The God Squad

by Doyle, Paddy

‘I am tired, I am tired, but I can’t sleep,’ I pleaded.

  ‘Then there must be something wrong with you?’ she said, becoming more annoyed.

  I wanted desperately to talk to someone who would understand the agony I was enduring and the awful fears that were my constant companions. I wanted her to understand the reality of the image I was seeing with increasing regularity. If I could do that she might understand why I was so distressed and anxious. Then I remembered the nuns and how they described what I was seeing as nonsense. Why should a nurse be any different? Because I said nothing which would have led her to understand why I had screamed the nurse told me to stop being ridiculous and to count sheep. I didn’t even know what she meant and as she left the room I pressed my face down into the mattress and cried.

  Later when she checked and found me still awake and distressed, she returned with a doctor. He placed his hand on my sweating forehead.

  ‘What are you frightened of?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t like being on my own,’ I said.

  He told the nurse that I was hysterical about something and she agreed.

  ‘Has he said anything?’ he enquired.

  ‘Nothing.’

  He asked again what was frightening me but again I couldn’t tell him. He asked the nurse for my chart, wrote on it and told her to give me two Phenobarbitone tablets immediately, and to keep me on that dosage three times a day. Within minutes the nurse returned with a tumbler of water and two capsules which she handed to me. One at a time I put them into my mouth and swallowed them with the aid of a drink.

  ‘Now, I don’t want to hear another sound out of you,’ she said as she held the bedcovers aloft to allow me to get down under them before tucking me in. ‘Off to sleep,’ she said, leaving the room and closing the door gently behind her.

  It was dinner time next day before I woke. I was groggy and didn’t feel like eating the meal offered to me, but the nurses persisted until eventually I began to eat and as I did so I became more conscious of my surroundings. I felt relaxed, no longer afraid of the room or of dying. The sun shone through the large glass doors, warming the room and its brightness made it difficult for me to open my eyes properly.

  When I had finished eating I asked a nurse if I could write a letter adding that I did not have either a pen or paper. She returned with a blue writing pad, matching envelopes and a biro which she said she was lending to me on condition I took good care of it and gave it back when I was finished. I addressed the letter and wrote:

  Dear Mother Paul,

  I hope you are well as I am myself thank God. I pray for you and all the other nuns every night and I also pray for all the boys.

  I would be grateful if you would send me the anual my uncle gave me when I was on holidays as I am in a room on my own and I get lonely for something to do. In case you cannot find the anual, Mother Michael left it on top of the press in the classroom.

  I remain,

  Yours truly,

  Patrick Doyle.

  I decided to wait and show the letter to the nurse who had given me the writing materials before putting it in the envelope. She read it quickly and remarked that although there were one or two mistakes, she doubted that anyone would even notice them. Before I could say anything, she had the letter in her pocket with a stamp affixed, ready for posting.

  It was nearly a fortnight before a reply came from Mother Paul. Her letter arrived in a brown envelope with a black harp printed on the front. In the bottom left hand corner the words ‘St Michael’s Industrial School, Cappoquin’ were printed in black lettering between two thin black lines. The nurse who had posted my letter stood by the bedside as I opened the envelope. The reply was short.

  Dear Pat,

  I got your recent letter and I am glad to know that you are praying for us all here. Your writing is not as good as it should be and I expect that it will improve before you write again.

  At the moment I am very busy and cannot find the book you asked for. I am disappointed that you could not spell annual right.

  Good Bye,

  God Bless,

  Mother Paul.

  I showed the letter to the nurse and I’m certain she said ‘bitch’ as she read it. It was the last time I was to hear anything from St Michael’s Industrial School or from any of the nuns in it, although their legal responsibility for me as ordered by the courts did not end until 19 May 1967.

  I had spent a long time, perhaps a year, in a room on my own before I was eventually moved out into a ward with other children. It was a move I had looked forward to, but one I was to deeply regret. This was the period in my life when I felt most alone and came to realize fully the stigma of being orphaned. Some of the children delighted in my never having visitors, and jeered me about being an orphan, and about how my ears stuck out. When I cried they used to throw wet face cloths at me. Isolation was better than almost constant taunting. I’d scream at them to leave me alone, but they continued until a nurse reprimanded them, and told me I was worse to be taking any notice of them.

  I hated night time, the drugs I had become dependent on no longer had the effect they used to. Death figured again in my life, and though I didn’t actually see any images of a hanged man this time, I was always terrified they would appear and I realized that this fear would be another cause for the children to mock me. I used to sleep hunched in a ball, my knees flexed under me, my head bent down with my forehead resting on them and my face pressed tightly to my thighs to muffle my crying. Nurses repeatedly reminded me that I was nine years old, no different from any other child, and that I should act my age. When I complained about being pelted with wet cloths and called names, they paid little attention. As the dosage of medication I received was increased it became easier to cope with what was happening around me. The price was addiction to drugs, an addiction that would cause me much suffering and take years to overcome.

  For an hour every Wednesday the ward was quiet while Hospitals’ Requests was on Radio Eireann, with each patient hoping to have a request played for them. When one was played and the names of parents and relatives read out, there was always some jeering. Good-natured banter about the name of a father or an uncle often turned into a vicious row with things being thrown across the ward by two combatants. I remember one boy having a request played from his mother, father, his uncle Dick and aunt Mary, which immediately brought a chorus of: ‘Mammy, Daddy, Uncle Dick, went to London on a stick, the stick broke, what a joke, Mammy, Daddy, Uncle Dick.’ It was strange events like this that brought a sense of reality to the sterile atmosphere of the hospital. Children would act as they might in normal circumstances, physical barriers such as plaster of Paris on broken arms or fractured legs could not restrain anger or dampen furious tempers. One evening as two boys, both almost completely paralysed, were having a game of chess, one accused the other of cheating. Both had only the slightest use of their arms, and as they threatened to kill each other, they moved their wheelchairs as close together as they could. Then slowly, each managed to get his hand to his head, by using his fingers to make it ‘walk’ up his body. With a swear, each allowed their paralysed arms to fall, as a dead weight, on the other. There was never the slightest chance of injury being inflicted and the physical effect of receiving a blow was nothing like as exhausting as that of raising a limb.

  The chief consultant in the hospital was a small, chubby, sallow-skinned man with steel-grey hair neatly combed in waves back from his forehead. His hands were said to have been blessed by Pope Pius XII. I often heard adults talking of the great healing powers he had in those hands. When he did his ‘rounds’ and came to my bed I was always afraid, certain that one day he would decide that an operation was the only way to straighten my foot. My nervousness was obvious, I became tense and fidgety, my breath came fast and I sweated a lot. Whenever he examined me he always did his best to relax me. In my early days at that hospital his examinations were never intense, the most he did was to hold my foot in his hand and move it about
gently, but as time went on and he became less and less satisfied with my rate of progress, he became more thorough in his effort to discover what could be wrong.

  One Thursday, he examined me in a manner he had not done before. He pricked my foot with a pin, asking me to close my eyes and tell him if I could feel its point. He checked my breathing, and made me follow his finger with my eyes as he moved it slowly across my line of vision. ‘Good,’ he said as I managed all the tests put to me. Then he asked me to stand out on the floor. The parquet wood felt cool beneath my feet and momentarily I was reminded of the times I used to throw off my boots and socks in St Michael’s and run across the field that separated the convent from nearby agricultural land. As I stood, he said he was going to push me and I was to do my best not to let him knock me down. With his first push on my chest, I rocked back on my heels and it required the swift movement of a nurse to prevent me falling. I was caught unaware by the suddenness of the move and I said so. Before he attempted the same thing again, he asked if I was ready. I was. Putting both feet firmly on the floor, I hardly moved, except for a slight swaying initially. Back in bed, he asked me to perform tasks I had done before. I experienced no difficulty in doing anything asked of me and the consultant praised me for that. I was so anxious to impress that when he asked me to walk across the ward, I tripped and almost fell. I steadied myself and slowly began to walk across the room looking down at my feet as I went along, each step being taken slowly and deliberately.

  ‘Don’t look down at your feet as you walk,’ he said as I returned to where he was standing, adding, ‘don’t be afraid to walk, you won’t fall, try moving a bit faster.’

  Standing back from the bed he spoke to those around him, junior doctors, nurses and the ward sister. He could find nothing physically wrong, no evidence of paralysis or muscle wastage. Yes, there was a slight inversion of the foot but it was nothing serious as far as he was concerned. He asked the nurse in charge to have me measured for a splint, a steel bar that would be strapped around my leg below the knee and run down the outside of the lower leg into a hole in the heel of a new pair of boots which were also to be ordered. This he hoped would pull my foot outward and eventually rectify the problem. As the consultant wrote on my chart I heard him enquiring about my parents. The most senior nurse pointed to a piece of paper and said that I was a ‘Ward of the State’. It was the first time I had been referred to as such. He wondered how my parents died, adding that he presumed they were dead.

  He was assured they were, but the circumstances were not altogether clear, though she presumed ‘natural causes’. The consultant wondered at what age the deaths occurred and he was given my date of birth and the date I was committed to the Industrial School. He remained silent as the nurse told him that I cried a lot and had great difficulty in getting to sleep at night. When she was asked if I had ever spoken about what was distressing me, she replied that I had not. He then asked what medication I was on.

  ‘Phenobarbitone,’ the nurse said, ‘it has calmed him a great deal.’ He thought for a while, expressed his dislike of Phenobarbitone, but added that if it was helping it should be continued. Before moving away, he requested the nurse to try and obtain whatever information there was on myself and my family. She made a note of it and slipped it into the brown folder containing my medical records. He pinched me gently on the cheek and told me not to worry about anything. ‘We’ll have you right in no time at all.’ I felt confident enough to ask him if I would have to have an operation.

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  I hesitated for a moment before telling him I was afraid of operations.

  ‘You don’t worry about operations, you won’t have to have one.’

  I felt so happy that day that I decided to write to my uncle, telling him I was in hospital and asking him to come and see me or to send something I could play with. If he wasn’t able to get a game, I asked him to send some money, saying that I would buy something myself. No sooner had I given the letter to a nurse to post than I was sorry for writing it. My uncle had not been a part of my life since I last saw him on the day he left me back to the school from my aunt’s. I worried about him writing to the nuns to tell them I was begging.

  I had become particularly friendly with a fat round-faced boy from Kilkenny, whom some of the others called ‘Fatso’, a name he hated and which caused him to issue the fiercest of threats to those guilty.

  ‘I’ll break your fucking neck,’ he used to say, ‘as soon as I can get out of this plaster.’

  He was older than most of the other boys by about two years and was in hospital to have his leg straightened at the knee. He had had surgery and was in plaster of Paris. He liked to read and chew sweets or gum, if he could get it without the nurses knowing. He was an avid radio listener and, with his guitar, used to mimic Cliff Richard or Elvis Presley. Occasionally he tried to play some of the instrumentals which the Shadows had made popular at that time. ‘Apache’ was his favourite. He hated anyone to touch the instrument, anyone who did was warned that they would end up with their necks in plaster. Somehow, I looked on him as the one person who would take my side when all the others were jeering me, and though he was immobile I was satisfied that he would one day carry out the threats he was issuing from his bed.

  ‘You leave him alone, you little bastard,’ he’d say and anyone who was teasing me stopped immediately out of fear of him. I was afraid of him too, and because of that, I never did anything to turn him against me.

  I was careful to agree with him when he said that Cliff Richard was better than Elvis Presley, though I hardly knew the difference between the two. He used to buy chewing gum with pictures of various stars in the packet and keep them in his locker in a scrap book. He spent a good deal of time doing his hair to look like Cliff. He had his own large jar of Brylcreem which he applied liberally and with the aid of a double-sided mirror he combed it back with a coiff at the front.

  ‘What’s that like?’ he’d ask.

  ‘Grand,’ I’d reply.

  ‘Is it like that?’ he’d say, holding up Cliff’s picture.

  ‘Yeah, very like it.’

  Then he would pick up his guitar and play the first few chords of ‘Travellin’ Light’ or ‘Livin’ Doll’ before beginning to sing, doing his utmost to sound like his idol.

  ‘When I get out of here,’ he said, ‘I am going to start a band.’

  At night after I had been given my tablets, John Gorman and I used to pull our beds as close together as we could. He had a cage in his bed to keep the weight of the bedcovers off his plastered leg and from the bars of this he’d hang a small transistor radio tuned to Radio Luxembourg. He also had a torch which he hung beside the radio so he could read when the lights had been put off. He was curious to know why I never had visitors. Because I wanted him as a friend I didn’t hesitate to answer anything he asked. As I was not exactly sure of how my parents had died, I told him they were killed in a car crash and that I was in the back at the time. It seemed the easiest thing to say and avoided the necessity for further awkward questions. He wanted to know where I lived and who looked after me.

  ‘A school, with a whole lot of other boys. Nuns look after us.’

  ‘I hate nuns,’ he said.

  I repeated what he said, and then realized that for the first time I was expressing how I really felt about Mother Paul and Mother Michael, finally admitting my real hatred of them to somebody. I was about to ask him what it was like to have parents when we heard a nurse approaching. He turned off the radio and the torch and pretended to be asleep.

  Everything was quiet for a while then he whispered to me that his mother and father slept in the same bed. I said I didn’t believe him and repeated what my aunt had told me about men being naked in front of women.

  ‘Cross my heart,’ he said making the sign of the cross over the pocket of his pyjamas’ top.

  ‘Do you know the difference between men and women?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.


  He made me swear on the bible that if he told me I would not tell anyone else, ever. I promised.

  He said that one Sunday morning he had rushed into his parents’ bedroom without knocking and his mother was standing on the floor with no clothes on her. He described her breasts as ‘diddies’ and said that she had no ‘mickey’ like a man, just a big bunch of hair with a slit in it. His father had roared at him to get out and never to enter the room again without knocking. Then he asked if I knew how babies were made.

  ‘No,’ I answered, sensing that there was something wrong with the conversation taking place, and yet wanting to know. Again I had to swear never to tell before he would continue. He said it was a bit dirty and wondered if I really wanted to hear it.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You know sometimes,’ he said, with a tremble in his voice and hesitated, ‘when your mickey gets hard and stands up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well the man puts his mickey up into the woman’s bum and pisses into her.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘I just do,’ he replied, before saying that another boy had told him. I was gripped by a strange, inexplicable sensation that made me want to hear more, even though I was feeling guilty as if doing something wrong.

  ‘You can only do it at night,’ he said, ‘because that’s when your mickey gets hardest and that’s when you have the most piss saved up inside you.’

  He kept silent for a short while and then asked, ‘Did you not know that?’

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  I was becoming sleepy as John Gorman asked me again to keep what he said a secret. I agreed and said I was going to sleep. Without thinking, I put my hands under the covers and was surprised and a little frightened by the pleasure I was getting from feeling my own erect penis.

  ‘There’s a letter for you,’ a nurse said as she tossed an envelope onto my bed next morning. I was surprised that the envelope was white and knew immediately that it had not come from St Michael’s. I opened it and unfolded a single sheet of notepaper, out of which a £10 note fluttered down onto my bedcovers. In my excitement I grabbed the money in case anyone saw it and stuffed it under the mattress before reading the letter from my uncle. He didn’t say much except that he was enclosing money and hoped that I would be able to buy whatever I wanted. He signed the letter, ‘Uncle Con’.