Laethanta Saoire: Rónán Hession on burgers, baking, and his other summer jobs 

 When I got sick of that, I went to work in Burger King. I lasted there three hours before I walked out. Strictly speaking, over thirty years later, I am still on my lunch break.

Then I worked at the Kylemore bakery in Finglas. We started at 6am, six mornings a week. I was on the pastry table, which is what they called a conveyor belt that fired out various pastry shapes that had to be placed on stacked trays in a sort of Tetris game.

It was boring, meaningless work made even more so by it being the summer of “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” by Bryan Adams. I don’t even think I ever had the privilege of witnessing a completed pastry. My least favourite part of the job was filling apple tarts. The apple paste was poured into a large funnel above head height and I would release gluey splodges onto pie bases using a foot pedal. The smell, the texture, the sounds, the endless foot pumping, have made me a lifelong apple tart sceptic.

I would cycle to the bakery along Collins Avenue – one of the longest streets in Dublin, and twice as long at 6am – closing my eyes for three pedals out of every four. The only other traffic was an old electric milk float.

My summer jobs were arduous because I knew nobody who could get me started. I had no contacts. I didn’t have an ‘in.’ The strings I could pull weren’t connected to anything.

But my summers were saved by a glorious thing called the Student Summer Scheme, under which a college student could get not much money from the Government for doing not much work in some community enterprise. I worked for Muscular Dystrophy Ireland (bringing kids on holidays), Age Action (steaming clothes), but my favourite was working in an oratory.

The Oratory of the Resurrection in Artane is a squat circular building with a protruding vestibule and a flat roof that leaked. Over the years it has been painted Robin Hood green and squashed tomato red – the sort of unwanted, leftover shades that get used for schools. Its exterior walls bore testament to Dublin’s love affair with UB40.

It was ancillary to St David’s school nearby, which had previously been an infamous industrial school, though at that time I didn’t appreciate quite how infamous. According to local legend, a ghost known as the Blue Boy still haunted the place, though apparently only outside school hours. One fearless kid in our cub scouts even boasted that he had breakdanced on the Blue Boy’s grave.

The oratory was run by Brother Leonard, a kindly Christian Brother who told me that he had secured the maximum number of vacancies allowed on the Student Summer Scheme so that he could help as many people as possible. I asked him what the job involved and he said he was sure I’d find something to do. I had been used to the hard edge of food-based capitalism, so felt liberated by this worker-led approach. He never even asked if I believed in God.

He showed me a copy of Awareness, a book by Anthony de Mello. It was a best-selling soft-Christian self-help book for people who lived by their laminated copy of the Desiderata. I remember it saying that if you dropped ink on a clean page, the mind would pay attention to the drop and not the rest of the unspoilt page – I liked that.

I made notes on the book and discussed with Brother Leonard how it might be used in teaching young people. He listened patiently, as always, though it slowly became clear that the intended beneficiary of the book was me.

The main part of my job was reading through the surprisingly large number of religious magazines and periodicals to find articles about apparitions of the Virgin Mary. I would then cut and paste them – using Pritt Stick and scissors, rather than Microsoft Word – into a scrapbook, which would later be photocopied into a newsletter.

The Virgin Mary had been seen all over the World, or at least in Christian countries where she would be recognised. These were mostly unofficial sightings, rather than the formal Vatican-approved incidents, and tended to involve people who had heard voices or seen shadows. It is of course tempting to look upon all these as backwater fantasies, akin to UFO sightings, but I was duty bound to retain my objectivity. It was the unwritten code of the Student Summer Scheme.

Medjugorje, in Croatia, featured a lot, being an officially sanctioned apparition and pilgrimage site. A woman who often came to the oratory told me she was visiting there that summer with her mother. I mentioned the coincidence that I had just cut out an article about it. With gentle pressure on my shoulder, she corrected me – “not a coincidence, a God-incidence.”

 Though I was an irreverent atheist, and it was tempting to scoff at what I saw as delusional religiosity, I liked and respected the people I met at the oratory. Maybe I even envied them. It was a peaceful, consoling place. People stopped by for a quiet prayer as part of their daily routine. They’d say a decade of the rosary or just sit by themselves for some silent reflection. Perhaps, even for atheists, there is something in such places that resonates with our sense of the profound. As Philip Larkin writes in his poem, Churchgoing, “someone will forever be surprising a hunger in himself to be more serious.”

 Brother Leonard would drop by every now and then and was generous with his time and lack of demands. He told me how he had become a Christian Brother because the order paid for his education. He had always been happy with it, and no, he had never wanted to become a priest or get married. We talked about the God I didn’t believe in. He explained that God says in the Bible, “I am Who am.” I stared, blankly. “I am Who am,” he repeated. “It’s a mystery.” 

 But even Brother Leonard saw the limits of our slacker summer. We were asked to do some weeding at the school where I met the caretaker who blew my mind by telling me, “To be honest I don’t like music.” That was the summer where I (single handedly) discovered The Beatles, when my first question to everyone was about their favourite Beatles song. All summer long I was haunted by one of my fellow students choosing ‘Michelle’ – “B-b-but …” I stammered, dumbstruck at the baffling variety in humankind.

The weeding didn’t last long, though – one of the other students became seditious and said that the only muscle he wanted to use was his brain (which isn’t a muscle, though you have to use your brain to know that, so it’s a vicious circle). Brother Leonard compromised and we instead applied our muscly brains to clearing out a dilapidated library. “What a waste, all these classics being destroyed,” Brother Leonard despaired to himself. He showed me a grimy copy of The Metamorphoses by Ovid – “Would you read this?” he asked as I stood in a skip, stomping down hardbacks of The Iliad.

The oratory is still open. Dublin City Council is considering a plaque to commemorate the boys who died at Artane Industrial School and who are buried, unmarked, on the oratory’s grounds. It is also, it seems, home to the Serbian Orthodox Church of the Republic of Ireland.

While my time at the oratory was a period of novelty, and something I have always viewed with flippancy befitting its simple anecdotal interest, I still think of Brother Leonard with fondness. A gentle, sincere unknowable man, who found and followed his inner seriousness, but who was enlightened enough to indulge the levity of youth.

• Rónán Hession is an author and musician from Dublin. His debut novel, Leonard and Hungry Paul, was widely acclaimed on publication in 2019, and he has since published two more books, Panenka and Ghost Mountain. Hession will be at the Marino Church in Bantry with British writer Caleb Azumah Nelson on Friday July 12 as part of West Cork Literary Festival