“I hear it in my head but it will not come onto my lips.”

“It will in time.”

But it did not. Still in a suit of grey Jonathan Adams stepped into a sunless office off the Crumlin Road in Belfast and signed on with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which had replaced the old RIC, disbanded after the new Northern Ireland state was founded.

It was one final attempt to appease his father who had been a policeman before him. Old Adams had seen his son George established as an engineer in Toronto, his daughter as a librarian at All Souls in Oxford. Willy in a ministry in Tyrone. All his family had done well. But somehow Jonathan had let him down. He had not persevered. Like the Jonathan of old he had disobeyed his father. He had tasted food before evening had come. He did but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in his hand, and lo, he must die.

If he could not spread the word of God throughout the new state, then at least, thought Jonathan Adams, he could guard its laws.

His father’s words – if you leave the ministry of the Church you’ll be cursed – remained a challenge that Jonathan Adams had to contend with all his life. His first few years in the RUC were even more humiliating for him than his period as a Presbyterian minister. Those who joined in the twenties were old RIC veterans from the South as well as the North, and all, including ex-servicemen, were sure of preferment. They had quickly taken all available positions of authority so that the young Presbyterian men like Jonathan Adams who joined in the late thirties had little hope of improvement. They remained at the level of Southern Catholic RIC men who were reaccepted into the force only on sufferance. None had the chance of rising above the rank of sergeant until political experience showed that Catholic inspectors stopped the cries of sectarianism.

He was assigned to a village in County Fermanagh. His ignorance of farming and farming communities was profound. He despised the uncouth RUC men who surrounded him, their corruption, their garrulousness, their ill-fed consciences, their sham, Church of Ireland pieties which seemed devoid of the principle that underlay true Protestantism. In his first station, his manners, temper, education and celibacy were a constant source of merriment for his fellow policemen.