Obiter Dicta

Sunday April 8th.

I watched an interview on TV this morning with the actor Liam Neeson who described a boyhood memory of seeing the Reverend Ian Paisley preach. He described him as a ‘firebrand’. It put me in mind of the time I went with my flatmates to see him preach in 1969.

            One autumn evening, Dave and I were travelling down George IV Bridge from the university, rolling home to the flat on the top deck of a cosmic number 27, full of groovy people, stardust, and golden billion-year-old carbon. Dave  nudged me and pointed to a notice in the Evening News.

            “Ian Paisley is talking at Leith Town Hall tonight.”

            “Yeah? Far out.”

            “Yeah! Let’s go and suss it out.”

            Suddenly, the evening had a focus. And foci were not that common in our evenings. Our flatmates were as enthused as we were. What a gas! Man, what a blast this would be! Yeah! Right on! This would be a night to remember, a night to live in the annals! What could compare? A night at the theatre, a night at the cinema? Amusements for milktoasts. A concert in The Place? Ten a penny. Only the ubercool would dig an audience with Ian Paisley.

            Out from the flat we emerged and made our way, as a soft evening fluttered down over Edinburgh like a hankie, along Eyre Place and Broughton Road, up McDonald Road and on to Leith Walk. Blithe as babes, naïve as simpletons, we headed down Constitution Street to Queen Charlotte Street and the imposing edifice of Leith Town Hall. What did we think was going to happen there?

            Leith Town Hall was a square stone building: arcaded, pilastered and columned, with tall and slender windows, then shedding weak light in a vaguely ecclesiastical way onto the darkening street. The sky was brimstone and copper. There was a noticeable police presence around the hall, and a disconcerting number of young and middle-aged straights, none of whom seemed to be too full of peace, love or understanding. Buttoned-up people in dark, kirky clothes kept arriving, carrying Bibles and such, and disappearing into the maw of the building. What there weren’t, were too many young men dressed in combat jackets, fur coats, RAF greatcoats, scarlet military jackets or grubby corduroy strides, and certainly no other males coifed and bearded like Charles II and his courtiers

            “Do we genuflect when we go in?” I said to John.

            “What we don’t do, is sing “I’m no a Billy, I’m a Tim” – that’s for sure,” Dave joked. We had all been pupils at a Catholic secondary in West Lothian, but now were completely irreligious. We had come for no reason related to religion in any way. We’d just thought it would be a gas.

            But the gas wore off right sudden. The urge for drollery and sportive pranks had gone from us with surpassing speed and unanimity. Glumly, we entered, through black arches, under the baleful gaze of the unsmiling straights who, we now realised, constituted a kind of Protestant Praetorian Guard, and made our way into the body of the hall. The polis had thrown us one or two quizzical looks and then smirked and turned away.

            “Oh man,” I moaned softly, “this is iffy karma. Iffy karma.”

            “Cool it man,” growled Eddie. “Stay mellow.”

            With a rapid and tacit understanding, born of growing alarm, we filed along a row of seats near the back and tried to remain unobtrusive. Unfortunately, we were as unobtrusive as an emerald unicorn. In the midst of all the dour and godly Proddies and their stone-faced janissaries, who evidently regarded us as terminally suspect, we might as well have been dressed as Charlie Cairoli, Carmen Miranda and Screaming Lord Sutch. The only thing that gave me a ray of hope was that they had not instantly ushered us into a side room and battered the living excrement out of us. But there was a pillared gallery all around the seating area and a detachment of the Loyalist Light Infantry now took up positions of vantage there and kept a watchful eye on us. It was evident that they were unsure whether we constituted an actual threat to the proceedings or not, but equally evident that they were going to take no chances.

            To make things worse, just as the man himself took the stage to a thunderous applause, five or six heavies filed along our row at both ends, thereby effectively cutting off any exit we might have had. We looked at each other whitely and gulped.

            Ian Paisley talked about apostasy – or, as he pronounced it, “Uppawsstissy” – in ringing and strident tones that bounded off the walls of the hall. He was a big, barrel-chested man, six feet four, with black horn-rimmed glasses and greying hair. He was a powerful orator. The audience, or perhaps it was a congregation, listened attentively. I caught Henry’s glance unobtrusively and made a wide-mouthed expression of terror. Then a hymn was announced. The organ struck up, the congregation stood up, we stood up as well and the singing started.

            But not all of us stood up. With us that night, purely by chance, was Chas, a guy who had once shared the front room with Dave, before being hurled from heaven. He was different in outlook from the rest of and now, in a typical moment of thrawn obtuseness or psychotic contempt, had remained seated.  Dave nudged me. I looked along the row as four of the bouncers filed into the one behind, leaned over and plucked Chas out of the seat as easily as if he’d been a handbag. Then they frogmarched him straight out into the gallery and away. Panic surged through me – surged through the rest of us. We sang like bastards.

            When we sat down again, I was shaking like a dog having a shit. I whispered to Henry: “They’ll kill him.”

            “They might just let him go.”

            “Naw, man. They’ll give him a tanking. Heavy, man.”

            The rest of the evening slithered by like a serpent, full of glaring eyes and significant silences. Towards the end, after we’d sung another hymn, a collection was taken up. Little collecting pouches, with a handle at either end, were passed round. We put a copper or two in and passed it on. John had no money on him, so just passed it on. Unfortunately, he was now the end hippy, so he passed it on to one of Paisley’s roughnecks. For a second or two, the ape stood and stared at John, as if he’d turned him up on the sole of his shoe.

            “Some folk are just lookin’ for trouble,” he said.

            “Haven’t a bean, man,” said John. “Remember the widow’s mite.”

            The gorilla snarled, dropped in a handful of silver, and passed the collection on.

At last, the service was over and we dispersed. Out through the vestibule and into the street. There were people here, there was traffic, there was Leith and normality. The goons had not followed us. The police were nowhere to be seen.

            “Fucksake, man!” wheezed Eddie. “That was a bum trip.”

            “What a scene, man!”

            “I wonder what they did to Chas.”

            Chas now materialised by the wall at the street. He was smoking and had a grin as wide as the street.

            “Hey.”

            “What did they do to you, man?”

            “Did they kick lumps out of you?”

            “No. They just horsed me out of the hall, called me a hippy bastard and told me if I tried to get back in, they’d bludgeon me to death. In the circumstances, I thought it wiser to stay out here until you cats had finished worshipping.”

            “Heavy scene, man. Totally plastic. Whose idea was this?”

             “What I find even more depressing,” I said, “is that, hard though it is to believe, there are people out here who don’t dig hippies.”

            “Yeah,” said John. “How unlikely is that?”

            There are indeed some strange people in the world.

Here’s to the next time, and, as a totally different Irishman used to say, May your God go with you till then.