Paul Malpas

Hello and it is so good to return to the land of the living to meet you all again after three and a half months of researching the life of a 62 year old dead man who passed from this world 42 years ago and who caused great grief to many young boys in Manchester, that he pastored for 16 long years all that time ago. Readers of this column will know of whom I speak and I just wonder whether it was the manner of his humble birth which made young, intelligent and gifted boys such an anathema to him.

Anyway, I am back amongst you, but not in a joyful or carefree mood, although I should be with that pair of burgeoning boys, born to my daughter in June this summer and winking at me from the wallpaper put on my computer screen and also another birth in August, in Bradford, of my sixth grand child, Hamzah, which means I think, Lion. Slightly built but with long fingers, he has time to grow tall and I expect him to play for Yorkshire one day and hopefully for Bangladesh or England, he has the choice and anybody with choice is half way there. I should be joyful after seeing the twins suck Northern France dry on our holidays there last month and I am not carefree because only just over a week ago, a man I held in the highest regard, a man who, more than anyone I know, kept his hometown of Boyle, in North Roscommon, in the artistic and intellectual spotlights of Ireland, died suddenly. It was his management and organization of the Boyle Arts Festival, an annual event of some magnitude, that kept the modern day artists of Ireland on their toes and it was him, alone, who captured the imagination of the Arts media. Except for him, Boyle would have been some little backwater bypassed on the road to Sligo and dreaming of its military and musical past.

I watched the blaze and pageantry of his funeral service, the blaze and pageantry that only the Catholic Church with the help of the local community can throw on occasions such as these and accepted that that is what they do well to bigfish in small ponds. I started thinking would he have liked all this hype, he went so quickly, he might not have left a protocol to be followed but knowing the man, I would suggest his favourite modus mortatis would have been in a blaze of glory, so he would not have been upset by his requiem.

Continuing along with that train of thought I realised that that kind of celebration would not be for me, not the pageantry or a blaze of anything other than the gas fired jets of a burner in some damp crematorium. I am no big fish in any kind of pond, I am not even plankton, possibly a minor diatom drifting around in a puddle caused by an imprint in the soil of some well worn wellington boot . When I go I want to be treated as such, first of all pinched for reaction, to ensure my mortality and when satisfied that life no longer exists, shovelled into some form of container, a body bag or even a shopping bag and taken to the firing chamber as soon as possible once all legal niceties are resolved, and there turned into clinker or ashes and when cooled, placed in some humble container. A cardboard box will do.

It is at this moment my family, if any still hold me in regard and a friend or friends can gather and drink my supernatural health and think of days when I did my best and there were not many of those. It would be a pleasure at this time if some kind burgher would dribble a few drops of life giving nectar over my cardboard contained dust. Just on the off chance so to speak. My mate, Charly’s, hooch would be just the thing. When satisfied that this elixir is only snake oil then take me off to South Sligo.

I want what is left of me to be bisected, roughly will do, if no scales are to be had, and the first half taken to the top of the Bricklieves, the Speckled Mountains, a place my ancestors of 5500 years ago held in high regard and it is there that my acolytes will await a gentle westerly breeze and allow this moiety of my roasted powder to slip away and be carried by this zephyr, over Dunaveragh, that ancient resting place of pilgrims and on over the latter day N4, to rest on the calm waters of Loch Arbhach with the lightest haze finally stopping on the walls of Ballindoon Abbey, where the Dominicans held sway 500 years ago.

Back in the car again with care being taken of my final remnants, a zephyr up there can soon turn into a tempest and this final grit has another place to go. To the historic Plains of Boyle we will be destined. Here on this vibrant pasture land, Irish cattle have been fattened up for thousands of years. In this much prized upland plateau is the townland of Eastersnow. It is here John Mcgahern, my most favourite wordsmith, in his much praised book “Amongst Women” buries the first fictional mother of the family. I can only say that he did this for the beauty of its name, certainly to me a better sound than, Aghawillin in Leitrim where his own mother lies and it has the added advantage of being within walking distance of Cootehall where he lived as a boy.

The graveyard at Eastersnow is a pleasant site, quadrangular in shape with the four walls of an old chapel standing in its centre. It has been the home of rich man and poor man for a long time and I would like my remaining bits scattered within these four walls. If John McGahern had high regard, so do I and it has the added advantage of being close to Byrne’s Public House. If any mourner ravished with the drouth, after so long a pilgrimage, would just knock on the door, I am sure Mrs. Byrne would offer them a drink.

So my time will be over and I hope there is great merry making in the community as one more thorn is picked out of people’s lives and the lovely Helen can settle down to an old age with little to worry about except for the untidiness of the kitchen. I, unfortunately will not be there to keep everything shipshape and Bristol fashion.

But before I go for today, I want to reiterate the thoughts in my first paragraph and thank you all once again for your support throughout the Summer. There was a steady flow of people logging on every day for, even though I say it myself, a better read than the newspapers.

The various events of June have dried my mind out, it is now a sere mass of grey matter and I have come to a full stop. Every morning for the last two weeks, i have come down the stairs at the crack of sparrow fart, dawn to the unpoetic, sat at the keyboard and nothing, not even a sentence.

It normally takes me about four hours to write a 1000 words, think, edit, rewrite, edit and type out, but these last two weeks nothing, in fact for the most of June, nothing. I might have been bothered about two major areas of research I have set myself, but nothing there either, only indolence, torpor and langour. I cannot set my mind to churn the way it has for the past seven months. So I have decided to rest up until the 1st October, concentrate on the research subjects and hope that I can get them out of the way for the Autumn.

It was not just that the words would not come although that was my Becher’s Brook, but there are so many other fences to jump. The glorious weather, a fascinating series of one day cricket against the Australians, a lake more or less outside the front door which had a 24 hour shimmer in that glorious June, the planning of a continental trip later in the year, the garden and vegetable plot that seems to want care evey five minutes with its burgeoning crop brought to fruition by the finest June on record, the thoughts of the twins thriving in Manchester and thinking of the life in front of them, I am sure and I hope that it will not be as hard as the past 60 years.

So there it is and apologies to all my readers who have been waiting patiently for most of June to pick up the glowing pearls that emanate from my keyboard every morning. A full stop will clear my mind, let me enjoy my enjoyment and stop making me feel guilty about taking time off. All my working life I have felt guilty at taking time off, even when working seven days a week. A weeks holiday, a round of golf made me a nervous wreck, it really was not worth it, but now I am retired, I am master of all I survey. So full stop until October and thank you for having me.

Please excuse me if I am inaccurate but I am speaking about an unusual subject for me at least, but I do understand logic and after nearly 40 years of marriage I am beginning to understand the courage and emotion that make up the female psyche and I know one thing for certain, women know their own bodies and as vacant as some of them might well be, they understand what is right and wrong for them.  There is another thing that I am certain of, men have not got a clue about the inner workings of a woman’s mind and body.  After years of study and examinations, the murky males who populate the maternity departments of hospitals and call themselves doctors and even worse, gynaecologists and look at women from a different perspective than most of us, have no idea about their patients’ innards and minds than we who admire them on a Saturday night out.

To them a maternity department is a well oiled conveyor belt with all operatives ticking along in unison like those in a car production plant, producing fully formed units every 20 minutes or so.  But this in reality is not the case and drugs and other additives are added to fine tune the system.  But this should not be the case.  Each woman is a unique machine, a Rolls Royce and is hand built to perfection depending on their environmental circumstances.  Each woman is different in a million little nuances; each woman needs empathy, not sympathy and certainly does not need to be patronised.

Most women nowadays understand drugs and their misuse and overuse and consultation and agreement is required, not dismissal and overbearance.  A psychotherapist with no maternity training would make a better maternity doctor than those who have trained for years in obstetrics.  Without a doubt when it comes to producing babies, mind is more important than matter.  Pumping them full of antibiotics and birth inducing drugs, like a cow in the field, is not what the normal woman wants.  Environment and nature is the thing to instil into these maternity mechanics.

On conveyor belts hundreds of things can go wrong.  Take the case of the North Dublin woman, Melissa Redmond, who went for an initial scan on her expectant third child, after a few miscarriages and was told the foetus was dead and the hospital set in motion the machinery to remove the embryo by D&C procedure two days later and gave her an abortion tool and some drugs that would help the operation.  The lady agreed to all this but knew in her own mind that something was wrong.  Her body was telling her different, she knew her own body and everything felt good.  Wisely she went for a second opinion to her G.P. who confirmed to her that her baby was live and well and in fact the bouncing boy was born in March this year.  If she had used the abortion tool or taken the drugs given, prior to presenting herself at hospital that new life would not be..

You might recogniSe the hospital, that conveyor belt to hell, Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, famed for Dr Michael Neary’s antics of removing the wombs and ovaries of women as they got out of their cars in the carpark.  To him, no woman was a vital unit until these parasitic organs were cut out.  To read more of this lady’s experiences which was well reported in depth by Fiach Kelly and Breda Heffernan in today’s Independent click here.

I, as a father of six, am well experienced in natural births, long labours (four hours) and short labours (ten minutes), hospital births and home births and I know the most important thing for my wife was environment, nature and absence,  My absence that is, whilst she underwent the joyous and personal effort of birth.  I was obviously welcomed back into the family as soon as the messy bits were cleaned up.

So my daughter, who became pregnant last autumn and was later told she had twins, swore she was going to have her multiple birth at home, like her last child, in peace and harmony and without drugs and insistence and clockwork routine.  She had suffered trauma with her first two births in that den of filth and grime, they called Wythenshawe Hospital, a few years ago.  Let us hope that they have now got their act together.

This time she had independent midwives on call and every thing was progressing well until time stepped in.  Even independent midwives have to send their charges to hospital if they are more than three weeks premature and Katy was 35 weeks gone when she started to have regular contractions yesterday and she reluctantly had to go to Stepping Hill Hospital, where if she had let them, she would have been hooked up to the conveyor belt and pumped with antibiotics.  An institutionalised midwife explained the system and a foreign doctor, who did not have a proper grasp of the language, never mind the mind of the mother, told her she would be endangering the lives of the unborn if she did not enter into the spirit of his system and have steroids administered to the foetuses.

Her husband could see the trauma his wife was in and with the obstinacy only those born in Northampton have, told the doctor to fuck off, which released the tension momentarily.  Katy suffered an adrenalin rush which halted her labour and they came home, exhausted and annoyed.  Her contractions started again this morning and she waited until they were coming thick and fast before submitting herself to an understandable husband’s six mile hair-raising drive to hospital.  An hour later, Tom, her first child was born at 10.05am and as I write between tears, he has already settled on her right breast and we are waiting for the second.  It is important to know that in this case the hospital staff did not have chance to start up the conveyor belt, at least nature if not environment took its course.  My wife telephones me from the ringside and tells me that a doctor in a book she is reading tells that the safest place to have a baby is in the back of a taxi on the way to hospital, to sever the umbilical and tell the driver “home James”.  The phone rings once more with the news that George was born at 10.30am and is settling down well on the left one.   Alleluia! Alleluia!

Mother, father and fourth and fifth born swear to be out of hospital this afternoon.  I wish I was there instead of tapping the keys of this ever devouring machine of mine.  I can hardly see the keys for these last few lines so emotional as this morning become.  Alleluia!

As a post scriptum to this happy occasion the first pictures, as if by miracle have come onto my computer screen.  The two young bucks look like their father and mark my words, they look obstinate buggers.

First of all I would like to apologize to anybody who reads this blog on a regular basis.  I have been very busy and have only managed to squeeze in one blog in the last week.  A cousin of mine died  a week ago, trgically young at 54 years of age and I went over to England last Thursday to a very emotional but lovely funeral.  A funeral is a very necessary and cathartic experience for all that have been  touched by the deceased’s life.  The tentacles of humanity, stretching out and gathering in all those people, who have at some stage  had their spirit lifted by the finished life-force, for one final celebration.  It is happy and sad and necessary and this particular celebration was made all the greater by the beautiful panegyric of the priest, Father Bernard Sparks, a great and longtime friend of the family.

I left the gathering after a couple of hours and went back to my daughter’s house in a very contemplative mood.  For reasons I will not bother you with, I had not seen the lady, my first cousin, for a number of years.  As you all grow up and move around and settle into a path of life, touch can easily be lost and this is what made this death all the harder for me.  At one time I was so close to her and her family and now I would not have recognized her in the street.  She died before I knew her and yet at one time I knew her well.  Somehow I had missed out on a good life and that is a big miss.

Away I came and the following morning was more than pleasantly surprised from a comment I received on a blog I wrote  on 12 January 2010 called The Importance of Blogs. I had just heard that Catherine, who has just died, was terminally ill and I dedicated this blog to her and her family.  It traced her mother’s  family tree back to the Famine in Ireland, it was a piece of their history they were unsure of because of their mother’s premature death, nearly 50 years ago.

This comment was from a lady who had just read this blog and realized that she was a second cousin of mine and Catherine’s, her grandfather and my grandmother were siblings.  She was from a branch of the family that had gone their separate ways in the 1930s and for whatever reason  touch had been lost.

That is why the blog is such an amazing and powerful tool if used properly.  You often think that once a piece has been posted, that is it, gone and forgotten, but the internet and blog field leaves it there like a bright shiny cherry on a tree waiting to be picked and eaten by passing strangers.  It is there for evermore, hopefully to be appreciated by everyone and that is what happened.  So now as one cousin goes another comes to light and hopefully will not disappear as quickly.

As I was writing these words this morning, there came news that  will only double my efforts in this field.  My daughter, Katy, has entered the final stages of pregnancy with the anticipation of twins.  She is slightly premature but the experts say that this is normal with multiple births and that mother and foeutuses are fine, with estimated weights of 5lb with still four weeks of cooking  to go.  However she will now have to go into hospital for their delivery,  a thing she dreads.  She was looking forward to a home birth and had an army of midwives lined up to take care of any eventuality.  She will have to be forthright and clear minded and not let these tinkerers of mortality, the doctors, try to bully her into treatment she does not want, just to suit the timetable of the maternity suite.

My wife has flown the coop and is now in Dublin boarding the Holyhead boat with a rolling pin in hand.  God help the doctors at Stepping Hill Hospital.   I am left with the young fellah, a mop and bucket and various dusters and told to make sure the house is perfect on her return.  That might not be until these twins are weaned so I have plenty of time.  The male’s station in life as with all things historic is a lonely one, but I suppose I have the pub and my blog and all the interesting things that both these channels deliver, but I must get on, the mop is doing a lonely dance in the bucket of hot water I prepared earlier.