Blessings. Mary Craig 

      Frank and I were both Catholics, conventional enough without being particularly enthusiastic. It didn’t bother us much one way or the other, and at this stage it would not have occurred to us to look for any comfort in God or our Catholic faith. But to the Lancashire Catholics among whom I grew up (especially those of my mother’s generation) life was nothing if not religion, and there were conventional pieties to cover almost any contingency. When things went wrong, God would put them right, though it must be admitted that, in their experience, he had rarely done so. Nothing troubled their faith that God was a kind and loving Father; and doubt was alien to them, a shameful thing. My mother, I am quite sure, had never allowed even a momentary doubt to cloud her faith. Her own life had contained almost an unfair share of tragedy – she too had had a handicapped son, her husband had died of killer pneumonia at the age of thirty-two, and as his body was brought from their home in Scotland by train to Leeds for burial in the family vault, her young son had fallen from the train and been killed. Father and son were buried on the same day, while she was six months’ pregnant with her second child, myself. When the time came for me to be born, she had quite plainly decided that she would die, because she left instructions that I was to be called Dolorosa, ‘child of grief’. (I had another narrow escape there.) But that was her only concession to despair, and she never doubted that God was a loving God. Still less did she doubt His existence. My mother went every morning to Mass, and was never happier than when she was in church. Religion was not only a consolation, it was her talisman against life. Say the right prayers, make the right Novena, speak to the right saint, and all would be well. It was a childlike, untroubled faith, shared by many of her friends; and though on many occasions it reduced me to fury, I think now that such calm certainty is to be envied.

      When an uncle in Dublin offered to pay all expenses if we wanted to take Paul to Lourdes, my mother was sure that her prayers had been answered. She genuinely believed that it was only a matter of time before Paul would be cured, and she urged us to accept my uncle’s offer with all speed. We, of course, were much less sanguine, but, for reasons which were not the same as my mother’s, we decided that we would go to Lourdes with Paul. We saw it as a gesture of sorts, and some kind of gesture seemed to be called for. Some symbolic act which would underline the separation of past from future. Besides, though neither of us came within a million miles of my mother’s faith, we did believe that Lourdes had something to offer us. It was not the spring-water or the hope of miracles which drew us, but the feeling that in such a place we might be able to put our own problem in perspective. If nothing else, we would have visible proof that we were not alone.

      There is in fact no better cure for self-pity than Lourdes. Where the sick and the maimed seem to pour together to proclaim their hope and their faith, or even just to share their fears, it is no longer possible to believe that one’s own pain is either unique or unbearable. The discovery holds at least a measure of comfort.

      We pushed, pulled and heaved Paul in a wheel-chair up, down and around, missing nothing. We went to the torchlight procession in the evening, and as a matter of course joined the massive crowds in the afternoon for the ritual blessing of the sick. It had not occurred to me to ask if I could join the group of mothers of sick children who were in a special reserved area at the front, near the altar, and generally Frank and I, with Paul, were somewhere in the middle of the heaving throng. One afternoon we had gone there as usual, and, as the priest came by, the sacred monstrance raised in his hands for blessing, the crowd fell silent. And in that pin-dropping silence Paul began to laugh. It was the laugh of a mad creature, a spine-chilling cackle that froze me to the spot with horror and shame. Suddenly an old peasant woman in a black shawl elbowed her way to where we stood and, eyes streaming with tears, lifted Paul out of his wheel-chair and held him up in her arms for the priest to bless. Paul was so astonished that he stopped laughing. It was an agonised moment, the significance of which did not escape me even at the time. It was another woman who had wept for my child, and who had taken compassion on me. Instinctively she had done what the moment demanded.

      The woman’s action pulled me up short. From that moment I shook myself out of my stupor, and scraped together some scraps of courage. I can’t claim to have been inspired by anything more noble than common-sense and the urge to self-preservation, but they were enough for a start. The alternatives stared me in the face: either I could go on wallowing, over-protecting myself from hurt, becoming more and more bitter each day as I played the insidious chorus of ‘why-should-this-happen-to-me?’ as the background music to my life. Or – I could face the fact that what had happened was not going to un-happen, and might as well be come to terms with. I had been drowning in self-pity for long enough now to see where it was likely to lead. There was no doubt in my mind that I needed to change course.

      Anyway, I was beginning to look forward to the new baby. A number of people had expressed horror – ‘Surely you’re not going on with it?’ Relatives and friends were full of forebodings and fears, but somehow I knew with absolute certainty that their fears would be confounded. The new baby would be a consolation, not a fresh disaster. For once I was right. The birth was easy; the child, John Mark, everything I could have hoped for. With Paul at home, and Anthony a restless, energetic four-year-old, the new baby had to be propped up with a bottle and left to get on with it. He seemed to know from the start that he couldn’t expect anything better, and to the relief of us all, he seemed to thrive on the inevitable neglect.