‘The freedom, even with the rules, was heady’
The cleaning lady was not impressed. “Oh God, Agnes,” she called out to her colleague in the hall. “Somebody has left half a big raw onion in the fridge. It would knock you down.”
The culprit was a chain-smoking student of medicine from Tyrone, who had the room to the right of mine in the Halls of Residence at Stranmillis College. We were opposite the communal kitchen, where the medic introduced me to the delights of cheese and onion toasted sandwiches and big bowls of sweetcorn with a chunk of butter, our staple diet throughout our first year as students at Queen’s University Belfast.
The Halls were the perfect stepping-stone from our relatively sheltered home lives, as teens in the early 1980s, to the house-sharing we took on for the rest of our studies. They eased us into life away from our mammies and, thanks to the cleaners, we didn’t even have to do any housework, beyond washing our meagre dishes.
For the first time in my life, I had a room of my own — with an in-built vanity unit and desk. I marvelled at such luxury. How grown-up was this? And it was all paid for, by the generous student grants of the time. We really didn’t appreciate how lucky we were. The Halls also provided the perfect opportunity to make friends from different walks of life. Unless we were working on an assignment or cramming for
an exam, no-one sat in their room in the evenings. The internet and mobile phones had not been invented, so we talked to each other.
We’d gather in someone’s room for a cup of tea and we’d gossip in the showers at the end of the long dark shared corridor. It was the first time I’d ever met ‘born-again’ Christians. One of them tried to ‘save’ me; I even went to a church service with her (it didn’t work).
The common room was another good place to meet people. It had a TV room off it — Coronation Street was essential viewing once a week for a few dozen of us. These included law students who had yet to turn uppity.
As naïve freshers we were all the same in those early days in the Hall; in second year, many of the future solicitors and barristers became prematurely elitist and looked down on us arts students.
I don’t recall any drinking on the campus — imagine — but smoking was allowed. The bookshelves in my medic friend’s room were lined with empty packs of Marlborough, the original red branded ones, like trophies of cool.
To call home, we had to use the pay phone at the entrance to our hall — the homesick ones would be weepy. Computers were still baffling, space-age machines to most of us in the Arts faculty. As a result, we were constantly trailing back to our rooms in the evenings laden down with books from the library (I can still remember the weight of an encyclopaedic tome on the Arab Israeli conflict in my bag).
I loved every minute of it. The sense of freedom, even under Halls’ rules (no parties) was a heady experience for someone who had never lived away from home. I learned how to budget my grant and cook for myself, in my own limited way, although I did try to fry uncooked rice once, with an equally clueless friend, and couldn’t understand why it didn’t soften up.
Towards the end of that first year, I discovered sweet peppers and spices — unheard of exotics back home on the farm — and I’d treat my delighted sisters to chilli con carne and spaghetti bolognaise.
I’m afraid I did take up smoking, in an ill-advised attempt to fit in with the Marlborough medic and her cohorts, but I never even saw a spliff until third year.
At school, I hadn’t been a part of the cool gang (at Rathmore, that was a group of well-heeled pretty girls known as The Magnificent Seven). But, at Queen’s everyone was starting off, it seemed, on the same footing.
The enthusiasm was infectious; I’ll never forget a trio of excitable girls, who were the first into the Halls, charging up and down the stairs and welcoming everyone they met on that first night of term.
Those three now comprise a prominent lawyer, a senior social worker and a public relations boss.
I might never have got to know them as friends if it had been a couple of decades on and we’d all been glued to our phones or lap-tops in our rooms or the common room.
So, I suppose my advice to freshers would be to lift your heads from the screens and get to know all these new, potentially exciting people face to face. And remember, they might be feeling a little awkward in this brave new world, too, in the beginning. And, if you don’t already know, don’t forget to boil rice before you fry it.