Paul Malpas

After the trauma of the recent week ie. the birth of those twin boys, I have found it hard getting back to the mundane. The pen has become heavy in my hand and my brain is struggling to return to its livewire best. Perhaps it was the cocktail of champagne, cider, stout and good old Chilean Carmenere wine that has dulled the mental performance, but today, come what may, I have decided to rid myself of the dilatory rut that I have found myself stuck in.

The news from Manchester this morning is that the twins, although not thriving as well as might be expected, are alert and well and their mother, although exhausted because of the new routine, is confident that they will get the hang of the tap that controls the flow from those mammary reservoirs. My daughter says that one of the delights with feeding twins is that when you have finished with one and turn over to the other, the first scratches your back. On top of that there is a lady coming round this morning who calls herself a Breast Feeding Coordinator from the hospital and she has papers to prove it. She will no doubt add her bosomal delights to the feast that is already at the table, but formula milk is definitely off the menu.

It seems these days that wet nursing is no longer a thing of the past and we know of one 72 year old woman in Hollywood who is still at it and has been plying this honourable trade for the last 42 years with the offspring of filmstars and in the process has made herself millions. She lives in a mansion up in the hills outside Tinseltown and must have paps down to her knees by now. Fair play to the rich and famous for ensuring this profession still exists today in this fast food world we live in.

I went to Manchester last week on hearing the news. I went the old fashioned way, by train and boat and train and was amazed by the ease which everything seamlessly slotted into place. I caught the train from Boyle, walked across the platform at Connolly Station in Dublin and caught the Dart out to Dun Laoghaire, walked across the road to the Stena Line Terminal and walked onto the boat. The same at Holyhead, where we caught the train to Chester, and changed for Manchester in minutes. What amazed me also was the number of passengers who choose this form of travel. Going by car you are cocooned and are not aware of this traditional mode. Although the throng was slightly diluted at Chester, some going north and some south, those of us who made it to the end, struck up a friendship that will take a long time breaking.

I heard one amourous young English lady who seemed attracted to this langourous, tall, thin, cigarette smoking West of Ireland youth, who looked to be coolness personified, “how many pints do you drink when you are out on the tear at weekends”. “I don’t know” was the reply “the same amount as I drink during the week. I’m always pissed when I get home and I can’t remember”. This for chat up lines takes the biscuit and I hope they have a long and loving relationship.

It is a trip worth taking for anyone with the time and it took me on a happy memorial tour of all the chemical and petro-chemical plants of North Wales and East Merseyside where I spent many a pleasurable day in the past. I was recognizing the plants but getting their names mixed up. A sign of old age, I am glad I am where I am.

My first meeting with the twins was memorable, emotional and private but I will at least show you this photograph, which was taken within seconds of me arriving at my daughter’s house. The smile I think is more in anticipation of the cold glass of Weston’s Old Rosie cider that my son-in-law was holding tantalizingly out of reach, while I cuddled the delightful twosome.

Two days later, repleat with joy, I came back to Ireland in Helen’s car and stopped off in Dublin to watch the premiere of my daughter, Paddy Jo’s, performance in Brian Friel’s play “The Yalta Game”. She played the female lead, Anna Sergeyevna, in this adaption of a theme from Anton Chekov’s 1899 short story “The Lady with a Lapdog”. Although I say it myself and I am of course as biased as hell, she was magnificent and I was really proud of her in this her first professional performance after years of making a name for herself at UCD’s Dramsoc. Mark my words, look out for Paddy Jo Malpas in the future, she indeed might need that wetnurse in Hollywood in the years to come.

Yesterday I was writing about the winter of  1972 which set me thinking of other things that happened in that year.  During the summer of 1972 I went on my one and only package holiday, four of us and two kids went to Majorca.  These package holidays were only just starting up and myself and three members of the Conservative Club decided to try it out.  There was Trevor, a local builder, Judith, his wife, and their two kids and Cliff, a retired fish and chip shop owner, from Northmoor Road and myself, an unimaginable quartet.

We landed at Palma and we were bussed out to our hotel, the El Cid, in Can Pastilla, a few miles out of Palma.  To us men from Longsight, it was a remarkable, clean, luxury hotel, nothing at all like the smelly boarding houses in Blackpool that we were used to.  We were certainly not used to such splendour and service.  Majorca was still in its peasant stage and had not yet become the tourist Mecca it now is and I think it was better off for it.  We spent two days riding in the hills in the centre of the island in our sheepskin coats like a couple of bushrangers under the sweltering Spanish sun.

One night, after organizing a hotel babysitter, the four of us went to Palma for a night out and after a drink in a couple of bars, where we were eating slices of meat cut off hams hanging from the ceiling and having thought that we had mastered the language, we felt emboldened enough to enter a night-club which had some entertainment.  Entry was free and it shows our naivity, girls brought us unsolicited drinks and sat with us.  However after half an hour of this spoiling we asked for the bill.  It was astronomic; we refused to pay; the management was threatening us with all sorts of nonsense, the brave new sign language had gone out the window.  We said in a voice getting louder by the sentence that we would pay a fair price but they could not understand and their numbers were getting larger and more aggressive.

Trevor and myself had gallantly pushed old Cliff and Judith to a position of safety and facing up the management, we were discussing tactics out of the side of our mouths, knowing we were in for a fair hammering but wondering how many we could take out in the beginning so has to reduce the number of blows we would have to take later on.  After all they were only dagos but there was a lot of them.  When all of a sudden the police arrived, but there was still a language problem.  So like the police the world over when they do not understand the criminal, they arrested us and put us behind bars with a few unsavoury regulars.  We managed to persuade them in some very basic words that Judith and Cliff were innocent bystanders and they released them.  Judith was now frantic thinking of the kids in the hotel , so we bade our farewells and expected the worst.  After a few hours an interpreter arrived and brought order to chaos and after a little negotiation and a few more hours captivity, we settled for a fair price, the key went in the lock and we were on our much chastened way back to the El Cid.

The next couple of days we spent within spitting distance of the hotel, not daring to chance Palma again.  I was rooming with Cliff who snored so loud that the ships out on the Mediterranean thought he was a foghorn and were preparing to do battle with this unsuspected micro-fog.  I gained some relief by sleeping in the bath behind a locked door but the reverberations from the snores continued to echo round the empty tile-floored corridors of the hotel.

One afternoon, two or three days into the holiday I decided the best cushion against this nightly bedlam was alcohol, so for about nine hours that evening I proceeded to tie one on, but unfortunately this treatment only succeeded in wakening me in the early hours with a bilious problem.  So to Cliff’s glorious cacophony I grabbed a glass of water and threw in two Alka-Seltzers, drank the brew down and returned to bed and tried to sleep in the clamour and uproar that was our bedroom.

Imagine my horror the next morning when I discovered the tablets I had taken were Cliff’s Steradent tablets which he used for cleaning his false teeth, but notwithstanding the griping pains I suffered over the next 24 hours, this dosage certainly cleared out my insides.  It was like having an enema in reverse, but it worked.

Was I glad to be back in Manchester, even though I had no work to go back to and I never darkened the doorstep of the Balearics again.

It must have been in the early 1970s, possibly the winter of 1972 when an extra special case of mistaken identity took place in the suburbs of South Manchester.  As I was witness to this particular incident and saw what happened, I will never ever give credence to charges brought against a person accused of a crime and picked out at an identity parade by an acceptable witness to such a crime.

The players in this particularly unfortunate incident were:-

Alan Malpas, my father, in his prime at this time, 54 years old, mild mannered in ladies’ company, surly and unapproachable in male circles, with a sharp temper kept under control but liable to break out unexpectedly in moments of stress, a Conservative councillor for Longsight, in Manchester. married to a Justice of the Peace, deputy chief apparitor of St. Robert’s Church in Longsight, a pillar of the community and a big fish in a small pond, who had a name to look after.

Howard Skelton, a fine upstanding Longsight man who had served his time as a printer and at 6′2″ tall and about 17 stone weight, was  not a man to mess with.  Captain of  East Levenshulme cricket team, he doubled as a very competent opening batsman and wicketkeeper.  He decided at about 30 years of age to join the Greater Manchester Police force.  He was a man of the streets, feared nobody and these particular traits soon brought him to the attention of his superiors and at this time, having been recently promoted to Sergeant, had taken over the desk  at Didsbury Police Station in South Manchester.  At 35 years old, he was a man on his way up and liked by everyone who had no reason to fear him.

Paul Malpas, myself, a humble sub-contractor in the civil engineering industry, carrying out drainage works on motorways all over England, returning often to Manchester when the work enabled and joining up with old friends like Howard, to enjoy a couple of pints and also to further his betrothal to Helen Towey, the love of his life.  Howard and Paul had a long acquaintance from East Levenshulme Cricket Club and we both enjoyed a few off duty drinks at Longsight Conservative Club.

Kevin Malpas, my younger brother by 16 months, who was another man to fear, 6′ 0″ tall and 16 stone weight, with a nose to prove more than a passing interest in a clenched fist.  At one time training to be a missionary priest, he had passed his vocation up when he realized he would have to leave Manchester to carry out his duties.  With drink taken, his anger would surface very quickly and his change of personality was not nice to watch.  However on more than one occasion Howard had steered him from danger by using a more superior force than Kevin could muster.

Brian Cain, a diminutive taxi-driver, having to work night shifts at his precarious occupation, driving round the wilds of drug and drink laced Manchester, faced with increasing costs he could not control from a supposedly regulated industry which in fact was one out of control, with rogue drivers paying service to a gangster culture that was slowly gaining command of the streets of the town.  Brian, an Englishman with Dublin connections, was a man at the end of his tether.

Helen Towey, an unassuming, honest-to-goodness type of girl and the prospective wife of Paul Malpas, hoping shortly to marry her intended in the following March, on St. Patrick’s Day.  Helen was a quiet and kind girl whose Mayo parents had come to Manchester 35 years previously to escape the poverty of De Valera’s Ireland of the 1930s and obviously knew how to keep their heads below the parapet.

A.N. Other, a man about town, of lower working class extraction, who, although a good and honest worker during the week, followed the habits of his stock by dressing up on Saturdays and spending the day and night drinking in the many legal and illegal drinking clubs of South Manchester, eventually regaining his doorstep and sleeping off his excesses on the Sunday, penniless until the following Thursday.

Scene 1.

Howard Skelton, the desk sergeant at Didsbury Police Station is halfway through his Saturday night shift.  It had been a busy one, with a stabbing outside a pub 100 yards from the station, a couple of loons full of something or other who thought they were Bruce Lee, three or four drunks who did not know where they lived and a local whore who had tried to steal a few quid off a customer who she thought was sleeping off his excesses at the local hotel.  The six cells were overflowing, Howard had had enough and he was thirsty, he was managing the station and could not get out like the beat bobbies, to enjoy a pint after time in one of the local hostelries.

A stuttering fart of a taxi-driver enters the station, effing and blinding.

Brian Cain. I’ve been shuttling this fellah round Didsbury for half an hour, he is that drunk he does not know where he is, never mind where he wants to go to and I want my fare.

Howard goes out to the taxi and immediately recognizes the drunk as Kevin Malpas and gives him a playful tap on the jaw to waken him.

Howard’s playful taps normally knocked out offenders and this was no exception, the man was now prostrate in the back of the cab.  He turned to the surprised driver and told him to follow him back into the station.

Howard. OK taximan, I know this fucker, the best and easiest way to get your money is to take him to this address, 2 Birchfields Road in Longsight.  I will ring them now and tell them you are coming.  They will pay you.  They are alright OK.

Brian.  Fuck me, OK then

Scene 2

It was after midnight on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, Paul Malpas and Helen Towey after enjoying a couple of pints and a game of cards in the bar at Longsight Conservative Club, nothing too grand for this serious courting couple who were saving like mad for their forthcoming nuptials. They had decided to call in to see Alan’s wife Margaret and chew the cud for half an hour.  The phone rang at this late hour and Alan picked up the phone with some trepidation.

Alan. Hello

Howard. Is that you, Alan?

Alan. Yes

Howard. I have that dickhead son of yours outside the station in a taxi, he’s as pissed as arseholes.  I am telling the taxi-driver to take him to your house, you pay the driver and knock some kind of sense into that prick son of yours.  It is either that or I am locking him up and he will be in front of a special magistrates court in the morning.

Alan. Thanks Howard, send him round and I will deal with him and the driver.

Scene 3

Alan Malpas, his eldest son Paul and his very concerned future wife, Helen Towey are stood on the pavement outside  2 Birchfields Road waiting for the taxi to turn up.  Lights approach, a taxi is recognized and Alan puts out his hand for the cab to stop.

Brian. I’ve been told to bring this fellah round to you.  Can I have my fare please.

Alan. Hang on a minute while I get this bollocks out

He opens the back door and the Kevin is just coming round from Howard’s playful tap when he gets an humdinger from his father who, I know from painful experience, packs a fair punch. Alan skuldrags Kevin out of the taxi by his legs and drags him to the hedge.

Alan. Sorry about this driver, how much do I owe you?  He is my son and I will take care of him now.

Brian. I’ve been driving him around for ages  and he could not tell me where he lived.  That will be £5 10 shillings please.

Alan.  Bloody hell, you must have been driving around all day.  Here’s your money now fuck off.

Turning round he gives Kevin’s now supine body a few kicks and attempts to pull him up, Paul observantly exclaims.

Paul.  Hang on a minute, that’s not Kevin.

Alan. Course it is Howard said……….

Gathering our thoughts and leaving the drunk lying against the gatepost Alan and Paul, followed by the distressed Helen return to the house to phone up Howard.

Howard. Didsbury Police Station here.

Paul. What the fuck is going on. This taxi pulls up with a drunk in the back, you told us it was Kevin, my dad as given him a few wallops and we find out it is not him.

Howard. Well it was Kevin in the back of the fucking taxi here. You must have signalled the wrong one to stop.

The three witnesses slowly walk back out to the battered victim to apologize for their mistake only to see him staggering off along Birchfields Road, rubbing his jaw with one hand and soothing the pain from the kicks he had received with the other and no doubt ruminating on whether a Saturday night out on the town was worth it.  They also wondered what kind of hooch the Desk Sergeant at Didsbury Police Station was on during a very busy Saturday night shift.

Now that I am rid of delightful grandchildren, wife’s bad backs and volcanic dust clouds, I can get back into the groove again,  ie, the never ending quest for words to put into my blog.  Some days I sit looking at a blank page for hours then something clicks and I am off, other days I wake up with an idea in my head and then struggle for hours to put it into acceptable form.

This idea came to me at 6.00am this morning as I sat reading an article by Ali Bracken, the Sunday Tribune’s crime correspondent, about sexual abuse by five staff members of young boys in St. John’s National School in Sligo over a 30 year period.  Three were Marist brothers and two were lay teachers.  The Garda say there was no evidence of a paedophile ring but it is a remarkable coincidence that most of these men taught at the school at the same time.  To make matters worse after a very thorough 11 year garda investigation, one of the Marist brothers, eventually convicted of 35 counts of sexual abuse against four boys  between 1968 to 1977 wriggled that much it took four trials to eventually nail him.

What was surprising was the leniency of the sentencing in the five separate trials.  The victims felt themselves let down by the courts.

Peter White (Brother Agnellus) In 2005 he received three years on eight sample charges of indecent assault  for “unfathomable torture” on two boys after pleading guilty

Patrick Curran In 2005 he was found guilty and sentenced to 12 years reduced to nine years on appeal for assaulting nine boys between 1966 and 1984.  He originally denied 237 counts of indecent assault on ten boys in the same periopd.  He was still teaching at the school when these allegations came to light.

Michael Cunnane In 1999 he received a three year suspended sentence for 11 counts of indecent assault on three boys after pleading guilty

Martin Meaney (Brother Gregory) In 2008 he received a two year sentence for five sample counts of indecent assault against one seven year old boy after pleading guilty.

Christopher Cosgrave (BrotherChristopher) Convicted after four trials of 35 charges against four boys over a nine year period.  He walked free from court this month because of time already served.  He has never admitted his guilt.

Now I would suggest these specimen charges must have just been the tip of the iceberg in this Sligo school.  God knows how many occasions have gone unpunished, but even so the punishment is, just on these specimen charges, lenient.

Whilst Cosgrave was wriggling, I have been conducting my own inquiry into a priest who has remained unpunished.  Perhaps his premature death at 62 years old in 1968 saved him from his punishment on earth, but let us hope he has received it in the place he espoused.

Most of you supporters of my blog will already know of my search for truth in relation to Monsignor Thomas Duggan, late Rector of St. Bede’s College, Manchester and I will not bore you with a repeat of his sins.  Suffice it to say that I am gathering a portfolio of testimonies on the sexual conduct of this priest and things are moving apace, as the Safeguarding Commission of the Salford Diocese now want to interview me and discuss the evidence collected.

Today I am not about to reveal the statements made by these ex-pupils (now professional men, some retired, in their 60s and 70s) but I have become fascinated by the language used by the middle-aged men of Sligo and the diaspora of former pupils of St. Bede’s.

Phrases like “he picked out the weak boys” and “reign of complete terror”, “physically violent beyond belief”,  “I put it out of my mind and did not think of those days” and “how could you tell your parents” repeat themselves so often in both inquiries.  Those men were all working to a pattern  as though taught it at some third level campus.  If the Garda say there is no evidence of a paedophile ring, there seems to me to be evidence of a learnt paedophile mentality as though the position and learning attracts.

These Safeguarding Commissions set up on both sides of the Irish Sea by the various dioceses are riddled with lawyers who do not know how to show empathy and understanding, but are selected to form defensive bastions willing to shrug off all allegations.  I understand the argument about wheat and chaff but I do think empathy comes first.  a psychotherapist or some such person would be a better first port of call than a hardbitten legal man,  It does show you though that the Church is thinking more of pounds, shillings and pence, rather than the healing of tortured minds and bodies.

This corruption went on years ago, it went on last year, it is still going on today, these paedophiles have just reorganized their strategies and the future is bright for them.  The Church and the Government need to understand this and get the right pegs in the correct holes and forget the retribution from sins passed.  Get positive.