Paul Malpas

I live in a really beautiful part of Ireland, in Boyle in north County Roscommon.  Our house is so close to the Boyle River that from a distance it looks as though the river runs through our front room and in fact it often tries to do.  Down the river a few hundred yards, the waters spill out into historic Loch Ce, a lake of christian pilgrimage for a thousand years.  The Premonstratensian, Augustinian and Franciscan monks all built abbeys on its shores and islands following on from St. Columcille’s monks who built a monastery on Church Island and a church at Drum on the river, at the side of our house in the 7th century.  The lake is six miles long and 4 miles wide and dotted so they say with as many islands as there are counties in Ireland.

Sail to the northern end of the lake and take the road through the village of Corrigeenroe (Little Red Rock) and you are taken along the eastern side of Lough Arrow which is just over the Sligo border.  You are in the ancient Barony of Tirreril, the Land of the McDonaghs, an ancient royal clan that owed allegiance to the McDermots, who were the royal chieftains of this area since the 10th century.  In Tirreril lived the O’Higgins family, a highly thought of family with big estates and a history going back to the O’Neills in the 6th century.  The O’Higgins were liked by all the local big-wigs, the McDermots, the O’Rourkes, the O’Garas and the McDonaghs for their poetry and their intellect.

It was here in 1720, on the shores of Lough Arrow, Ambrose O’Higgins was born in much reduced circumstances because of the Cromwellian persecution and later Jacobite/Williamite upheaval.  It was the time of the Penal Laws, when Catholics were disarmed, stripped of land and reduced to the level of servants.  They were disenfranchised, forbidden to marry Protestants,  join the Army or receive a decent education.  It was a time when most gifted and doughty men left Ireland and filled the ranks of the military and civil service in all the countries in Europe.  They called it the Flight of the Wild Geese.

The O’Higgins family became tenant farmers for the Rowley family in Meath after their land was eventually all taken off them.  In about 1750, aged 30, Ambrose took the plunge and ended up in Cadiz in Spain where he worked for the powerful Irish/Spanish merchant family of Butler.  After some few years in Cadiz, Ambrose decided to seek his fortune in South America.  He worked in Venezuela, Peru and Argentina before getting his big chance.  He worked out a route from Mendoza, in western Argentina, over the Andes into Chile, thus joining up two Spanish colonies that previously had had little contact for most of the year other than by sailing round the Horn.  This route worked and for the first time ever the two colonies could remain in contact all year long.  By now he was enlisted in the Spanish Imperial Service and besides developing this route, he was asked to stay in Chile by the Spanish authorities and join the Army, which he did and sucessfully put down an Indian uprising, humanely and not cruelly, for which he was thanked by both sides and eventually he was upgraded to the position of Governor of Concepcion in 1786.

In 1788 king Charles III of Spain made him Baron of Ballinar for his services to the colonies.  He soon became leader of the Spanish Army and eventually Governor of Chile.  He entered on a programme of road building and rebuilding of ancient towns.  For this service the new king Charles IV made him the Marquis of Osomo in 1796 at the age of 76 and appointed him Viceroy of Peru, the land of which covered present day Peru, Chile, Bolivia, north west Argentina and western Brazil.  It was the most powerful position in Spanish America and he died suddenly from overwork in 1801 at the age of 81.

In 1777 Ambrose at the age of 57 fell in love with an 18 year old girl, Isabel Riquelme, of a powerful mixed race family.  In accordance with society’s rules at the time, he was not allowed to marry her at the risk of losing his hard won position but in 1778 Isabel bore him a son, Bernardo.  Ambrose never met this boy and never ever recognised him but he provided the money to bring him up and pay for his education in London.  It was here, at the age of 18, influenced by South American independence seeking  politicos, did Bernardo start to put his thoughts together towards an independent Chile, free of Spanish rule.  After a short time in Spain he returned to Chile in 1802 and started farming a large piece of land willed to him by his father.  In 1806 he entered the Chilean Parliament.

The Independence thinkers were helped considerably by events in Europe, Napoleon of France took control of Spain in 1808 and whilst he was involved in his European campaigns the Spanish/Chilean ruling class formed their own government, ruling the couintry in the name of Napoleon’s captive king, Ferdinand VII and Bernardo was elected deputy in the first National Congress of Chile in 1811.

After Napoleon started to lose his power in Spain after Wellington and Nelson had given him a bloody nose, the Spanish imperial forces invaded Chile to regain control of the country  but Bernardo defeated them at Linares.  In October of that year he effectively took command of the Chilean Army and defeated the Spanish forces again at El Roble with the famous cry of “Lads!  Live with honour, or die with glory!  He who is brave follow me”  However at a later battle at Rancagua, the Chilean forces were soundly beaten and Bernardo was lucky to escape with his life, scurrying into Argentina.  He returned to Chile in 1817 and defeated the royalist forces at Chacabuco.  Bernardo became Supreme Director of the newly independent Chile in 1818.  He founded the Chilean Navy but after five years with the cost of arming the new country it teetered on the edge of bankruptcy only saved by a £1 million pound loan from England but by then he had run foul of the country’s opposition party and in 1823 at the age opf 45 he was deposed.

He left Chile, never to return, in a British naval vessel intending on returning to Ireland but he met up with Simon Bolivar in Peru and joined him in his successful fight for independence and then went into retirement for the next 20 years.  By 1842 the tide of public opinion had turned towards him in Chile and he was invited back and given back his old rank of Captain General of the Army but on his journey back he suffered a heart attack and was buried in Lima in Peru.

His remains were exhumed in 1869 and brought back to Chile and he lay in a marble coffin in Santiago whilst it was decided where he should be buried.  He had wanted Concepcion but the Chilean people wanted Santiago.  It was not until General Pinochet finally put him down in 1974 in Santiago was the argument decided.  Wherever you go today in Chile, Bernardo’s name shouts out from street names and statues, districts and docks.  He is their Deliverer.

Not bad for two men from Tirreril whose countryside was bypassed by the 20th century.  Even today there isn’t much change from the countryside Ambrose knew.  It is a quaint, quiet backwater but full of more history than most parts of Ireland.  So this evening as you settle by your fire in your favourite armchair, lift your glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon or even better, Carmenere, because without these two boys you might not now feel so smug.  Do not forget that the South American vines saved the European wine industry in the late 19th century when an outbreak of phylloxera nearly killed every vine on the Continent.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ambrose and Bernard!

As a follow up to yesterday’s blog posting, I want to pursue this idea of changing your first name halfway through your life.  By pursuing this thought it might help me to understand and start to like people I have no particular regard for and it might also help me to understand myself a little better and help me to get to grips with my reactionary self.
I am going to take as my example Baroness Scotland, the lady I clumsily tried to make sense of yesterday.  I am using Baroness Scotland because I have no regard for her present self but I could easily use any number of men or women who pick up a new Christian name in middle life.  Sir and Lord are very popular.  I want to stress that by picking Baroness Scotland that this is not a gender or even an ethnic thing, it is just purely a christian name thing.
Ever since Patricia Janet Scotland learnt to cry, the tenth child of 12 children born to her parents in that pretty little house on that beautiful island of Dominica in the West Indies, she started to answer to her family name of Paddy, or if discipline had to be meted out Miss Patricia Janet.  She was fond of these two names, they had a certain cachet, as she made her way through several schools and colleges before being called to the Bar at the tender age of 22 years old in 1977 and then still luxuriating in the name of Patricia Janet she became Queen’s Counsel at the ridiculously early age of 36.  She was doing well, really well, so I do not understand why having done so well with her parentally given names of Patricia Janet, she should wish in 1997 at the age of 42 to change her name to Baroness.
It is a stupid masculine sounding name, hard and rough and no way matched her petite, girlie nature and physique.  All I can think is that she was not happy with her feminine side to decide on lumpy Baroness, but she was 42, as I said and on the cusp of middle age and she did what so many English people did and still do, she changed her name.
Now I am a rough as arseholes, straight talking, hard living, son of a gun and having learnt my trade over a great number of years, nobody in this world would have the nerve to call me a fay Sir or Lord, let alone myself.  I was born Paul and I will stay Paul but that is not to say other people, from time to time, have called me different names behind my back in the past.  It was their choice not mine.
So there we have it, the nice warm feminine, bubbly Patricia Janet at the age of 42 changed herself and almost her sex into this hard , knobbly and damaging Baroness.  It was at this point I started to dislike her.  I had followed her passage through Walthamstow School for Girls (strange for a good Catholic girl, but obviously they do not cater for good Catholics down there in London like they do in my stabling ground of Manchester), Mid-Essex Technical College, Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology, the University of London and Middle Temple and I was pleased with the fact that our Paddy was going places and then in 1997, full stop.  She became a waspish, supercilious, ladder climbing Baroness and that put an end to my love.
It is some years now since I last indulged in my fantasies with Patricia Janet and I wonder sometimes how she has got on with spiky Baroness, I doubt that she has still got that wondrous, loving, happy self of her early life and I bet that she is really that dumpy, miserable, knife sharpening, hard Baroness I have imagined.
So I would like to throw this idea out to the floor and ask all her confreres and all you lawyers out there who think they know me and there must be plenty who do because just like Baroness I also have previous and I must have met plenty of you in different courts of law up and down the land in the last 66 years.  Do you know the girl?  When you all meet up at your late Friday afternoon soirees, do you come across her?  Is she half as nice as she used to be when I was first attracted?  Or has she suffered, has she deteriorated since that mind bending moment in 1997 when she decided to veil herself in this puritanical persona and call herself Baroness.
So please report back you importers of forked tongues, cast off your cloying, brotherly, natural instincts and tell me the truth, tell it as it is for once in your smarmy, elusive, inveracitic lives.  Am I to remain forlorn or is there a glimmer of hope.

I have had two very difficult problems solved recently by a man with a van showing that there is a job for everyone in this world especially those willing to work and spot a niche in the market.

This last Christmas I was in Manchester visiting relations, in fact visiting my grandchildren and future grandchild.  We all went over, my wife, my youngest son, our dog and myself.  We took the mindlessly boring journey across the Irish Sea and the long car ride from Holyhead into Manchester.  I was doing the same journey 40 years ago in roughly the same time.  Nothing has improved in all that time, in fact some things have worsened.  Whereas 40 years ago you were served creamy Guiness out of a hatch, these days with vastly superior service features the Guiness tastes a little like washing up water.  Gone it seems never to return is the HSS fast ferry, whisking you over the waves in something less than two hours or the sedate and civilised overnight cruise to 12  Quays at Birkenhead.

One of the days over Christmas, my eldest grandchild, a strapping seven year old boy, approached me and said that he would like to come back to Ireland with us so that he could play our piano: which got me thinking and asking.  I asked my daughter, the young chap’s mother, who said he was always asking about the piano, but decent pianos are hard got and quite expensive.  I thought of our piano, bought at a cost years ago for my youngest daughter and which does not owe me a penny after she won a music scholarship to my old alma mater, St. Bede’s College in Manchester,  which saved me oodles of cash over her seven year stay, in reduced fees.  In fact this part of the story is worth a blog on its own and I will try to write it over the next few days.

However youngest daughter flew the nest years ago and is revelling in pastures new on the east side of Ireland.  I will here give her a little plug.  If you want discount in Dublin, she is your lady.  They call her Miss 20% due to the many contacts she has in the retail trade in the Fair City.

So having flown the nest, the piano, constructed of quality polished mahogony, has been stood in my study gathering dust and used as a shelf for my many files and papers.  Helen, my wife of many years, as good as she is at most things, is no master of the ivories.  The poor thing (the piano that is) is now redundant and that ain’t what it was lovingly built for by the family firm of Waldberg of Berlin in the early 1930s.

This masterpiece of musical manufacture would be just the thing for this budding Liberace of a grandchild but how to move it from Roscommon to Manchester without an arm or a leg being involved.  I rang a mate and told him of my problem.  This mate not only rivalled my daughter in the discount stakes in the west of Ireland but as it happened knew a man who did little else but transport pianos and similar sized objects back and forth across the Irish Sea.  I rang this man in Mayo and without batting an eyelid gave me his price which was not at all outrageous.  I accepted and he was knocking on our door at 9.00am the following morning.

Not only was this man an amenable sort, he was a Manchester man to boot.  I had enough credentials immediately.  So with the help of the inevitable Scouser I drafted in for his engineering skills, we huffed and puffed and with a few guttural curses common to our part of Ireland, this massive piece of pre-Nazi musical endeavour was hoisted into the vastness of his little white van, joining another piano that was en-route for Lincoln.  The operation was brought to a rapid conclusion without the need for a funny story but the Scouser had to remind us of the TV advert of years ago where a father and son chimpanzee were manoeuvring a similar instrument up the stairs and the son said to the father “Hey dad, do you now the piano is on my foot” whereupon the father chimpanzee said “No, but if you hum it son, I’ll play it”

So we said goodbye to the amenable Manchester man, his white van, our piano and its Lincoln mate and sure enough it arrived at my daughter’s house in Cheshire at 9.30 this morning, he was then travelling over to Lincoln with a vastly inferior instrument and then onto Kent to pick up a motorbike that was destined for Westport.

I am amazed at the smooth, cheap, easy way the whole operation was handled to a very worthwhile conclusion and I hope to hear many wonderful worthwhile musical interludes in the years to come.

I told you previously that I had two problems, the other being of the dog variety.  I explained how we had brought over our dog, a ten year old Shih Tzu of Tibetan/Chinese extraction, on his winter holiday to Manchester.  Well on Christmas Day, not happy with his lodgings, he bolted.  For five days we searched the highways and byeways and dogshomes to no avail, our oriental sentinel was not to be found.  So with heavy heart, we returned to our adopted home on 29th December, dogless.

On one of the early days into the New Year my daughter was at the local supermarket and she noticed a man tying up his dog outside of the shop, prior to attending to his proposed purchases.  This dog was a Shih Tzu, not ours, but obviously a close enough relation to strike up a conversation.  She told him of our sad story and how we had gone back to Ireland broken hearted.  A chink of light appeared, he had heard of a Shih Tzu being handed in at a kennels not far away.  My daughter, keeping a tight rein on her emotions called in at the said kennels and there was Sushi, our dog, having the time of his life with a pack of his mates.

There was immediate recognition of my daughter by Sushi or enough for the kennel maid to hand over the dog and she would not take a penny for his seven or eight days lodgings, which was really kind of her in these hard pressed times.  My daughter took him home and locked him in the stables until she could solve the problem of returning Sushi to his own little home in the west.

But blow me did he not bolt again and my daughter tearfully relayed the circumstances in a telephone call that evening but just on the off chance she returned to the kennels the following morning to be met by the smiling kennel maid.  Sushi had returned the previous afternoon.  He must have been missing his new friends.  The kind lady said “why don’t you leave him here, he seems to enjoy it, whilst you organise his return”.  Problem solved!

My daughter went home and just out of interest she googled “transporting dogs to Ireland” and there was a man who did nothing else.  Twice a week he transported a load of dogs from Ireland to England and vice versa.  There is a market and a need for everything.  Within days the man was contacted, the dog collected with the kennel maid still refusing money.  The lady said she had fallen in love with Sushi and she did not want him to go.  The man with the van and the dog were  introduced and last night in the middle of the Irish Sea, there was a great celebration with piano heading east and the dog west.

I collected him in Mullingar at 6.30am this morning and Sushi did not want to leave his new home in the Mercedes van.  It looked like the most comfortable bed he had ever had.  I had him home at 8.00am and off he went sniffing out his old mates with obviously a tale to tell and as though he had enjoyed every minute of his adventure.

So I would like you all to raise your glass to the amenable men with vans who churn out a living in these depressing times, looking after the needs of their fellow men and looking after them well.

As I explained in yesterday’s posting, that overwhelming depression that had descended on St Bede’s before my time and was throughout my stay and afterwards, according to my correspondents, tainting both student and teacher alike, never found its way to the sports field.  So as I hated my experiences at the school and pondered long and hard on the devastating effect it had on myself and others, I thought nothing of turning out for Old Bedian cricket and rugby teams.  There it was a different world into which the College never encroached and in fact the term was a slight misnomer in that at least 50% of the lads who played  sport at Old Bede’s had never attended the College

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For me the highlight of the sporting year was the annual cricket tour to the Wye Valley on which I went for four years from 1966 to 1969 until unfortunately work took over my life.  They really were magnificent days, setting off in a coach with a really decent set of lads, all older than me; lads I had revered at school for their prowess on the cricket team, lads who were playing at a high standard in league cricket and all treating me as an equal.

Lads like Joe Smith, a crazy left arm fast bowler from Unsworth, near Bury, who taught Classics at Stonyhurst College, that Jesuit pile in Lancashire.  He spoke with a broad Lancashire accent and I always wondered what Xenophon or Pliny would have sounded like, with its Lancastrian twist, to the privileged kids at that school.  To be any good as a fast bowler you have to be fairly crazy and Joe’s lunatic antics often used to get us into scrapes where we generally used to escape with honour.

Other lads on the tour who had been through the mincer that was the College were Dave McGarry, a very good footballer and batsman, who liked bowling leg breaks, and happened to be our in house chaplain and peacekeeper.  Chris O’Rourke, a top wicketkeeper/batsman who had trials for Lancashire and captained Stand in the Lancashire and Cheshire League and Len Whelan, a teacher and drinker, who had all the attributes of a good fast bowler but could not convert this God-given physique into cricketing ability but he made up for this fault with tremendous enthusiasm.  Len was married to a cousin of my future wife, Helen and went on to teach at Bede’s Prep many years later.  He died suddenly in the 1990s leaving his large family devastated.

The normal tour was a first stop at Shrewsbury or Ludlow, then onto Leominster, our usual headquarters followed by games at Bromyard in Worcestershire and at Hereford, playing the occasional game at Ross on Wye and always finishing off playing the Welsh Brigade army team at their permanent barracks at Crickhowell, near Abergavenny, having lunch in the Officer’s Mess and drinking out of silver goblets at the bar.  Crickhowell was a massive army camp and could always put out a very good team.

The second year we played them their team was captained by one aptly named Major Poncia, I tell no lie but he was actually a very good batsman who opened their innings.  We had taken three cheap wickets with Joe Smith bowling at his best when Corporal. Jones joined Major Poncia at the crease.  After an over or two settling in the Major drove a ball through the covers and shouted to Jones to run two.  Our cover fieldsman was a very able man and collected the ball at which Jones denied his captain and sent him back at the start of his second run.  The ball was returned swiftly to the bowling end justifying Corporal Jones’s fears. Major Poncia who had been embarrassed by his swift and ungainly retreat and enraged at this apparent insubordination, tucked his bat under his arm and marched down the pitch to the luckless Jones and demanded off the poor man that “when I say run, you’ll bloody well run Corporal”.  This bit of disciplinary action caused all us non-combatants to roll about the pitch laughing our heads off and this little piece of Army rebuke was repeated many times over by the northern bretheren and shortly afterwards the enraged and perplexed Major Poncia was bowled out to a completely un-Poncialike stroke.

The atmosphere became distinctly unfriendly from then on, we won the game easily and we had to fend for ourselves in the mess that night, we were not as welcome as we had been at lunchtime.  We did not know the ropes; we had no idea on protocol; we had never done National Service.  I bet Poncia wished us to be called up there and then.  We played one more game the following year but we had been demoted to the Sergeant’s Mess and no officers played and after that we became personae non grata alas.

Always these tours were carried out in blazing summer weather, playing teams who were genuinely talented and glad to see us.  They took time off work to play us midweek and gave us a welcome that is now rarely seen.

One year at Leominster, a most picturesque ground with a footpath running through it, whose users had right of way over the cricket and caused the game to be interrupted every now and then, we were chasing runs in the late afternoon when I went in and scored 50 off about 30 balls.  Even the footpath users stopped to admire the sport, we won and I was feted for hours afterwards .

Years later and Dave McGarry had just started his sermon one Sunday morning, I was late and found a seat at the back of  St Catherine’s church.  We had not met for a good few years but Dave spotted me and did a right turn with his prepared speech and dumbfounded the congregation with a ball by ball commentary on the closing overs of that day at Leominster.  I do not know if he was down on his collection that morning but at least he remembered an old mate.

The A49, which went through most of the towns we played at, was for me the best 100 miles of road in the country.  For many years afterwards I detoured and took it remembering the good times of youth and at the same time trying to blot out my wasted years at the school.