Paul Malpas

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.

With all the comments I have received lately about a piece I penned over two years ago, I thought I would continue on the same theme and write of more thoughts I have about life in Longsight and especially life attached to St. Robert’s parish and school and try to invigorate our selective  memories.

I was born in February 1946 and anybody with a glimmer of simple mathematics can work out that my conception was based on celebrations attached to Mr Hitler’s demise, nine months previously in May 1945.  So I am the only man I know that rejoices in that horrible man and his fortunate death but I doubt that my parents were the only ones celebrating in early May that year.

I was born into a family that had virtually nothing, having been bombed out of their house in Miles Platting during the Christmas Blitz of 1940.  They were at the start of the long weary trail of putting one foot in front of the other and building from scratch.  But in other regards I was born into wealth, into Longsight and its many characters and more importantly into St Robert’s parish, centred on Hamilton Road.  The Catholic Church then, as opposed to now, put its arms around its families and guided us through the hard times.  It seemed to cater for more than pastoral care, it actually managed our existence in times young people now will never understand.

I started school after the 1950 Christmas holidays; I was four years and ten months old and I could read and write in a fashion that was probably better than my script today.  I entered Miss Standen’s class, an old lady who retired shortly afterwards but not before she put me on the road.  My memories of her say she was a kindly woman endowed with lots of patience, ideal for the task in hand.

The following September I moved up to Infants 2 which I think was in the care of Miss Willoughby and then onto Infants 3 and that ended the soft times.  They thought at eight we had certain responsibilities in life and one of these was to accept punishment rather than chastisement for any misdemeanour. Junior One started for me in September 1953, in the newly built prefab adjacent to Farrer Road, built for the first of the baby boomers of my generation.  It seemed the war ended and love started in 1945.  Our teacher in Junior One, a young decent woman who was shortly to get married, decent in that she could control her class by a mix of sternness and niceness, a mixture that was missing in some of the teachers.  Her very presence calmed you and made you listen.

Then onto Mrs McGrath’s class, Junior Two, and it was in this class that the powers decided punishment was the answer to all problems.  Mrs McGrath was the Headmaster, Paddy McGrath’s wife and must have wanted to keep her husband in shape so that any murmur at all was sufficient to send us down the corridor to her husband’s office for a dose o0f his feared strap, which he summarily dished out outside his room for all and sundry to see.

We moved up to Miss Wallace’s class as we approached 10 years old and the punishments got worse.  Miss Wallace, so the rumour went, was attracted by Paddy McGrath’s punitive muscles and always dressed smartly when he was around, tidying up her make-up and recoating with lipstick if Paddy was due for inspection.  It was thought that her and Paddy were close,  but how close in those Catholic days, I don’t know.  Miss Wallace had a grim countenance, only  brightened by Paddy’s frequent visits.  She was always calling me big-headed and far to cocky, always beating me over the hands with the edge of a ruler.  Her possibly unrequited love affair with Paddy might have had something to do with her dissatisfaction of me, but I for my part could not understand her grievances against me because my examination results were always top class and I always wondered what I had to do to escape such duress.  Confidence was not the thing authority respected those days.  Control and subserviance were the qualities to attain.  My reports, which I still have, tell me that I was top of the class of 47 children and still getting beaten to within an inch of my life.  I suppose trying to control 47 Longsight kids was a task in itself, if you were not on top of your game, without trying to teach and vexation did rise to the top more often than not.

I have to say that punishment never ever taught me a lesson either at St Robert’s or at St Bede’s where I went after 11+, it only made me more determined to plough my own furrow.  I think we thought of punishment as a necessary evil, something to be endured, like cutting your knees whilst playing football in the school yard.  A means to an end.

The senior class before the 11+ examination was Junior Four and Mr Groarke’s class.  A fine and fair man, a good teacher, who could dish out punishment just the same.  When he punished you , you felt that you had deserved it.  With Paddy McGrath and Miss Wallace hitting you, you wondered why.  People I remember in that class, most of whom went on to Senior One (there was no secondary schools for most in those days and comprehensive education had not been thought out), were Pauil Richardson, Barry Mannock, Stuart Robinson, David Evans and Alan Morris, David Duffy and Anthony Fahey.  I seem to remember more girls as they were more competitive in the exams, Pauline Connor (one of seven daughters of Jim and Helen Connor), Pauline McGhee, Belinda Maloney, Mary Leydon, Rosemary Keogh, Marlene Moran and Maureen Smith from up North Road, Maureen Sargent and the Swiss girl, Helen Vogeli who did not seem to mind the change in language.  It is funny how you remember some but not others, but there was another 31 kids there somewhere and probably a little reminder and they would all come flooding back.

I was co-opted onto the altar boys at St Robert’s when I was seven, my mother bought me the cassock from John Neville’s in Manchester and my Aunty Kath made the cotta with some fancy lace trimmings on the sleeves and round the hem and Fr Dwyer instructed me in the Latin rites and made me know how important and special was the role of an altar boy.  A few years ago whilst writing my Memoir, a 400 page tome, which I did for my children rather than for publication, I discovered a photograph taken prior to an altar boys trip to Blackpool.  The photograph is strange these days, there was a group of men and boys about to go on an outing, all dressed up in shiny shoes, suits, shirts and ties, no leisure wear, anoraks, tracksuit trousers or trainers.  It must have been taken in 1958  because I was wearing my first year St Bede’s uniform, grey short trousered suit with school tie and blue shirt.

The two priests sat centrally, Canon O’Shaughnessy andf his curate Fr McCardle.  Some of the St Vincent De Paul Society stood at the back who were a lot older than us.  Reggie Singh, who chanced his arm with Evelyn Mellor who lived next door to us but who never stood a chance with the battalion of GIs, fresh out of Burtonwood who were queueing up to register their claim.  Next to him there was John Sparks, Bill Bagnall, Robin Clancy, the twins father, Mr White, John Shepard, John Walsh who became a dentist in Clare and  John Mulcahey.  Lads who were older than me at Bede’s, John Watkins who lives in Zurich now, Michael Power whose sisters , Aileen and Geraldine, I knew and Mike McPartland.  There were “Punch” Donelon’s two sons, Chris and Sean and Anthony O’Malley who went to Xaverian and ended up in Law.  The Harrison twins, John and Michael, Michael continued to serve on the altar until the church closed in 2003, devoting nearly 50 years of his life to the cause.  Then there was Stuart Robinson from Swayfield Avenue who went on to marry Cath Philbin who became Lord Mayor of Manchester, Anthony Millington who I continued to meet the odd time at Houldsworth Golf Club and his brother Paul who I last saw in his butcher’s shop on Meldon Road.  Paul Hopkins was there the son of Gabriel Hopkins, a local shop owner, politician and friend of my father’s, Paul became headmaster of a secondary school in North Manchester.  John Halloran I notice, John was the nephew of a famous Daily Mail journalist whose name at the moment escapes me. There was Tony Deacy who was making a name for himself in the construction industry until he was tragically killed on Longley Lane in 1973 aged 26. also I see Kevin Kelly, son of the church organist Mrs Kelly and his fellow skiffle group member, my brother Kevin, who the following year took up with the Holy Ghost Fathers, John Howarth, Michael Leydon and Robert Fannon.  The White twins , Peter and Paul, John O’Grady and a lad called Davidson (Jeremy, I think).  There are two boys I cannot name but I will do one day when I finish this process.  Whatever happened to most of these faces, they all look very serious and I doubt the 54 years will have changed the ones that are still living that much.

These lads and men formed the backbone of the parish at that time, serving at every church service.  I wonder how many, like myself, have drifted away because of the Church’s inabilities in reinventing itself.  Its power and control was great for the war weary 1950s and before but the Church had given us education and most of us eventually empowered  with this wisdom, realised the faults in its system.  For me its only fault, propagated by lowly priest, dandy bishop, aloof cardinal and disdainful pope was the massive corporative cover up of clerical abuse which has been in practice all my life and which they are still trying to conceal when they have been caught bang to rights as their suppurating corpse twitches on the altar of life.

But back to Longsight and St Robert’s.  Nowadays I wonder at the distances some of the kids walked to school, especially a school in an urban environment.  Marlene Moran from long gone Greenwood House flats on Kirkmanshulme Lane, must have been the farthest.  The Sacred Heart in Gorton or St Joseph’s in Longsight would have been nearer.  Barry Mannock who lived off Stockport Road, near Mount Road and would have been quicker going to St Mary’s and in fact all the St Richard’s children who had unfortunately no school to go to.  I understand the position as now reversed itself and all the St Robert’s children now go to St Richard’s.

It is strange also to think of shopping in those pre- supermarket days.  We lived on Duncan Road and except for occasional trips to town, all the shopping to satisfy our daily needs was done within a 100 yard radius of where we lived.  Mrs Bunting’s greengrocers shop was at the top of the road on Slade Lane, Ernie the butcher on the corner of Clitheroe Road and Dixon Street, Mrs Reynolds grocer’s shop opposite and the off-licence on Clitheroe Road where I used to go with a jug when my granddad was to poorly to stroll down to the Anson Hotel.  The jug would be filled with beer from a pump and I would head back down Dixon Street, having a few slurps to stop it from spilling .  All these shops would have been full if three customers came at once, so you just wonder at where the hundreds come from that fill the supermarkets 24 hours per day.

We were all surely an insular bunch, living in our own little cocoon that the parish had created.  We did not notice the poverty all round us; the only time we ventured further than the top of the street was when we went to the pictures.  Longsight and Levenshulme were well endowed with picture houses, from the flea-pit Queens at the Stockport Road/Slade Lane junction to the opulence of the Regal Cinema in Levenshulme, which does keep reinventing itself, from a cinema to a bowling alley to a showcase curry house.  Sometimes three cinema visits a week were called for to satisfy our needs in those pre-TV days and on the way home, a bag of chips in the previous days newspaper.  You could read the news off the chips, the type transferring itself from the newsprint onto the potatoes.

Well there is 2100 words fashioned out of nothing with still plenty to talk about in Longsight and its church of St Robert.

One of the disturbing news items coming out of Syria today is the Amnesty International report that the Assad security forces are using 31 different methods of torture to create a “nightmarish world” for those protesters picked up off the streets of that beleaguered state.

Victims who were taken into custody report the fact that they were beaten up and further abused with whips, sticks and fists when admitted to detention centres.  Other prisoners were anally raped or hung by their wrists from ceilings and beams.  Many have died as a result and survivors are coming and giving their testimonies from all over the country, all telling a similar story showing that this systematic torture is widespread.

As I was reading the reports of this in the Guardian newspaper this morning, memories of similar tortures came flooding back into my mind, from a time when Amnesty International was only a twinkle in Peter Benenson’s eye (Peter founded this august institution in 1961).  The times I speak of were the late 1950s, the location was St. Bede’s College in Manchester, the perpertrator was Monsignor Duggan and his clerical staff.

St. Bede’s College, the premier Catholic grammar school in Manchester, was where I was unluckily sent after passing my 11+ examination in 1957.  We were faced with torture of equal magnitude, which probity, to use a popular word, forbids me to mention .  A whole generation of clever Catholic boys lives wasted, some have even been lost.

More news to come out of the Catholic dustbin this week is that the Salford Diocese have now appointed a new co-ordinator for their Safeguarding Commission to replace Fr Barry O’Sullivan, who was ignominiously sent to Strangeways Prison in Manchester in December 2011 to commit therapy on the prisoners.  The new Coordinator, who starts in April 2012, is a lady called Dawn Lundergan, who works for Rochdale Council at the moment and who must be at least one step up from the blithering idiot she is replacing.  It makes one wonder though, whether after over three months without a Coordinator, do the Salford Diocese need one?  From all their accounts they have the situation under control and there is not one priest or servant of the Diocese stepping out of line.

You can read all about the new appointee, with comments from professionals in the field and a look once more at Bishop Brain’s excuse for an apology in March 2011 for the aforementioned Bedian abuse in this Friday’s edition of The Tablet.  If you cannot buy a copy, read it on line.  However as a person who has had vast experience of Ms Lundergan’s new department, I cannot let this opportunity pass without giving her some good advice.  To start with, her committee are a waste of space, they are only expected to attend a couple of meetings a year and some cannot turn up for those.  They are only there because being on the Committee is good for their CVs, Sullivan knew this and did not bother to involve them, preferring to do his dirty work alone.  Dawn’s chairman, a solicitor chap called Devlin, who likes to control meetings whatever they are about, because his head is full of empty words, but who used to wash his hands of O’Sullivan’s malpractices, is only there for his Bene Merenti medal from the pope and also because his position looks good in the practice brochure.

So Dawn, clear them all out, let your new brush sweep clean, do not allow it to become glabrous, you owe it to the many survivors of clerical abuse who live precarious lives in the Salford Diocese and who cannot find an outlet for their experiences.

One of the great things about having a WordPress blog is that you also get entry to a tool called Google Analytics which allows you to see which articles you have written are the most popular amongst readers and indeed where these readers are from.  Picking a date, say 4th April 2010 nearly two years ago, people from 145 countries have logged on to my blog and hopefully hundreds of thousands of people have become a little wiser because of this.

I picked the 4th April 2010 because on that day I wrote a piece called Paedophilia: The Hollie Greig Scandal, The Dunblane Massacre & The Scottish Cabal  and in all that time since, for over a 100 weeks, this piece has remained in the top most popular pages read. At this moment it is riding high in first place for this last month.  Why this should be, I do not know, it is not particularly well written but it does bring together a few threads that two years ago were just hanging in the air.  What has happened since is that most of what I wrote then in that posting and in others on the same subject I wrote at that time is now just accepted fact and a few more names can be added to the list I appended at the bottom of the article.

For example two Grampian Police Chief Constables, Dr Ian Oliver, who was forced out of office in 1998 for a reputed botched handling of a child murder and who chose not to investigate the very suspicious and convenient “suicide” of Hollie’s uncle, Roy Greig, in 1997.  Roy being the only witness to Hollie’s rape by her father, Dennis.  Incidentally Oliver’s son, Craig Oliver, is now head of communications in the Prime Minister’s office replacing the infamous Andy Coulson of phone hacking fame.  The other Chief Constable to add to the list is the present incumbent, Colin McKerracher, who has recently shut up shop and refuses to talk or answer any questions put to him about Scottish cover ups of all that is bad north of the border.  Another gracious name is the Glasgow law firm Levy McRae, who are played like a fine fiddle by former Procurator Fiscal, Elish Angiolini.  If any one or anything has to be leaned on in Scotia, Levy McRae are the boys to do it.  They are implicated in everything iffy and down right illegal in Scotland today.

What is interesting in this climate is that those who stood accused of malfeasance in these campaigns for truth and justice have all gone upwards and higher over the last two years, whilst all the campaigners are being trampled on and forced further down the ladder of life.  Robert Green is now serving 12 months in Aberdeen Prison for thinking of handing out leaflets in a breach of the peace conviction that cost scottish jurisprudence a bundle of money to bring to fruition and which involved most of Scotland’s legal bigwigs and all for what.  A simple breach of the peace!  Ann & Hollie Greig are being dragged through the legal system in England and are now back in the secret Family Court awaiting a judgement and a very real threat of Hollie being taken away from Ann if she is deemed not to be a fit and proper person as carer to her daughter.  A daughter she has looked after for the last 31 years.

But the wind has changed, now on a daily basis there is a slow drip, drip of information suggesting that things are not well in the upper echelons of the Scottish establishment.  Judges, lawyers, politicians, high ranking police officers and top civil servants are all bound up in this maze of obfuscation and illegality to ensure that these wrong doings and criminality are kept from the general public.  But history tells us that this type of behaviour cannot be sustained, there are whistle blowers in every walk of life and these whistle blowers are like the oncoming tide which King Canute found could not be resisted.

I have deliberately not gone into detail about these case but you can read all about the grossness of Scottish injustice and the hogwash that their establishment puts out by going on to Hollie’s web site Hollie Demands Justice and spend some time there and also click on Robert Green’s blog on the same site.  Slowly you will be overcome with emotion as you try and reconcile what truth and justice means to you and how it is actually portrayed in Scotland.

One big thing you can do is write to Robert in Aberdeen Prison, he would welcome contact even though the Governor and prison officers are treating him with all the care and responsibility they give their own families.  Roberts address is:-

George Robert Green

Prisoner No 125799

HMP Aberdeen

Craiginches

4 Grampian Place

Aberdeen

ABII 8FN

Try and send him a stamped addressed envelope because he has to pay for his stamps and he will definitely write back.  I got one from him this morning and he does not know me from Adam