. And she also felt that it was her own fault.

When her mother found her the next morning, still sitting beside her window and in great distress, she reluctantly told her what had happened.

Her mother was hugely sympathetic and supportive. She gave all the hugging and moral encouragement she could. Not a word of blame, or regret that she had gone to such a party.

And then when the girl said she was going to tell the guards, her mother’s face froze.

“You can’t possibly do that,” she said in astonishment. “This has nothing to do with the guards, it wasn’t a stranger that came and raped you, it was a boy you went out with. You knew what you were doing when you went to the party with him. Nobody would call that rape, they’ll say it was a normal and even reasonable end to the evening.”

Now the mother doesn’t think it was a normal, reasonable end to the evening, but she thinks that’s what the authorities will say. It’s like calling the guards to a fight between husband and wife . . . they’ll have to say, regretfully, that it’s a domestic matter. And if it gets to the courts? Well then, surely, there will be all kinds of questioning and investigating and does she really want to explain the night’s activities, in detail, in open court, to people who will all assume that it was a matter of consent anyway?

“You mean he’s going to get away with it? Isn’t it a crime?” the girl asked.

“You don’t have to see him again, and the trauma of the whole thing would be as bad as the rape,” said her mother, who was utterly sincere and had no hidden agenda about fear of publicity or scandal or anything like that.

And this week, with all the publicity about the case in England where the King’s College student, Austin Donnellan, refused to submit to a college disciplinary punishment and insisted that, if he had to be charged with rape, then he should be tried in open court, has seemed very relevant to them.

In the Old Bailey in London, Austin Donnellan was entirely cleared of rape because it was decided that the girl was drunk and willing. Hate mail has gathered in sackfuls against the girl who had wrongly accused the male student who was brave enough to give his name, even though hers has been kept a secret. It seemed to prove what a lot of people suspected, that women were quite enthusiastic and then regretted it and then cried rape.

The mother and daughter read the reports and were glad they had not filed a complaint on the friend who had taken her to the party – even though he had proved to be such a false friend.

If it had been a stranger . . . now, that would have been totally different, they told each other. Then she would have been blameless. No one could have said it was all her fault.

If it were defined as rape at all, it would be called “date rape”, with all the complicity that that term implies.

That is not a phrase that should be used.

We don’t talk about dating as part of our normal conversation in this country. You say someone is going out with someone on Friday, not dating them, or that people are seeing each other, not dating each other. Why choose this phrase to cover such a hugely controversial and important aspect of rape? The expression “date rape” minimises rape. It is also misleading – 80 per cent of the rapes committed in Ireland are by people known to the victim.

In cases of “stranger rape” – to use another made-up expression – women are much more likely to report it. It’s not as hard to describe violation by a totally unknown person, and there isn’t the lurking fear that it might be seen to have been condoned or encouraged.

Of those who consult the Rape Crisis Centre in Dublin, only 30 per cent will go to the guards and, of that number, only 10 per cent will go to court. The centre agrees with this mother and daughter’s view, that rape by a stranger is somehow more socially acceptable, if you could use such a phrase in this context.

Some of the girl’s friends are encouraging her to bring charges against him. If he had assaulted her in some other way, she would; if he had robbed her, she would have no hesitation. She was hesitating because she feared that the intimacy he forced upon her would be regarded as part of something agreed between them.

Some of her friends have said that statistics have shown that someone who rapes is likely to rape again. All right, so she might not see him again, but what about all the other women he is likely to meet in his life? Does she not owe them any responsibility?

Her mother has heard that going to court is a nightmare. The victim is not legally represented, she appears only as witness for the State. There are proposals to change that, but this is the way it stands at the moment. The girl can look at a group of wigs and not know which one is for her and which one is against.

If she doesn’t accuse him of rape, she may forget it more easily.

Or, if she does accuse him, perhaps she will have somehow exorcised it and played a part in establishing that rape is a crime and must be considered one. To ignore it and just cross the street when she sees this man again is to diminish, even in his eyes, what he did.

She doesn’t hate men, nor does she want them branded as beasts. She is torn between the beliefs that it is best forgotten or best tackled.

I’d advise her to tell.

Too many people have not told things over the years because it was going to cause more trouble, or get too involved, or cause more heartbreak, than it was worth. Often they think that to report a crime such as rape would be a sort of act of revenge, and therefore almost as tainted as the original offence.

Always, in the case of reporting someone you know, there is a huge conflict of interests. But if she were to ask the people who know, the people who work for the Rape Crisis Centre, she would hear words and statistics that would give her courage. The courage to know that sleeping dogs – if they are rapists – should not be allowed to lie.

Young Nicks

“If parents gloat over not paying VAT on something, shouldn’t a child try to escape the fare on the DART?”

They were in the carpark, unpacking the trolley from the supermarket. Her nine-year-old son was being very helpful as usual and, as he went to return the trolley to the queue, she saw him pausing to open a Kit Kat.

“Hey, where did you get that?” she asked.

He reddened and said nothing.

“Did you steal it?” she asked. There was no reply.

“You can’t take things without paying for them.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, with his head down.

The mother said it was a very long moment. She didn’t want to force him to go back with it and say he had stolen it. She didn’t want to say anything about how shaming it would be if he had been caught, because that made the being caught bit worse than the actual act of taking it.

But she thought, come on, he’s only a kid. Kids like Kit Kats. Supermarkets leave them where kids can see them, to drive them mad with desire for them. Supermarkets build in the cost of kids nicking things. It’s not a federal crime. She should lighten up and let it go. Otherwise, when it comes to really heavy things where she wants to lay down the law – like about drugs and motor-bikes – she won’t have any authority. He’ll always think of her as a nit-picking mother, who thinks that the most minimal things are major deals.

So after what seemed like a lot of thought, she said: “All right this time, but don’t do it again, you get pocket money and that’s what it’s for”. And he cheered up, finished the bar, and got into the car companionably beside her.

For him, the incident was over. For his mother, it was not. “Did I do the right thing?” she asked. A lot of people said yes.

They said that supermarkets were almost open season. They said that big companies like that expected to lose the odd bar here and there and wouldn’t even know how to ring through an empty wrapper paper if it were returned by a humiliated nine-year-old and his gaoler mother.

They said there was stealing and stealing. A child swiping a chocolate bar from a supermarket shelf wasn’t the real thing. Now, if he had taken one from another child, it really would have been stealing. Then she would have something to worry about. It showed a totally different sort of nature if a kid stole from another kid’s schoolbag or coat pocket. But from a shelf of them? No.

And then there were those who said that maybe it was a sign that something was wrong. She shouldn’t look on it as a simple act of shoplifting, but as an indication that the boy wasn’t getting enough love or attention at home. She thought about that seriously and decided that, as a theory, it didn’t hold any water.

Theirs was a happy home. There had been no new arrival to wipe his eye, no latchkey child syndrome, no absent father, no rows, no fear that the marriage wasn’t stable. In all honesty she couldn’t see that it was a cry for help. Just a cry for a Kit Kat. And a refusal to spend his pocket money on it.

And other reassuring friends said: “It wasn’t as if it was money. Don’t worry if they only take small things, that’s natural. Now money from someone’s handbag, that would be different”.

But she asks herself, suppose it is a handbag next time?

If he thinks she’ll keep an eye on him in supermarkets from now on, might he not help himself to the coins from her bag? Or, a thousand times worse, from someone else’s handbag? And why would it be worse from someone else’s bag? The amount would be the same, the action would be the same.

She realised that it’s the shame element that would make one theft greater than the other. What kind of morality was that?

I’d advise that she should have gone back with the Kit Kat. Not with a heavy moral tone and drumbeats of doom, but quite casually, saying: “Look, we forgot to pay for this, sorry . . . Can we pay for it now?” Then the point would have been made.

There couldn’t be à la carte nicking, some of which was tolerated and some of which wasn’t.

Children are very logical. Why, if the odd bar of chocolate is okay, wouldn’t the odd bottle of sherry be fine for the adult to take? If parents gloat over not paying VAT on something, shouldn’t a child try to escape the fare on the DART?

People will say that times have changed since my youth, when a girl of 12 was reported to the school for having stolen a packet of clear gums from a station stall. And we thought she was terrible. Nowadays, kids go into shops and hoover up what’s available, they tell you.

But that’s not what anyone would call the march of progress or the dawn of a new enlightenment. And it is not the way parents should view it. Of course it’s easier when you have no children, things are more absolute, the areas less grey. But even those with no children love them and want the best for them. If I were with a nine-year-old, I’d go back to the till with a cheery face and no post-mortems over a nicked bar of chocolate.

You can’t expect children to look into your face and wonder is this kind of theft acceptable – or not – unless there are some guidelines, however old-fashioned, laid down, for them.

Caste Struggle

“A sense of tribal mistrust will never be solved by a new batch of statistics, however accurate and however damning

to the racist war of words”

It was a long way to the reading at the Writers and Readers Festival in Birmingham. We passed two mosques, endless rows of shops selling saris, very sweet sugary confectionery, stores with bags of flour to make chapati-type bread. The children playing in the school-yards were of all colours. The signs over shops and business premises were in foreign lettering. It would not take a fleet of detectives to work out that Birmingham is a multinational city.

The remarks of Tory MP Winston Churchill – who, because of his name, would get media attention if he only read the telephone book – hit Birmingham hard. He spoke of a “relentless flow” of immigrants into the country and of “our northern cities being over 50 per cent immigrant”. He called for a halt to immigration, and said that the face of Britain was changing in ways that did not have the consent of its people.

Like Enoch Powell’s famous “rivers of blood” speech all those years ago, his words provoked both alarm and fear. They had to be taken back, of course, explained, and elaborated. He wrote to The Times: “When I spoke about our northern cities being 50 per cent immigrant, I only meant the inner cities”. This, when his figures were immediately challenged.

The British Home Office had to come out and pat people down by assuring them that only the families and dependants of British subjects were being allowed to immigrate, and denied that it was a “relentless flow”. So it meant that everyone was apologising for the existence of Asians in the country and trying to say there weren’t nearly as many there, nor on the way, as Winston Churchill had said.

And then began the pub talk. A latter-day Alf Garnett said that maybe the man had a point. Why shouldn’t such things be discussed? This wasn’t what they had fought two World Wars for.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time for Mary. It coincided with the week she had decided to tell her parents that she would marry Jalid. They know about him, of course, they’ve met him and have been polite – on the whole. When her father has had a few pints on a Sunday, he sometimes asks how it is that Mary couldn’t find one of her own kind to take up with. But Mary says that this kind of thing goes with the territory of Sunday lunch at your parents’ house. Something is always a mystery to parents – the length of skirts, of hair, of time on the phone, in the bathroom, or not in the bathroom. It was only to be expected that finding love in another community would be a mystery as well.

Mary is a teacher and lives in her own flat. When it became serious with Jalid, she did her best to prepare for arguments by involving her mother in the school so that she could meet little Pakistani children at first hand and not fear the possibility of being a grandmother to an alien kind.

Jalid’s mother doesn’t speak English and Mary has enough problems trying to work out what the small, anxious foreign woman thinks of her to even contemplate bringing the two families together in any farcical pretence of bonhomie. She and Jalid have decided that the wedding will involve a lot of hand-shaking introductions, and then two distinct groups at either end of a function room. They could survive it, they told each other, up to the new war of words. Now everything has changed.

The older generation in Jalid’s family has bought very strong shutters for the windows of the small shops that they run. His father has urged him seriously not to be seen holding Mary’s hand in public, in case it might inflame a gang of skinheads.

Mary’s father said that, if she could get a career break, he would be happy to give her a few quid to get out of Birmingham and see a bit more of the world. All right, so he did say there was no place like home, once. But that was a while ago and a person could be wrong, couldn’t they? Mary’s mother has spoken not once, but twice, about the marriage bureau at Knock.

Mary is so stung by the injustice of it all that she is not thinking practically any more; she is thinking in statistics which will not change any mind or heart that she wants to change. She will point to surveys, independent surveys, not ones undertaken with a bias. Immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, she will prove to you, are far higher in what are defined as the acceptable values that British society desires.

Even the census shows that, in 80 per cent of Asian families, there are two parents and children, so how could anyone say that they are battening off the State? Milking the welfare services? You only had to look at their record in looking after the elderly in their extended families: they didn’t need paid welfare visitors or places in old people’s homes.

Mary says she can’t understand why people turn away from these statistics; if you read them, it’s as plain as the nose on your face, that the Asian community is no threat, no drain on the country’s resources. Why can’t there be a proper campaign to counteract this whisper war from the Winston Churchill faction which claims that the number of immigrants each year is in excess of the whole population of Grantham? Things will not change, Mary cries, until everyone is told the facts.

I don’t agree. I think Mary should forget the facts and concentrate on people and life-stories. She should bring Jalid around to her parents for his breakfast, dinner and tea, if she wants them to understand him. She should encourage him to tell her father all about the place where he works (making the new Pullman cars for the Channel Tunnel trains), and all the luxuries they will have – videos, maplewood desks, telephones in each room. She should forget charts about the stability of Asian family life and quibbles over numbers let in at Heathrow. She should include his nephews and nieces with their Brummie accents. She should talk about the members of his family whom she loves, and whisper about the ones she dislikes, just as she would do if they were not from Pakistan.

She should bring up, good-naturedly, all the fuss there was in the 1950s when her own parents married across the cultural divide, at a time when “No Irish” was written in landladies’ windows, and when her mother’s people thought that marrying an Englishman was the greatest sell-out since the marriage of Aoife to Strongbow.

A sense of tribal mistrust will never be solved by a new batch of statistics, however accurate and however damning to the racist war of words. The weapons that the thousands of Jalids and Marys must use have got everything to do with wearing down prejudice by sheer familiarity, and nothing at all to do with an intellectual appeal. The host community will not read the evidence and accept that it is not being swamped by newcomers.

What Mary should bring to Sunday lunch tomorrow is Jalid – and not the study from Warwick University proving what a splendid and non-intrusive role Jalid’s tribe is playing in the area.

Her Irish mother and English father will never learn to love statistics. But they might well accept as normal and, eventually even as good, a marriage where a man and woman refuse even to dignify the problems by defining and denying them.

First Compromise

“It’s not blackmail, it’s not super indulgence, it’s knowing that you can’t change the world between now and Corpus Christi”

All right, the young mother says, all right, she knows the arguments, you can’t disappoint a child. It is not the little girl’s fault that the country has become obsessed with show and competition and vulgar display. But someone has to make a stand. Either it’s a religious milestone, and an important part of a person’s spiritual life – if so then of course it should be marked and honoured – or it’s not. And, for the great majority of those entering into the Communion and Confirmation circuses this month, there is little spirituality. When she hears of seven-year-old girls applying fake tan to their little legs to look well in the photographs, that annoys her marginally less than their mothers going to the Canaries to get real tans to look dazzling in the church in pale pink jackets and low-cut blouses.

This woman is 33 and she has a daughter and a son. She has a husband who was recently made redundant. She has a job where she works long hours. They have a house which could be a lot more comfortable if there were two salaries coming in. They have friends, neighbours and family around. She is not a loner. She is head of no cause. She never stood on a principle against the crowd, before this. She is not doing it for God. She thinks that God is indulgent and forgiving about the way humans make such a mess out of everything including what is meant to be a sacrament.

No, she wants to stand alone against the charade because she thinks it’s dangerous for little girls to be made into princesses for a day with everyone admiring their dress, their ringlets, their flowers, the professional taker of photographs, the video of a big lunch party with a host of relatives and friends fielded.

Because it’s the first step on a ladder. Then there will be the Confirmation, and the Debs and the Engagement and the Wedding and the Christening. She says she can’t listen any more to those who say that life is grey enough, and that it’s colourful and good to mark out the happenings along the way with pageantry.

In her job she has come across the seriously poor. Her everyday work involves trying to put together the pieces for people deep in a well of poverty in a world of moneylenders. It is only too obvious to see that the spiral begins with the loans for the First Communion outfit.

She can date almost every loan pattern to the time when the eldest child was seven. She says that, up to now, she went along with the indulgent view that life had to have its compensations, that it was not fair to deny those who had so little, their days of dressing up and being able to stand heads high watching a little princess come out of the church rather than a kid in the clothes, the unsatisfactory clothes, of every day.

Now she thinks this view is patronising. It smacks of allowing the poor to have processions and pageants and to pretend to be the rich for one day a year. She sees what the expectations of a middle-class child are going to cost, and she feels it personally. They will not put themselves into debt over this. She will not approach her credit union for a loan even though she is luckier than those who have to go out and borrow from moneylenders.

Scales have fallen from her eyes, she says. She sees the other mothers, not as wonderful, kind, maternal creatures doing their best for a child’s big day, but as ludicrous, competitive entrants in a surreal Miss World contest. They are living out their own fantasies in the dresses, the curls, the flowers and the photographs. They are grumbling because camcorders are not allowed into the church; they are saying that kill-joys are trying to spoil it for the youngsters. Trying to be all sour and take away their big day.

And she believes with all her heart that a seven-year-old child will be happy with any kind of fuss . . . not just this out-of-control commercial fuss. All it needs is for someone to have the courage to opt out, to give the child a great day without the razzmatazz.

She was disappointed that I didn’t agree. She would have thought I wouldn’t want to go for all this show, that I’d like it to be like the old days. It’s no use thinking about the past, what it was like in the old days.

I have my First Communion picture like everyone has. I look like a happy lampshade, there was something odd about the wreath. We went to see my aunt in the convent; it was just after the war and the trams and buses were so slow it took all day, but I didn’t mind. I had people admiring me for hours.

I don’t remember my Confirmation day, although I have a picture of myself in school uniform but wearing a plain net veil. The nuns, very admirably, urged families not to spend a great deal of money on outfits, which was sensible, but they didn’t give us a big party in the school, which was foolish. We felt like anyone else. My face has all the lines of being short-changed.

I think this mother should borrow the money and give her daughter the day. Her husband is very supportive; he says he would love his little girl to look and feel the equal of everyone else at her school. He doesn’t see it as a principle. And that is what their real difference is all about.

I do see it as a principle. But, because she’s much, much too late, she has missed the principle bus. And she has to give in, this time anyway. It really is not fair that a seven-year-old should be made the victim of her stance. It’s all very well to say that a seven-year-old heart doesn’t break seriously and the child will cheer up again, but it’s not honest. It’s not only the day itself. It is the weeks afterwards when they are all still talking about it and showing the pictures. How can a girl that age explain what her mother finds difficult to put into words, even if she were to understand it?

There are many more years of misconstruing for her mother ahead, many rows to be fought, chasms to be opened between them, words to be said and taken back, plea bargains to be arranged. Let her not have the additional weapon and aching hurt that at seven, when every single other child had a day like a princess, Mother took a silly stand and wouldn’t let the child do it.

It’s not blackmail, it’s not super indulgence, it’s knowing that you can’t change the world between now and Corpus Christi.

The little lad is only four. She has three years to work on his school, to try to get it turned into a school day where all the parents can come and contribute food and give money to a good cause. There can be group pictures and family snaps. The notion of collecting money can be frowned upon.

Most mothers are misunderstood much of the time. Let her not go for it like a lemming by depriving her daughter of a day that was hers by right of having expected it.

Treading on Dreams

“Of course it’s a dream. We can’t buy certain happiness”

This summer over 30,000 people will leave Ireland for Florida alone, many of them on family holidays. For two grown-ups and two children it can cost £1,300 for two weeks. That will include the fares, an apartment and a hired car. They pay for petrol and food and drink the same as they would at home.

This family has been saving since Christmas and they’ll be heading off in about three weeks’ time. Their neighbours shake their heads and say they are quite mad.

First, they say these are not wealthy people. They have very ordinary jobs, the mother and father. The house could do with a coat of paint, the children don’t have clothes or shoes that are up to standard. They don’t have a lawnmower and, in the summer, their garden has a straggly look about it.

This couple have a cheap and smelly oil heater in their hall, the kind of thing that you wouldn’t feel safe with at all. They might be better getting some kind of heating, cleaning up their act a bit, instead of filling two children’s heads with nonsense out in Florida, no less.

These are not just jealous, selfish neighbours, nor killjoys who are against the lower orders having a holiday as if they were people of property. They are not the house-proud, neighbourhood-conscious folk who would want to confiscate the air tickets and replace them with two cans of paint and a strimmer to keep up standards.

The neighbours really and truly think that the whole business of getting passports and visas, and studying maps of the east coast of the US, is only laying up a store of unhappiness in the long run. The word they use is unrealistic. They say it’s unrealistic for people, who live at the level that they do, to raise the expectations of the children who are, after all, only 12 and 10 and would be content with something a quarter the cost, and much nearer home.

I don’t think it’s ridiculous. I think it’s about the most realistic thing they could do. They have been earning around £45 extra a week between them, and the children have been encouraged to do baby-sitting in order to have some pocket-money to spend when they get there.

If you are going to work in a supermarket, sweep up in a hairdressing salon on late nights, do deliveries, or a couple of nights washing up in a restaurant, then surely the best thing is to have a nice near goal that you can actually see ahead of you.

I would prefer to work for a ticket from Shannon to Miami and to look at the picture of the car I was going to rent, the apartment where we would all stay, to imagine the faces of children brought to Disney World in Orlando, than to think in some vague terms of improvement of lifestyle. I don’t go along with the theory that because saving for a holiday is, in fact, buying a dream, we shouldn’t do it.

Of course it’s a dream. We can’t buy certain happiness. That family will probably find the heat too much, the children may be difficult and not grateful enough, or delighted enough, the apartment might well be too small, or too remote. They might meet nobody from home and be lonely, they might meet everyone from home and feel crowded out; they might, on the other hand, have a ball. But whatever happens, they will have gone to a different place, a place miles from here, and they will have been able to show that kind of a place to their children.

Why should that privilege belong only to those who were born to it, or those who had worked for so many decades to earn it that they were too feeble to enjoy it once they felt they had saved enough to go there?

There is, still, a snobbish begrudging attitude that the needy shouldn’t have a holiday – an idea which holds no water at all, since the lowest brain must accept that they should have one much sooner than those whose everyday life is full of treats and variety. But you would not have to dig deep to find the view that, if people knew their place, they should realise that this place was not as a part of a foreign holiday.

The argument went on long about this family. I was accused of being a reverse snob, my attitude equally patronising, if not more so. I was just patting them on the head, I was told. I was encouraging them to go on and take a holiday that was out of step with their economic circumstances because I wanted to appease my own conscience and feel good that others too had trips abroad.

It became fairly heated, which is not necessarily bad. But it may be one of those insoluble things, like those who are cold not being able to understand those who are hot. The neighbours, the people who say this family is just increasing its downwards economic spiral, can see nothing but waste in handing over £1,300 to a travel agency.

They remind me that I was fiercely intolerant of the people who threw away their money in Las Vegas. I remember my attitude there as being mature, wise, tolerant but mystified. Still, I take the argument and run with it. In gambling you risk losing all you worked for. In spending it on a two-week blast, you have made a choice of how you are going to spend it. If you want to sit under the sun and drink strange, coloured drinks, like lots of us do, then why, if you are not cheating anyone else, should you not do so?

This is the same as my encouraging people to waste money on Communion frocks, they said. No it’s not. It’s different. That’s so that a child won’t feel left out of a cultural scene. Not even on my most giddy highs could I think that it’s part of the norm to go to Florida, and that those two children will be scarred if they don’t get there.

It would be indeed patronising and reverse snobbery to pretend that I was ever very poor but I didn’t have much to spend as a young teacher. I think it’s fair to say that there wasn’t anything sizeable. And of course I should have bought a good winter coat and leather shoes but I didn’t; I saw the world.

There were many of my parents’ friends who would have liked them to buy a car, or go out to restaurants for a meal, or put in central heating. But my parents didn’t want what people said were sensible things. What was left over from educating the lot of us, they spent on taking us on a holiday every year. It wasn’t Fort Lauderdale by plane, it was Ballybunion by train – but for seven of us, for a month, that was pricy too. And in terms of memory and widening of horizons and seeing another world, it was worth every penny.

Some time in the middle of the next millennium those children whose house is a mess, whose garden is a wilderness and whose parents are needy will remember the holiday in Florida. Surely it’s not patronising to wish them well?

Mister Wrong

“Nobody else has had the guts to say anything except

squeak about how romantic it is . . .”

Sometime soon, within the next few months, this couple will get married. That’s the plan anyway. I am not on the guest list of 60 people, and I only know the bride very indirectly. But I do know that at least four of the people who will attend the wedding think very strongly that she should not be getting married at all.

I don’t know anyone on the groom’s side, so we have no reading from his side of the church. Four people who know her well, is this a very sizeable amount of opposition? Or is it the norm?

For all we know. Maybe weddings are filled with people dressed to kill and fuming inside about the union that is taking place in front of their eyes. Maybe most people believe most marriages are unwise and forecast doom under their breath as they cheerfully throw handfuls of confetti.

And, of course, most people shut up about it. The words just don’t exist to tell someone that you think they have made a poor choice of a life-mate.

If, in return for your wedding invitation, you handed out a great chunk of Unasked-for Advice, and pointed out the weak links in the chain, the glaring incompatibilities and the wisdom of celibacy at this point, you would find yourself fairly friendless.

But suppose, just suppose for a moment that you were right. Suppose that you could see why these two people might be making a mistake, spurred on by all the pressures of society and a series of shallow attitudes. Suppose you truly believed it. Should you say anything, or should you forever hold your peace?

One of the wedding guests is on the verge of doing the unthinkable and actually saying what others are thinking. She thinks that this girl is marrying because she is 30, because she feels it’s her last chance. Because all her friends are married and she feels out of it.

She believes that, in spite of the giant steps made in giving self-confidence to women, many of them still feel that their place is, if not in the kitchen, at least marching two-by-two with a male of the species to shopping malls on a Saturday, to garden centres on a Sunday, and through all the paraphernalia that being married brings in its wake.

But surely an intelligent girl in the 1990s wouldn’t marry just to say she was married, rather than because she had met a real person to share her life with properly?

Ah, says the Courageous Wedding Guest, there’s another side of this. There’s the aspect of loneliness. It’s hard to see everyone else sharing, and having someone to talk to, if you don’t have it yourself. When she comes home from work, there’s nobody to tell about the horrors of the day. At breakfast, there’s no one to tell her she looks well or has a run in her tights or to make plans with.

But, if this is the problem, why doesn’t she look for a flatmate? Or a lodger? Or indeed a lover? Marriage seems a bit drastic a solution to ease a small sense of isolation, or a need-more-conversation phase. No, there’s something makeshift and temporary about such arrangements. And anyway, the bride-to-be has looked around her. If everyone else on Planet Earth has found a spouse, so can she. It’s as simple and as deeply unsatisfactory as that.

All right, let’s suppose that her frame of mind has been correctly analysed. Lots of people marry unlikely-seeming people. What’s so wrong with this one that people seem to be going into conclave over him?

The answer was that he was, basically, a very stupid man. Something that the faint-hearted would find hard to speak aloud as a reason for his betrothed to renounce him at this late stage. But that is what he was.

He read nothing except magazines concerned with a hobby. He looked at sport on television but didn’t like any current affairs programmes or films. He shrugged at politics. “They’re all the same, they’re in it for what they can get.”

I asked whether everyone else’s objections were based on a similar set of premises – basically that she was too bright for this guy. Well, yes and no. The man was a bit restless. He had been in a relationship for three years and that had not worked out. He had changed jobs often. He never kept a car for a full year.

Someone has to play the Devil’s Advocate . . . These could be good signs, I argued. He knew the last relationship wasn’t right so they hadn’t married. He’s not stuck in a rut as regards work. Maybe the car thing has something to do with tax?

He had nothing to say to her friends, she seemed constantly defensive about him . . . she moved the conversation from topics that bored him to things that the tabloid newspapers might have on page one.

The Courageous Wedding Guest was, I believe, a really good and honourable friend. She didn’t live in the same town as the bride-to-be. It wasn’t a simple matter of jealousy, the sense of loss we all feel when a friend gets married and isn’t available as much as before. I may have made her sound a total snob and an elitist, but it was very hard for her to articulate those criticisms; they weren’t dismissive, middle-class attitudes that would trip easily off a class-ridden tongue.

She is not a killjoy by nature, she believes in the magic of ritual and in the triumph of hope. She doesn’t think marriage is outdated or a form of servility for women. Her own marriage did not last but that has never soured her, either against the man or the institution. She doesn’t know whether her own marital status makes her uniquely well or uniquely ill-qualified to judge the situation.

She says that when she speaks – if she speaks – the bride-to-be will cease to be her friend. Whatever happens, one way or the other, she will be out of their lives. If they marry, she will be excluded from everything except triumphant announcements of new babies, anniversaries and assurances of how wrong she was. If they do not marry, she will be held vaguely to blame for it all. So why speak?

Because her own friendship with the bride-to-be is not important, the girl’s future is. Nobody else has had the guts to say anything except squeak about how romantic it is and how they’re looking forward to the wedding. Even the conclave who say it’s going to be a disaster are saying nothing. All the Courageous Wedding Guest is looking for is a set of words that doesn’t sound patronising, hurtful or sour. Words that might make her look at the situation again.

She wondered did I have any help with those words.

None at all. They should never be said. A woman is just as entitled as a man to marry a dumbo – just as men say they have been doing for years. It might be a nice rest after work. That’s what men always say.