The God Squad (28 page)

I attended a school in the hospital. It was a fragmented education as I was often taken from the class to the gym. In school I was given the task of teaching the tin whistle to a small class. I had just started learning it before leaving Cappoquin and was able to manage the scale and just one tune, which everyone learned: ‘The Dawning of the Day’. The payoff was when the hospital band played this tune on
The Imco Show
on national radio.

I knew that my stay in Baldoyle would be short – I was there for about nine months – and looked forward to being moved to St Mary’s Hospital at Cappagh in Finglas, County Dublin. Reports reached Baldoyle that Cappagh was a better hospital, that the nurses were nicer and the nuns were not as cross. It was also a hospital for big boys.

The move to Cappagh was not in the least traumatic as I had prepared myself for it. It was to be a move of great significance to me and one which would undoubtedly have a massive impact on my future. In the first few weeks I underwent surgery to both legs, the purpose of which was to release the tendons at the back of the knee, allowing them to be straightened with greater ease. The surgery was only marginally successful and the surgeon under whose care I was placed recognized this. He actually told me that I would not have to undergo any more surgery. Instinctively I felt I could trust this man, there was a sincerity in his words I had not noticed before in any of the hospitals I had been in.

As I settled into Cappagh and began to make friends I became a more relaxed person. The days of anxiety and tension were fading and I no longer worried about dying. I was surrounded by lively teenagers instead of old people.
Younger boys made plans during the day to raid the convent orchard in the evening, while older lads would try to persuade one of the female patients or a young nurse to meet them at the back of the congress altar, which was used to celebrate Mass every Sunday. This structure had been positioned on O’Connell Bridge in Dublin in 1932 before being moved. It was not unusual for three or four boys with varying degrees of handicap to meet there in the evening for a smoke. Dates with girls were also arranged and it was behind this altar that I got my first kiss. I was now a teenager growing up in an institutional environment but I was happy. I was forging strong relationships with other boys and experiencing the intensity of teenage love. I was enjoying life and being treated as a young adult by nurses and nuns.

One extraordinary event occurred in Cappagh when I began to answer Mass again in Latin, from my wheelchair. The responses to the prayers were still so clear in my mind that I never used a card or missal. I became the hospital altar boy. I was also involved in the Scout Movement and went on regular camping trips to the Dublin Mountains. As my self-confidence continued to grow, my disability somehow seemed irrelevant.

During one of many frequent trips to Lourdes – always paid for by someone hoping I would be cured – I was befriended by a priest. His curiosity about me led to the second meeting between my sister and myself. For her it was to be a traumatic affair. She had last seen me running and walking at seven years of age. Now I was confined to a wheelchair. She still finds it difficult to understand what happened to me in those short years. Many adult years would have to be spent trying, if it was possible, to make up for the lost years of childhood.

I had an interest in music and was tutored in piano by an
occupational therapist attached to the hospital. I hated the lessons and tried every ploy to get out of them. I wanted a guitar and finally managed to buy one. I must have banged out the chord of C thousands of times before doing the same with D. The surgeon under whose care I was, listened, unknown to me, as I sang ‘What Have They Done to the Rain’. He clapped and said: ‘If The Searchers ever get to hear that, Doyle, you could end up in jail.’ He arranged music lessons for me and paid for them himself.

Nurses were becoming more than just people who looked after patients, they were friends. Two or three played a particular role in my life and one determined its course. She gave me real love, both physical and emotional, and I was able to return it. Sometimes it was difficult for me as a teenager to unscramble love from caring. Could a nurse many years senior to me actually love me, and could I love her? I never wanted to be loved out of a sense of duty or pity, I wanted to be loved for the person I was.

During these years I grew into a strong and confident young man. There were no stresses on me and as a result my physical condition improved considerably, even to the extent that for brief occasions I was able to walk without the aid of crutches or calipers.

I forged a particularly strong relationship with two other boys my own age, and it was not unusual to see the three of us, in the company of three nurses, heading for the bus and a day in the city. The nun in charge of our ward was particularly instrumental in ensuring that we went out. Often she called me aside and gave me money, suggesting that I spend it on something other than cigarettes. This nun, now dead, came to my defence when I was caught in the girls’ ward, replying, when told by another nun that I was sneaking down to visit a particular girl whenever I got the chance, ‘I bet you did a bit of it in your own day, Sister.’

I was introduced to a social worker and the possibility of my being discharged became a regular topic of conversation. These talks ‘primed’ me for leaving Cappagh and when the day came I was desperately sad and uncertain about the world I was heading into. I had been in institutional care for most of my life, now I was being discharged from hospital to become part of a family.

I was placed with a most wonderful family. A woman with seven children ranging in age from four to fourteen, was prepared to treat me as one of the family, though I found difficulties in getting used to being part of such a unit. I was actively encouraged to visit Cappagh and to get on with my schooling. I was never made to feel different because I was disabled and I was taken with the family on their annual holidays. There was never a problem about making space for one other person or a wheelchair in the grey Borgward Estate. It was from this family that I gained the confidence necessary to feel I could take my place as an equal in society.

There was an inevitability about my departure from the security of a family. I wanted to challenge life. I wanted society to accept me as I had been accepted by others. I moved into a flat on my own while still at school. The flat was my ‘house’, there was a sense of ownership about it and I could bring people in when I liked without feeling I was intruding on anyone.

Exactly half the welfare payment I received went in rent for the flat, the rest kept me on a diet of cornflakes, eggs, sausages and bread. There were times when the flat was a lonely place. I wrote a little when I couldn’t afford to go out or didn’t feel like visiting anyone.

Synge Street Christian Brothers School was nearby and I used to push myself to school each day. I particularly enjoyed those years. I was regarded as ‘one of the boys’ and
loved not only the companionship it brought but, most of all, the respect – not pity – I was given by my fellow pupils. Because I had no basic education I found it difficult to deal with certain subjects in school, particularly mathematics, but one teacher determined that I could get a leaving certificate if I was prepared to work hard in and outside of school. He was right. I passed – though only after a recheck of the maths paper.

By the time I left school I was nearly twenty years old and anxious to get a job. I was involved in a relationship which I hoped would result in marriage and so when the offer of a job in CIE was made to me, I grabbed at it. It was a bad decision, though it took twelve years to realize, by which time I felt my very sanity was being threatened. By the time I had the courage to leave, I was moving towards writing and trying to find out about my past. These ventures, uncertain though they were, have proved stimulating, frightening and rewarding.

In 1974, I got married. Many objected to the idea and voiced their total disagreement to a disabled man marrying an able-bodied woman. People took my wife aside and warned her that she would end up ‘looking after’ me. What infuriated me most about these interfering busybodies was their blatant disregard for the good sense of either my wife or myself. A half-hysterical matron summoned her student nurse to her office and demanded to know ‘what was the meaning of it all?’ People would ask my wife what sort of sex life she could expect. There were times when the pressure almost caused the relationship to collapse. I began to ignore people who interfered, realizing the futility of talking to them about something which ultimately was none of their business. When all else failed I’d tell them simply to ‘fuck off’. This may have been crude but it certainly had the desired effect.

In September 1976 we went to an auction for ‘A Victorian House – needing redecoration’. We had looked over the house which had been empty for ten years and, though it was damp and dusty, we decided to try and become the new owners. Our bid was the highest and the auctioneer’s hammer came down with the words: ‘Sold, to the gentleman seated for seven thousand pounds.’

Looking for a house loan and dealing with solicitors delayed us from actually taking possession until six months later. But on a dark, wet Good Friday evening a car and trailer drove up through the overgrown and neglected front garden, carrying all our belongings. My first child ran around the house amazed at its size. My wife, who was pregnant for the second time, stood in the middle of a bare, dusty and damp room. She held the brass hall door key in her hand and remarked: ‘Well, at least it’s ours.’

Behind the house a high-speed diesel-engined train hooted as it rushed past, replacing the hissing and panting sound of the steam engines I had been so used to as a child. Looking out the bay window, I fleetingly remembered St Michael’s Industrial School. I am typing these words in that same room where trains and granite walls are as close to me now as they were thirty years ago in Cappoquin. I had never been loved there. I am here.

EMPTY CRADLES
by Margaret Humphreys

In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker and mother of two, investigated the case of a woman who claimed that, at the age of four, she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. At first incredulous, Margaret Humphreys soon discovered that this woman’s story was just the tip of an enormous iceberg. As many as an estimated 150,000 children had in fact been deported from children’s homes in Britain and shipped off to a ‘new life’ in distant parts of the Empire – the last as recently as 1967.