Frightened Pilgrim (eBook)

From Ireland to America with a miracle in between

James O. Mallon (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
212 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-4256-9 (ISBN)

This is a story of a boy who grew up on a small farm in Northern Ireland in the 1940's. At 8 years old he had an accident that damaged his left shin. Doctors wanted to amputate his leg, but his parents refused to give their consent. After cobalt treatment, the wound still remained. Local neighbors took up a collection & sent him to Lourdes in France. A few weeks after he returned from Lourdes the wound disappeared. Like many Irish people before him, he immigrated to the USA. He had a dream of becoming an actor someday, but Life kept getting in the way. He worked at many different jobs; found it difficult to settle in one place; got married; got divorced; did some acting and had a play written about his leg injury & miracle, entitled 'A Bump on the Leg.' And now he has written & published his autobiography. Hopefully this will be a legacy for future generations.

This is a story of a boy who grew up on a small farm in Northern Ireland in the 1940's. At 8 years old he had an accident that damaged his left shin. Doctors wanted to amputate his leg, but his parents refused to give their consent. After cobalt treatment, the wound still remained. Local neighbors took up a collection & sent him to Lourdes in France. A few weeks after he returned from Lourdes the wound disappeared. Like many Irish people before him, he immigrated to the USA. He had a dream of becoming an actor someday, but Life kept getting in the way. He worked at many different jobs; found it difficult to settle in one place; got married; got divorced; did some acting and had a play written about his leg injury & miracle, entitled "e;A Bump on the Leg."e; And now he has written & published his autobiography. Hopefully this will be a legacy for future generations.

CHAPTER THREE

To Lourdes I went to seek a cure

If it would work—I was not sure

It was a drain

Ship, bus and train

It did not make me feel secure

For a long time my mother wanted to rent out the farm and move to England, but my father would not hear of such a thing. I was pleased with his decision because in England I would have to stay in school until I was fifteen. In Ireland the legal age was fourteen. I would have to continue my studies for a full extra year if we made the move.

I hated school right from the start. I could not wait until I was old enough to get out and earn my own way. Until I was fourteen I would just have to cope with the status quo. I was tired of listening to my father’s complaints about the lack of money almost every day as if it was our fault.

Mother wanted to get a part-time job to help out, but father said that would only make him look like a poor provider. His ego overwhelmed his common sense so he refused to let her work outside the house. She then did the next best thing. She joined a group working for a catalog service called Littlewoods because that could be done without leaving her home premises. She received clothes on approval that she could then sell to her friends and neighbors. When she made a sale she earned a commission. It did not add a lot to the family bottom line, but every little bit helped.

Even so, times continued to go from bad to worse. The poor old mare had a difficult birth and her foal died before it was old enough to sell. A bit later the cow had a calf which also died. My parents borrowed a brooder that was meant to keep newborn chicks warm by an oil lamp. The brooder caught fire. The good news was that no chicks were in it during the conflagration. The bad news was that they would have to replace the brooder.

Less than a year after Eddie was born my mother gave birth to twin girls. I have already discussed what happened to them so I will not relate that sad tale again.

The year 1950 turned out to be a very bad one for me. I was eight and Eddie was six. One day we were playing around the remnants of what was left of the very old house on the adjacent part of our property. That land belonged to my father until he decided to sell that portion years later. There were parts of some stone walls without any sign of a roof. It looked like it had been just one room and a kitchen at one time. I asked a farmer who had lived in the area for many years if he knew who had lived there. He said he could not be sure, but he thought their name was Cassidy. It was so long since it had been vacated.

My parents used to dump all their scrap there; tin cans, bottles, jam jars and so forth, because there was no regular refuse pick-up in those days. It was a somewhat perilous area to play in. We really were not supposed to be there, but kids are kids and we took it as a challenge.

As we walked around I accidently stepped on the rim of an old rusty bucket. It flipped over and bit into my shin like an animal trap. I did not pay too much attention to the swelling that developed because that sort of thing often happened when we were playing football and always went away after a short time. However, that bump had other plans for me. It remained for a long time. When I was in bed at night it became more and more painful.

My mother took me to see the local GP and he advised me to take some aspirin for the ache. That was no help at all. When I started to get up at night to hold my leg near the fire to ease the pain my parents thought it was just an excuse to stay home from school. They even had to pay a fine once for allowing me to skip school. When I was older I told them they should have sued the Board of Education, but by then they were just happy that I had not lost my leg. That had been a real possible outcome for a while.

My mother was so worried that she decided to take me to Daisy Hill Hospital in Newry for some x-rays. The next day, while we were waiting for the results, I walked to school as usual. About half-way home at the end of the day my mother met me on her bike and said I had to report back to Daisy Hill immediately. An ambulance came for me that evening. I had no idea what was going on. At the hospital we were told that I had an infected bone that could become cancerous if I did not have surgery as soon as possible. My parents gave their consent thinking that they were only going to scrape the bone.

My leg was shaved and a red line was drawn just below my knee. A team of doctors stood around my bed and I heard a nurse say, “Do you know what this poor boy is in for?”

I was beginning to think that this could be serious. Luckily, my parents came to see me in the nick of time. When the doctors said they would have to amputate part of my lower appendage my parents rescinded their permission to operate. My mother said that there had to be another way to deal with my problem.

The head doctor admitted that there was one other possibility, but that Daisy Hill did not have the equipment to do it. He spoke of Cobalt B treatment. The nearest place that could offer it was Belfast Royal Victoria Hospital.

So off I was taken to Belfast for a series of doses of radiation. Belfast was a long way off, nearly sixty-five miles, and I would have to stay there for six weeks. Mom and Dad could not visit me very many times because they simply could not afford the transportation costs.

I was housed in a convalescent hospital while getting my daily treatments. Very few of the other patients were under sixty. I often wished there were other kids to talk to. However, I did discover capitalism. The old folks would have me bring them newspapers or whatever they were permitted to eat or drink. For this service they would give me a few pennies so I was feeling rich.

When I finally got home I still had the bump. The local doctors opted to apply a plaster cast that itched something fierce. Months later the cast was removed but the bump persisted.

It was then that our neighbors formulated Plan C. They took up a collection and put together enough money to send me to Lourdes, France—alone. That was when I became a ‘Frightened Pilgrim.’ I kicked up a storm and refused to go when I heard of the plan. For all I knew France could be a thousand miles away and no one would speak English there. My strenuous objections were overruled and soon I was on my way.

I was joined by a contingent of perhaps eighty other hopeful pilgrims. Most of them were as old and as infirmed as the people I met in Belfast. They were all strangers to me as we started out and I was the only youngster in the large group.

It was a complicated journey. Hardly anyone flew from place to place in those days. First, there was a bus ride to Newry, then a train to Belfast followed by a ferry ride to England. The old boat did not float on an air cushion like so many modern ones now do. The sea was rough. My stomach was tied in knots the whole way and I got sea sick. The only good thing was that I met two sisters from Salthill, Galway in the west of Ireland, who took me under their wings for the rest of the excursion. Their names were Peg and Nelly Gallagher. I will always remember their efforts to comfort me.

Another train took us to Dover and a second ferry across the channel to Calais. On that leg I was again a victim of maldemer. I was not cut out to be a sailor. From Calais we trained to Paris.

You can only imagine the effect that huge city had on this wee Irish lad. The food there was delicious and very different from my usual diet. I had my first taste of grapes and French bread and our drinks had ice in them.

Lourdes was still five hundred miles away so the longest leg of our quest was yet to come. A series of railroads were well coordinated and eventually we were disembarked on schedule in an orderly fashion.

There were many shops in the town hawking holy water, rosaries and medals. They also carried one of my favorite things, View Masters. I bought one and some slides of the grotto and the cathedral to show my people back in Ireland.

The grotto at Lourdes was full of abandoned wheel chairs and crutches left behind to attest to many claimed miracle cures. While over 7000 recoveries have been attributed to Our Lady of Lourdes, the Catholic Church has only sanctioned seventy as miraculous. Millions have gone to the shrine during the 150 years since Bernadette Soubirous first described her visions of Mary there.

One thing I strongly disliked was the baths. They resembled horse troughs and were filled with spring water. Men and women entered through separate doors wrapped in towels. Then two men would grab each of us in turn and would drop us in the not too clean tanks.

A more pleasant memory of Lourdes was the nightly torch-light processions with everyone singing the Ave Maria. It was a beautiful ritual.

After we were thoroughly dunked, blessed and bilked we re-boarded the trains to start for home. Nearing the end of the arduous expedition I glanced out the window of the Irish bus and saw a heartwarming sight that lifted my spirits. I could see Slieve Gullion Mountain, my old playground near my house. It only topped out at just over 2000’ and to most people around the globe would not be considered a mountain. To us it was the rival of Everest or K-2. We owned a small portion of it and there were four other families who have homes on it. I could see all four of them in the distance. My memory of that particular moment will be forever with me.

Many years later, in the year...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	12.1.2024
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
ISBN-13	979-8-3509-4256-9 / 9798350942569

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