‘Will someone steal my coat?’
‘No, you’re on a holy pilgrimage,’ my son’s Irish carer-companion Rosemarie reassured him. We were going to Lourdes, where in 1858 a poor peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, had 18 visions of the Virgin Mary.
At Stansted I’d lost a tooth. I had a bad knee and an ancient foot injury. Should I not be in a wheelchair myself, instead of being a helper? Our group was BASMOM, the British Association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. I was a bit dubious about Lourdes (Rosemarie’s idea). Wasn’t the Order full of recusant Catholics who my father, a Knight of Malta himself, always claimed were ‘interbred’? He’d cited loo rolls playing Ave Maria (probably a myth), and as a Catholic child I was familiar with lurid statuettes of Bernadette and the Virgin and ‘bling’ rosaries.
I would be in a hotel with other helpers, Companions, Knights and Dames.
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