Credit to a Newsman: Letters After His Name

From a Derry girl, more or less.

Once upon a time, before everything became urgent and push-notified and accompanied by a breaking-news chime, we waited. Not just for the news – but for someone we trusted to tell it to us.

There was a posture to it. A kind of quiet ceremony. You sat up. You paid attention.

And in my case, you learned.

This week, Teacher Appreciation Week, I’ve been thinking about that kind of authority. Not the loud kind. Not the viral kind. The quieter, steadier version. The one that doesn’t announce itself as important, but becomes so over time.

The kind that walks into a classroom, sits behind a desk slightly too small for it, and changes the trajectory of a life without ever making a fuss.

When UTV broadcaster, Brian Baird, entered our living rooms – in black and white and with poker-faced authority – we took what he told us as gospel. This was how I first knew him – not as my professor, not yet – but as the newsman who brought the world into our house at teatime.

As my brother remembers, “You could read nothing in that face. It was all in the voice. The face, if it told you anything, told you this: listen to what I’ve found out since I was talking to you last. This is very important, and will take only three minutes.” There was no shuffling of papers, no toying with glasses – there was just the news.

I first met him on a September morning in the early 1980s. I was a student at Queen’s University of Belfast’s Stranmillis College, late for my first Modern Irish Fiction Since Joyce seminar. When I opened the door, I was met by a familiar voice coming from the front of the room.

There he was – sitting behind that little desk – reciting Yeats with the same gentle gravitas with which he read the news. Away from the television that took up one corner of our living room on the Dublin Road, Mr. Baird was larger than life. Over the course of those college years, he changed my life in the way only the best teachers do.

In Mr. Baird’s seminar, I discovered the novels of Edna O’Brien, the short stories of Frank O’Connor and Liam O’Flaherty, and Brian Friel’s plays. Even now, I can hear his recitation of Patrick Kavanagh’s “On Raglan Road,” which made me weep a little.

I still prefer to remember him waxing poetic over reporting Northern Ireland’s news which was, more often than not, grim in those days.

And then he introduced us to Seamus Heaney.

Not as a literary icon, or a syllabus requirement, but as something more immediate, something already alive in the language of the place I came from, though I hadn’t yet recognized it as such.

As “professionally unfussed” as the characters who moved through those poems, Mr. Baird led us into and out of them with an ease that felt almost unstudied. He wandered through rural places and practices I had known all my life, but had never properly seen. I felt a new pride – almost boastful – that I belonged to Heaney’s world: Castledawson, The Hillhead, Lough Shore, Broagh. I was, without question, a Derry girl.

I found a new respect for the craft of country men who populated Heaney’s poems – the Thatcher, Barney Devlin, the blacksmith at The Forge, and the Diviner – men like my father, who I once watched “witch” water, the pull of it so strong where he stood that the stick, shaped like a wishbone, bent and almost tied itself in a knot, “suddenly broadcasting through a green hazel its secret stations.”

To be fair, this newfound appreciation for the ways of life in the townlands of rural Derry did little to improve my punctuality or my timing with homework. Mr. Baird always referred to me as “the late Miss Watterson,” announcing my arrival in a way that only seemed to encourage further lateness. I enjoyed the attention, and I saved every handwritten essay because I loved his red-ink comments. I used to imagine him delivering his assessments on the six o’clock news: “A very sound survey, which I was pleased, at last, to receive. I had had oral evidence of its existence.” Or, “This was received very late, so I can’t guarantee this mark.” I got the mark anyway.

He began his career as a young English teacher in 1956 in Kuala Kangsar, a small town in Malaysia. He had taken up a post recently vacated by a John Wilson, who later, under the pen name Anthony Burgess, wrote the 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. After five successful years, Mr. Baird moved to the island of Penang, where his son, Patric, was born. And in 1963, the year I was born, the Bairds returned to Northern Ireland, bringing with them a cargo of words and phrases, recipes and photographs from places that must have seemed impossibly far from Belfast.

I remember spotting him one evening in the foyer of The Lyric Theatre on Ridgeway Street, just a few doors from where I lived as a student. He was laughing with local celebrities, cigar in hand, a thick bracelet chinking against a brandy glass as he raised it in my direction. I wish I had been bold enough to say hello, confident enough to ask whether he thought the play would live up to its reputation. I know now he would have welcomed me into the conversation, but I was hesitant – aware, in a way I couldn’t yet articulate, of my “station” as the first person in my family to attend university or go to a play at The Lyric. I may as well have been in Penang. Mr. Baird would have understood that. Seamus Heaney did too, explaining in Stepping Stones to Dennis O’Driscoll:

Even Belfast was far away to me. In those days, I was outside the loop—my family had no familiarity with universities, no sense of the choices that there were, no will to go beyond the known procedures, no confidence, for example, about phoning up the local education authority and seeking clarification about what was possible—no phone, for God’s sake.

A university education in Belfast was a universe away from the Broagh, requiring a kind of verbal dance with his mother when he returned home, full of new knowledge, new words, and new sensitivities. I can almost picture him – in that tight space between elevated and plain speech from South Derry – watching every word, weighing its impact before he utters it. My mother and I have danced that same dance, her still saying to me, “you know all them things.”

From Clearances IV

Fear of affectation made her affect
Inadequacy whenever it came to
Pronouncing words ‘beyond her’. Bertold Brek.
She’d manage something hampered and askew
Every time, as if she might betray
The hampered and inadequate by too
Well-adjusted a vocabulary.

With more challenge than pride, she’d tell me, ‘You
Know all them things.’ So I governed my tongue
In front of her, a genuinely well-
Adjusted adequate betrayal
Of what I knew better. I’d naw and aye
And decently relapse into the wrong
Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.

In 1991, Mr. Baird received a letter from me. By then, I was living in Phoenix and teaching part-time. In preparation for a class I was about to teach on Irish literature, I wondered if he might still have the syllabus from the Irish Fiction course that had changed me all those years before.

He obliged.

His elegant handwritten letter is still folded between the pages of The Collected Poems of Patrick Kavanagh, a Queen’s University Library book that stands in my bookcase to this day.

I wish there had been more letters. He died in 1998, by which time I was in the midst of learning how to be a new mother – how to be my daughter’s first teacher.

I regret not finding the time to thank him properly for the gift of Heaney’s poetry. There has not been a day of my adult life that I have not been grateful for it.

Following his death, Desmond Smyth, then manager of Ulster Television (UTV), described him in a way that felt entirely familiar to those of us who had watched him:

To a TV generation, Brian Baird was the voice and the face of UTV news. He was a totally professional broadcaster and a charming work colleague, with not an ounce of ego about him.

Like Seamus Heaney’s men. Like my own father. Not an ounce of ego.

In a world that had, by 2013, grown both smaller and more porous, I received an unexpected email one morning from his son, Patric. While travelling, he had come across something I had written about the impact of his father on yet another former student. It turns out I am part of a rather large, quietly global fan club.

On a trip to Malaysia to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, Patric told me he met some of his father’s former pupils, then men in their seventies, speaking with unmistakable gratitude and affection about the teacher who had shaped their love of literature and the English language.

It was a long struggle with a rare form of leukaemia that ultimately took my favourite professor. Patric wrote that his father remained positive throughout the illness. Of course he did.

He died before seeing his son become a journalist, and before fully knowing the reach of his own influence as both teacher and reader of Seamus Heaney’s poetry. And yet, even though I can still picture him as the man who once kept reading the news while a fly briefly landed on his lip, I also like to imagine that his otherwise unreadable poker face might have softened into something like a smile at the thought of his son and a former student -both now in our fifties, and both, like Seamus Heaney, still “crediting marvels.”

After my husband died, on the weekend before my first Christmas as a widow, I went out one morning to find a large envelope in my Phoenix mailbox, bearing a Belfast postmark. Inside was a typed letter from Patric and a slim paperback I knew well. He had been meaning, for some time, to send me one of his father’s books of Heaney’s poetry, and in searching for my address online, he had come upon news of my husband’s death.

In his letter, he wrote gently of his father’s final days – his death a few days before Christmas in 1998 – and of the flight back to Belfast to be with his family. Whether from London to Belfast or Dublin to Phoenix, he wrote in effect, some journeys feel too long. Fraught with a single, unrelenting wish: to already be where you belong.

And so it was that Mr. Baird’s personal copy of Death of a Naturalist became part of my book collection.

It is certainly the most dog-eared of the collection and probably the one he read the most. I’m sure he could think of no better person to whom he would like it passed on.

I like to think he would have understood exactly where it ended up. And perhaps approved of it, too.

Thank you, Mr. Baird.