Paul Malpas

Over the last few years since starting this blog in November 2009, I have written on occasion about the parish I grew up in and surprisingly these postings received more attention than any other pieces I have written, which I suppose vindicates my theory that Longsight in those days was a lovely place to live and that we at St Robert’s were a lucky bunch of blighters to have such smashing pastors that ruled and organized our lives.  There was no apparent skulduggery by clerics, there was no serious questioning of religion, all the bishops seemed to be decent men who easily received our approbation.  Old days in an old church was the subject of one of my postings and it surely is a true reflection of those days.

A lady who was at school with me and has been a frequent contributor to my blog expressed an interest in giving her story of her childhood and its happy times as we baby boomers kicked off the post war years in style.  Jean Skitt is the lady’s married name but we at St Robert’s knew her as Jean Gay, who patrolled the streets of Longsight with her brother Cliff in those far off halcyon days.  So today I give you Jean Skitt and her lovely piece on her childhood in and around St Robert’s parish.

St Mary’s Church and parish is in North Lancashire, probably the northernmost parish in the Salford Diocese.  The village is famed for its prettiness and old world charm.  The church and graveyard is famed for its bones ie, the bones of Monsignor Duggan and Lord Nolan, the man the Bishops of England and Wales asked to sort out their Safeguarding problems back at the turn of the century (21st that is).  While Nolan was beavering away at his report published in 2002, which really made clear to the dioceses of England and Wales how they were supposed to deal with this pesky problem of priestly abuse on children, Duggan’s bones were already 34 years in the cold Lancashire clay.  No two men could be more poles apart, Duggan, the arch-abuser of vulnerable young boys at St Bede’s College in Manchester and Nolan, the antithesis.  Yet here they are side by side in this lovely Lancashire vale.

St Mary’s had been presided over by Fr Anthony Grimshaw, ex- strapper in chief at St Bede’s under Duggan in the 1960s, a man, who once he had shrugged off the cloying mantle of Bede’s, distinguished himself in Africa as a missionary priest before returning to parish work in Manchester.  A lovely man by all accounts and in my few recent dealings, he seemed to be a good honest man.

Idly flicking through the web this morning, I came across a site named Holy Spirit Interactive, their message for today Friday 4th May 2012 was a long rambling piece on how boring, the boring mass should not be, the writer must have written 5000 words on this boring subject and by the time I reached the end, I was bored to tears.  Then my heart gave a leap because the writer turned out to be no one else but my old mate Bazza, Fr Barry O’Sullivan, who described himself as the parish priest of St Mary’s Chipping.  So what happened to Fr Grimshaw, I do hope he is alright but I did understand he had been in poor health.

So if the the web is not lieing Old Bazza has found his little heaven in the sun.  For those not aware of O’Sullivan or this blog, let me just tell you that in his previous life Bazza was the Coordinator of the Safeguarding Commission of the Salford Diocese.  The man charged by Brainless Bishop Brain to look after the welfare of young people and vulnerable adults in the Diocese.  Brain’s nickname could not have been nearer the truth.  O’Sullivan was the complete square peg trying to fit into a round world.  In fact in O’Sullivan’s world there was no square hole even, he was just one useless son of a bitch.

After 10 years slaving away at nothing except feeding his two scraggy dogs he accepted the inevitable, when Brain’s advisors eventually got through and told the Bishop that the present situation in Salford regarding Safeguarding was ridiculous, it could not go on.  Even Cardinal Brady of Armagh was sniggering at Salford.  Bazza with downcast head left his plush Cathedral offices supposedly to devote his time to the poor prisoners in Strangeways Jail in Manchester and devote himself to his 11+ studies in Counselling at Manchester University.  The prisoners revolted and the senior professors threw up.  They have all been saved by Bazza’s mate Brainless removing him to Chipping where he can polish bones and look after another old mate of mine, Ronald Shelley, who I went to school with and who is now a parishioner in St Mary’s.  It was Ron who barked at me one day two years ago that I should leave the sacred bones of Duggan to lie in peace and not publicise the horrors that this devilish man had bestowed on young boys at St Bede’s for 16 years (1950-1966).  Well Ron you have another fine man now so look after him.

It was O’Sullivan who told me one day that he and Brain had discovered something terrible about Duggan and that it was too serious to talk about on the telephone and would I come over to Manchester.  I said I would but before the meeting happened he, in his stupid childish little way, fell out with me over a matter of protocol and said I was an unworthy advocate, not to be trusted and that he could no longer see me and therefore could not speak to me and therefore could not deal with me.  I was persona non grata.  How could a man faced with the biggest clergy abuse scandal to ever hit the Salford Diocese, become my enemy over something so trivial, unless he was the blithering idiot that everybody now knows he is and was.  A man so far removed from reality that he even puts Brady in the shade.

It was the learned O’Sullivan who once threatened to sue me for deformation if I did not retract something that somebody else had written on my blog.  I told him that all resonable gentlemen argued in words and that he had every right to counterbalance the offending sentence with one or two of his own.  Perhaps at that time he had not learnt to write but he is certainly making amends now with this boring old piece of bunkum on the website.

It used to be said that as a priest if you had done something wrong, made love to a women, robbed a bank or went on a drunken wrecking spree, you were sent to North Lancashire to cool off and repent and let the breeze of that area wash you clean.  Unfortunately with O’Sullivan that will not happen because the poor chap needs counselling himself and with his two dirty mutts snuggling up beside him each night, the rancid smell of dog will be with him for life.  God help Chipping.

I am willing to change anything in the above piece if I am proved wrong and the internet has lied to me but I do not think it has and I do not think I will, but at least this piece will be ongoing as more facts arrive.

Shock and horror 12 hours after the above went public a very learned friend who is much closer to the action tells me that I have been duped by that stupid inefficient website Holy Spirit Interactive.  They had the date right but the entry written by our friend O’Sullivan was at least 10 years old.  It seems he was attached to the parish for some time just after the turn of the 21st century.  So I am glad that Fr Grimshaw is in good health or at least as good as it can be at 75 years old and I am happy for the parishioners of St Mary’s.  The last thing I would wish on them is the nincompoop O’Sullivan especially for a second time.  We must also give the website a new name, how about Holy Spirit Inactive.  But at least they gave me a chance to give out about O’Sullivan, another inactive if ever I saw one.

So sorry Tony Grimshaw, sorry parishioners of St Mary’s but God blast you O’Sullivan for being the stupid man you are and to you Ron Shelley watch how you go and listen out for the rattle of bones as Duggan lies uneasily in his bunker.

I wonder whether last night’s (1st May 2012) BBC Northern Ireland television expose (to be repeated on BBC 2 tonight, 2nd May 2012) of all things clerically abusive in Ireland and directed in the main at Cardinal Sean Brady, the Catholic Church’s main man, could possibly be the forge out of which the last nail was hammered which will eventually fix down the lid of the coffin on this stuttering fart of a prelate.

My old mate from America, Tom Doyle was in it, jostling to be the first man in the queue at the forge.  Tom is a Dominican priest who told the American bishops 26 years ago that what they were doing in covering up this abuse scandal was wrong.  They ignored him and side-lined this once ambitious and learned man and eventually stopped paying him and cancelled his pension.  Tom, a high ranking Canon Lawyer, now travels the world giving expert testimony in courts and on the media pointing out in a very clear and precise way the damage these blundering priests are doing to their religion and flock.

Brady whilst admitting his presence in the Father Smythe case that rocked Ireland nearly 20 years ago, but only in the face of overwhelming evidence, has said he was only at the original enquiry in 1975 as a priest notary and it was not his position to publicise his knowledge.  He did not even report his findings to the parents of Smythe’s abused children and he went on abusing for another 15 or so years, whilst Brady lived in Rome, burnishing his canonical reputation.  His position was clear he said, he had to report to his superior, the bishop, and that was that as far as he was concerned.  Pontius Pilatus comes to mind.

However it is not enough to say he did his duty.  As a priest and a man of God he should surely have allowed his own private person to take an interest.  Brady , at that time was a 36 year old canon lawyer and teacher, he was no slip of a lad fresh out of seminary.  He was a mature Catholic priest with, you would hope, a conscience.  He could surely see a wrong but did nothing to counteract it other than report it to his superior.  A little like the Nazi philosophy to its followers,  it was to this level that the Church had fallen.

So to act as a good centre half in the face of this unfair criticism of Brady, the Vatican wheels out Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Promoter of Justice of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  The CDF is the Vatican’s latter-day Inquisition and was headed for many years by the present pope, Benny 16 and is now presided over by the disgraced Californian, Cardinal William Levada.  Scicluna said at the time when the  first evidence was introduced two years ago ” I think he (Brady) fulfilled his duty well”.  He has not learnt and he repeated his mantra again this morning.

Then onto the Pat Kenny programme on RTE 1 came Bishop Gerry Clifford, the mumbling Auxiliary Bishop of Armagh, a Scicluna think alike, who said that 1975, when Brady was implicated, “was in a different era, with a different ethos” and so the the turgid rubbish keeps spewing from these advanced cleric’s lips.  Will they never ever learn.  He said the damage to the victims was not realised in those days and it was not treated  seriously.  What shite, the Church knew about its long lasting damage at least in the 4th century at the Synod of Elvira in Spain where the first recorded response to clerical abuse was discussed and legislated against and also in the proceeding 17 centuries following that, where they have tried and failed to grip the problem and failed because of  the transient bishops need to retain power.  Brady will not resign, although age and confidence have deserted him.  The only thing keeping him in place is his own need for power, defending the indefensible is his ethos.

Bishop Clifford’s only answer to his circumlocutor Kenny, who really lost his chance to hammer the man because he got lost in his own verbosity, was to say that if the same thing happened today it would be Brady’s or a modern day priest’s responsibility to go to the local Safeguarding Commission and report it there, if his bishop played a deaf one.  The local Safeguarding Commission would take up the cudgel on the priest’s behalf and stop the rot.

To this statement I have a real problem.  I have had experience of a Safeguarding Commission albeit in England and I doubt it is any different in whatever diocese you go to, they are all trained in the same response.  My experience was in the Salford Diocese, a bunch of dudes I have written about at length, managed and run by priests with a sprinkling of lawyers looking for Vatican recognition and a heap of professionals in the field of Child Safety, who are only looking for additions to their curriculum vitae and could not give two damns about abused children and vulnerable adults.

In my case the fumbling idiot of a priest I reported to agreed with my accusations saying he had heard of the abuser for the whole of his twenty five years as a priest.  Wherever these holy men got together on retreat or at the golf course, they whispered and tittered about the goings on of my man but did nothing about it.  This fool said that their files were clean yet the whole bloody diocese knew of the satanic deeds of this monsignorial monster.  This just sums up the corporative philosophy of the Church and in the years to come when the filth that is the Catholic Church is finally exposed, it will be this philosophy that drained the life out of the Vatican and made millions just like me, who had devoted their lives to its teaching, receive the bravura to walk away to their own personal, mental and philosophical peace.

If you wish to read more on this subject google “Clerical Whispers, 2nd May 2012″ and try and watch BBC2 repeat tonight Wednesday 2nd April 2012.

Tommy O’Duggan was an agrarian expert, a Lancashire farmer imbued with the generic gifts his forefathers had bequeathed when they left the broad green fields of their native Tipperary to seek a life in distant lands after their agricultural skills had deserted them following some bad harvests long ago.  Lancashire was where they pitched up and in those dark satanics their innate gifts were lost as they went about life like the rest of the unwashed, with no care at all for their fellow man or woman.

But T O’D was different, great things were expected of him.  It was obvious from a very early age, dragging himself from the curse of unwedded birth, everything he touched almost turned to gold.  The rich landowner of those wild Lancashire hills kept a good eye on him, he could see his talents and nurtured them.  As Tommy matured and became a man, the landowner fed him the best and put him in front of the finest educators.  The landowner’s marriage was barren and he loved Tommy like a son, Tommy was going to inherit the land but something happened, we know not what, the story became blurred.

It could not have been anything to do with the pretty young maids who cluttered the mansion house, put there for Tommy’s delictation.  Tommy was a devil for work, ploughing and tilling the fields of his master’s many farms.  He had no time for frippery.  Tommy’s work was his raison d’etre.  However some people say that a change came over him when that big broad and burly sailor wandered through the village.  The sailor, tall and wide like the masts and sails of an ocean going clipper, rolled through the hamlet one weekend, hoping to pick up a four master in the port of Liverpool.  He was dressed in his finest civilian clobber purchased in the world’s seediest fleshpots.  Strappy 6″ high heeled shoes, fully fashioned nylon stockings, pencil thin white skirt putting mighty pressure on his muscular hips, which from the imprint on the sheath, were covered by gossamer thin lingerie.  A tight sleeveless top barely covered the rippling torso and left his tattoed biceps for all to wonder at.  His freshly coiffured head of silken ginger curls took the eye, as the whole was embroidered with professionally applied nail laquer, American lipstick and delicate Provencal perfume.  This man was hitting town big style and possibly Tommy was the victim but do not tell anyone that I said that.

After a few days the eagle-eyed landowner noticed the canker, put sailor and farmer together and came up with a no-no.  No longer was Tommy the next in line, no longer the favourite child, but at the same time the liege lord was not heartless and he searched his fiefdom and came up with the answer, his favourite field.  The lord after rebuking his once favourite, took him down to the Long Field.  Through the wide pillared gateway to the Victorian pile with many outbuildings erected by previous tenants who had obviously seen the good days.  At the rear of the buildings was this God’s gift to man.  The land that had created the name for the place, the Long Field stretched as far as the eye could see and even farther, the finest tilth.  There was nothing that would not grow on it given care and attention and T O’D had that in spades.

The landlord spread his arms wide, “this is yours my son, my good and faithful servant.  This is yours to do with what you will, but obviously you do understand that we cannot have you and your canker in the manor house”.  Tommy’s eyes, seconds before filled with remorse for his recent stupidity, started to shine.  He could see the possibilities.  If this was not on the pig’s back at least it was very close to the sow’s arse.  He thanked his lord profusely and set about the place.

Without doubt it was a long field starting off at his Victorian edifice, it ran for many a mile, far into the 21st century.  Besides being long, unfortunately it was very narrow and had often defeated his predecessors, who had a job turning a cart and horses within its width but its quality was magnificent.  There was no finer loam, a splendid glebe.

Tommy knew only too well his own shortcomings, he knew he had squandered his biggest chance but he was lord and master of this heavenly place and he was going to give it his best shot.  “Thomas O’Duggan is a magician”, he thought ” I have the chance of turning this lovely oasis into heaven, I will not fail, God if there is one, is on my side”.

The Long Field was narrow but with his agrarian acumen and equine know-how, within a couple of seasons he had bred a team of shire horses that could easily turn the cart.  They could shimmy, in fact, far better than that now forgotten sailor.  Tommy was going great guns and except for the occasional blip when the landlord’s help was needed, he carried on regardless and in fact his labours were so good his master granted him a knighthood for services rendered.

On the right hand side of the field was a railway track, like the field, disappearing into the distance and on the left separated by a stony ditch was wet marshy bogland.  Anyone or anything venturing into same would be lost without trace, devoured by this cloying, contaminated slough but between the two was this glorious narrow verdure, the Long Field.

Time moved on and the maturing Tom found life a little dull.  No more the tittilation of tars, the idyll had lost its heavenly allure, thoughts turned to alcohol and worse.  Tommy’s adoring prince could see this and scoured the country for answers, all the agricultural panels were consulted and he came up with a solution.  He drove up to Tommy’s place in a mighty pantechnicon, full to the brim with sacks of  the finest quality seed that the leading bio-scientists could find.  “Here Tommy, here is your gift.  With your abilities the yield from this field will be fivefold, the grain the finest.  You will make a fortune and I only want 10%.”

That evening Tommy brought a few sacks into the house and spread one sack onto the large dining table, normally burdened with huge hunks of beef, tureens of vegetables, pots of potatoes and jugs of succulant velvety gravy.  His trained eye immediately noticed that though all the grain had been passed by the finest scientific brains, it was not all the same.  Each seed was not a clone of the other but each had its own little nuance.  Some were golden and fat, some a pale yellow and pointed, some even round and comely.  As he sat and looked at each grain he developed a game to while away the long winter hours before it was time to plant same.  He pulled out his erect, veinous and by now knarled penis from his voluminous garments and placed it carefully on his knee.  Then carefully placed a seed from each of the main types onto the end of said digit and with a swift flick of his mighty phallus sent the seeds  and any small drippy bits tumbling into the air.  At this point his seaman stained tongue issued out, chamelion like, from his puckered and muscular lips and the idea was to catch as much of this scattered load as he could.  After a few practises he was containing the whole of the tumbled load in one tongueful and after a few pensive mastications he spat the spent husks out into his copper spitoon.

Initially Tommy was heartened with this winter sport, however his lust for the noxious had increased along with the need for alcoholic turpitude and in a fit of rage and in the middle of winter with the frost still on the ground and the land not ready for sowing, he took the seed and scattered it wildly.  Lots went into the murky morass never to be seen again, some fell into the stony ditch maturing some seasons later but impossible to reap, a little fell onto the fine tilth of the unprepared land to grow the following summer but with poor yield.  The rest fell on the railway track and were gathered up in the slipstream of passing trains and carried off to all parts of the known world where they prospered in the main in warmer climates.

Poor T O’D did not last the course, he was carried out of his beloved desmesne in a straight jacket stricken with mental illness brought on by an overpowering need for depravity and two years later died of an aneurism, the legacy of that buxom sailor. ” All’s well that is hard as well” were his final words.