” …only the view backward shows you how utterly random and chance-driven these vital connections are.”   William Boyd, “Any Human Heart” 

Reading some of these histories of how people found the Faith, I’ve been humbled, astonished and delighted at the mixture of the mundane and miraculous, the ordinary and amazing ways people have become enamoured of the Blessed Beauty. My own story is no more remarkable, no less prosaic than those that precede it, nor those which will come after. The problem for me trying to write it, as it has always been with any type of narrative, is where to begin? As a student of history, my tutors were bemused by my inability to see the passage of time as anything other than a continuum.  I found it difficult trying to write about the social conditions in Britain which led to the Welfare State without harking back to the French Revolution, and beyond that to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire.  An essay on electoral changes in the early twentieth century opened with references to the growth of the canal system in England.  I loved history but scraped through on most assessments. 

It would be easy to write: “I first came across the Bahá’í Faith in 1970 …”, but that would give nothing of the spirit of the times, the coincidences and chances, the accidents of birth, the roads less travelled, the myths and legends that have bloomed around those heady, heart-breakingly wonderful/terrible  times, when everyone smoked, real men didn’t use deodorant  and there were jobs galore; when the fear of nuclear war clouded everything, when anyone from beyond a three-mile radius around our prefab sprouting mining village was seen as exotic, alien, and hostile, and when random violence was an everyday part of school-life, home-life and (as far as I could tell) an accepted norm in marital relations.  

So maybe I should begin, “In 1970, I was 16 years old. I knew no-one who was divorced, who had central heating, or who had had a foreign holiday (except in Ireland, but that didn’t count. Until I was five, I thought we lived in Ireland). The only face I’d seen whose hue differed from mine was the occasional trainee priest from the colonies sent to minister to our souls for a short time (which must’ve sharpened his sense of the contours of purgatory) and once, tellingly, a Bible salesman, from whom my mother bought a Bible, though she wouldn’t let him through the door.” 

But if I start there, then how can I tell you of my feckless, illiterate, and quintessentially unlucky grandfather (after whom I’m named) who had joined the British Army in 1903, served his obligatory three years, was called up as a reservist in 1914, was captured in the first days of the war, spent five years in a POW camp and returned to Castledermot (in sweet County Kildare) in 1919 wearing his British uniform, only to be warmly invited by the local IRA commandant to leave Ireland on the next boat, thus washing up in Lanarkshire and joining the ranks of the migrant Irish.  

Or of my mother’s wandering tinker family—given to outbursts of melancholic singing and three-day booze-ups—great greyhound-owning, street-fighting, gambling men, generous to a fault and a danger to all who crossed their path. Indolent and energetic by turns, fiercely opposed to privilege (“I could cut a better man from a hedge” an uncle declaimed once—next time I heard that it was in a poem by Seamus Heaney) yet supine in the face of the clergy. Their quiet wives brewing poteen in zinc baths, head-scarfed, bold, and pregnant. 

Because without these vital connections I would never have been born in Scotland, probably never contracted polio, and perhaps never have met the Faith. 

Well, anyway: in 1970 I was sixteen, as aggressive and timid a skinhead as you were likely to meet, driven by an anger born of having a father and two older brothers who had been prize-winning boxers, but for whom I was a disappointment. Having polio meant, amongst other drawbacks, that I would never follow their boxing exploits. However, having learned from an early age to get my retaliation in first—running away wasn’t an option—I was an experienced head-butter, and violence came as an easy way to gain kudos and credibility, as well as being a necessary accoutrement for getting on the bus from Motherwell to Airdrie. 

I had arrived in Airdrie via Motherwell Technical College to take up a job as an electronics technician. I’d managed to get a place on a pre-apprenticeship course the year previously, largely due to the fact that my primary seven teacher had given us simple logic tasks (how clockwork works) in the last few weeks of primary school, and the lesson stuck. My secondary education was short (I played truant for most of my third year), nasty (the place stank and the teaching staff were psychopaths), and brutish (I contributed my bit to that aspect, I’m sorry to say).  I left school with no qualifications whatsoever. My father died that year too and the guilty relief I felt on his passing still challenges me. He was quick with his fists and had knocked me unconscious when I was about eleven. We had never really got on after that. 

I was one of ten apprentices taken on by a telecoms company that year.  I hadn’t the necessary qualifications normally required but had shown promise in the vocational tests given as part of the entry procedure.  The other nine guys were cleverer, cleaner, and generally less prone to fighting to the bitter end than me.  But by the end of the first week, a clear pecking order had been established and I was seen as one of those with whom you didn’t mess, being deemed “mental”. That was an accolade, by the way.  

Like many of my generation, I had fallen away from the religion of my birth and, though the scars of sectarianism still delineated some aspects of my social milieu, I had many friends who were not Catholic. This was just three years after the Summer of Love and, even in darkest Lanarkshire, patchouli oil and Afghan coats could be found, and some folk had flowers in their hair (bless them). Part of me resonated with all this, but another part just wanted to kick it in the loon pants. 

And then, one week after our apprenticeship course had begun, a week in which we had slapped, bragged, and lied to each other so that we had established a hierarchy of sorts, in walked Andy McCafferty.  

Being part of the crowd, indistinguishable from the group, not being an individual was not his style. We apprentices had all been told to buy regulation dark-blue boiler suits (one-piece coveralls), keep our hair short, and wear safety shoes.  That was a good thing, because we were all part of a herd and less likely to draw the attention of someone who might want to prove something by giving any of us a “doing”.  McCafferty had a wine-coloured boiler suit, long(ish) hair, ankle-length boots made of green and red leather, and wore a yellow vest with a red star in the middle. We were, to put it mildly, intrigued by this character.  On discovering that he was from Glasgow, spoke barely above a whisper, and had long(ish) nails, it soon became apparent that he was prime “jumping” material. 

Getting jumped was an occupational hazard if you were a teenager in Scotland in those days: getting jumped was a common occurrence if you were in a place where you didn’t live or you were alone and confronted by a gang of feral apprentices eager to climb up a step in the ladder of violence ratings.  And if you had no friends and wore a red boiler suit and a vest with a star on it, then getting jumped was what you got, deservedly, I believed. The routine was fairly simple and well-established; wait until the victim went to the toilet, follow him in and attack from behind without warning. 

Yet somehow, the pendulum in my soul, for reasons which still elude me, swung the other way and, rather than join the mob, I offered him a cigarette during the morning break. I remember his hand trembled as he took it and all the tension evaporated.  He did not get jumped. We became friends. Later, he became a Bahá’í. You can read about his declaration here: https://bahaihistoryuk.wordpress.com/2012/11/06/andy-mccafferty/ 

Later still, I became a Bahá’í.  

The rest of my life is predicated on that moment, however.  

Me’n’Andy were inseparable for years. We hitched to Paris together, to Ireland together, to England together. We shared a summer job in Italy. Once, we arranged to meet in Hyde Park on a Saturday morning in June. He was living in Glasgow and I was on the Local Spiritual Assembly of Dumfries. It was a bad trip down from Scotland for me and, after many adventures, I eventually stepped out of a lorry cab in the Blue Boar services at Watford Gap on the very morning we were to meet. Walking across the forecourt was McCafferty with two cups of coffee in his hands.  He handed me one and said, “What kept you, man?”  

In the darksome nights of despair, we knew that no matter what happened the bond we shared was unbreakable. Everything that followed for me—my four years as an indigent, a travel-teacher and pioneer, marriage, university, work, service, these very seconds passing before me as I type—was predicated on that split-second decision to offer Andy a cigarette rather than jump him. When he died in December 2003, my life was diminished greatly. 

Years earlier, by which time I had long hair too, Me’n’Andy had fallen asleep on the grass in a park on a sunny Glasgow day when one of the girls with us had plaited our hair together. I felt a tug when we woke but our locks parted permanently on the day I said the Prayer for the Dead at his graveside. It was like the moon pulling on the tide. 

And what would my paternal grandfather Oul’ Paddy Morrissey make of it all? My sons live to serve the Faith. My wife’s family was there at the start of this whole Revelation. I have served on Local Assemblies, travelled to teach the Faith, edited the Bahá’í Journal, refrained from violence (what a struggle that was from 17 to 20!), eschewed alcohol and unprescribed drugs, and tried to laugh as much as possible at life’s great mysteries. 

My mother’s brother, my Uncle Dazzle (everyone had nicknames growing up and his was given because he wasn’t very bright), whose greyhounds I used to walk, on hearing I’d become a Bahá’í believed I had joined the Moonies and that no good would come of it.  He may yet be right in a sense. But for now, as the day closes, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude for the bounty of being a follower of Bahá’ulláh, and having had, for a time, a true friend. 

Pat Morrissey 

February 2013