Frightened Pilgrim: From Ireland to America with a miracle in between

By James O. Mallon

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350942569

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

On the old sod is where it began

My trek from wee babe to a man

It was not so easy

At times I felt queasy

But a person must do what he can

I have heard from those who know that it was a sunny summer morning in the County Armagh in Northern Ireland when I entered this world at approximately 9:30 AM. The county is often referred to by locals as Orchard County. The reason would be quite obvious to any visitor. The date was the 3rd of July in the year 1942 and I was a healthy seven pounder. Armagh is a significant city in those surroundings. It is often called the home of saints and scholars. It is the main control site of the Catholic Church in our small country, which is mostly under Catholic rule.

As was customary in those days I was born at home aided by my Grandmother Mallon, who was a trained midwife. As far as I know the delivery was smooth with no complications. I had no siblings at that time. My mother, Annie had had just one previous pregnancy, but she had miscarried. I was her first full term baby. Two years later my brother, Eddie entered the scene and our family was as complete as it would ever be. Sometime after Eddie’s birth our twin sisters arrived, but sadly they only survived for a few days. They were born prematurely and stood little chance of growing older. Mother wanted to put them in Daisy Hill Hospital where they could get constant care; better than at home, but grandma put the kibosh on that idea saying that they would get more personal attention at home. In all fairness to her it really made no difference. The two tiny babes would not have made it no matter where they were. Medicine was much less advanced at that time than it is now. Even now the question might be moot. They simply had too much working against them.

Let me say a few words about my parents. I often find it incomprehensible now that they ever got together because their temperaments were so diametrically opposed.

When he was a very young man my father was part of a British scheme that sent young people to Canada to learn about farming. After a while his brother, who was a U. S. citizen, helped him get a visa to enter the United States. Once there he found employment as a doorman in New York City. He would ever after be labeled a ‘Yank’ by his countrymen.

He returned to Ireland and bought a farm from one of his uncles. In reality it was three separate plots, three acres on the mountain, three more close by with old walls that were once upon a time a house and four additional acres where he would live and where Eddie and I were born.

One might say that my dad was a grumpy old man even at a young age. He never seemed to want to show any emotions. On the other hand, my mother was an entirely different story. She was a jolly, happy-go-lucky person who was always very easy to get along with. She treated every day as a new beginning.

She was eleven years younger than my father when she married him and moved into the small farm house to begin her duties as a farmer’s wife. They were wed in the ‘Hungry Thirties’ so it became hard to adjust to living without mod cons (Modern Conveniences).

A few years later, Eddie and I became a part of the life they were living on that small dis-jointed farmland. There was a large multi-purpose room and a kitchen attached to a stable and a byre (Cowshed). We had neither plumbing nor electric power. Our light was supplied by a paraffin lamp. The bedroom, which was part of the main room, contained two beds, one double and a smaller one for my brother and me. The beds were second-hand, bought from my mother’s brother-in-law. The mattresses were also second or maybe third-hand. The ticking was dirty, torn and filled with horse hair. For covers there were some ancient army blankets and top coats.

We had an open fire place from which most of the heat escaped up the chimney. There was a hob or shelf on each side of the fire place where pots could be placed to keep them warm and where we kids could sit if we had something under our bums. There was also a fan bellows under one of the hobs that we could crank up to blow the fire to life when it was getting low and a very large hook directly under the chimney to hang pots for cooking. My mother often blamed that hook for the miscarriage she had before I was born. She thought it probably happened when she was straining to remove a heavy pot of potatoes from the dreaded hook. She was a small woman, only five feet tall, so reaching out with a load was quite difficult for her.

It did not take long for her to begin to hate her surroundings. She had had a fairly easy life before she was married. She had worked as a maid in an English household where just about every want was provided for. Her new husband had also had solid work in New York so they were both accustomed to a better life.

The main problem was that most of the ten acres was not fit for cultivation. Most of it was too rock strewn to permit plowing and some of it was inaccessible due to trees and steep hills. All things considered, it was nearly impossible to scratch out a living from the meager crop.

To supplement his income my father often did construction work in nearby England, but that was seasonal and would disappear during the colder months. At those times he would just sit back and go on the dole (Unemployment). He was perfectly content to relax on the small government funding. He made little or no real effort to find anything else.

As soon as we were old enough my brother and I were put to work gathering potatoes on our farm for ourselves and for some of our nearby neighbors. Sometimes, when we were returning home past a quarry we did it without a flashlight so we could not see much in the dark. Occasionally we would run smack-dab into the rear of a wayward animal that had wandered off from its own territory. That could be a daunting experience because we could not be sure if it was a cow or a horse or something more frightening. It was fortunate that we always managed to get back safely to our home.

As time went by mother was not too happy, but she never complained out loud. She was one of those rare people who would offer the last bite off her plate to someone she thought needed it more. Consequently, she often went hungry just to keep Eddie and me well fed. She had expected that when she married a returned Yank, things would go better than they did.

Most of our neighbors were either, spinsters, bachelors or couples with no children. The only kid we had to play with was a spoiled brat who was often sent home from school for bad behavior. Years later he was doing time in a New York prison.

When we reached school age it was in a one room site that included all of the grades. Of course we walked there and back every day as did everyone in those days. Our teacher was a man named Tom who was very good at his trade when he was sober, but that was not too often. When he was hung-over he became a tyrant who would give us six hard raps on our knuckles with a stick if he thought we were acting up. He was a big man—impossible to ignore. Those were the ‘Good old days’ when teachers could use sticks and belts to maintain order.

I must note that my parents never resorted to such tactics at home with just one exception. One evening when my mother was away visiting her mother my brother and I were playing on the floor and my pop was reading his paper peacefully in his chair. I tied a book to our cat’s tail to see how he would react. The cat freaked out, banged into furniture trying to get free and scared the wits out of my poor dad. He freed the cat then grabbed the belt from the fan bellows and just before I made it out the door he caught me and thoroughly whipped me. I had a sore backside for several days after that. I could not blame him because I knew that what I did was very wrong. Needless to say, I never did anything like that again.

My father suffered from bleeding ulcers caused in large part by the unhealthy lunches he ate when he worked in England. They usually included bread dipped in bacon fat or lard which was not very digestible. He was not a drinker. He rarely consumed alcohol, but he did smoke a lot of cheap cigarettes.

CHAPTER TWO

Family trees can be quite complicated

Midst the limbs one can get inundated

There are uncles and cousins

They can add up to dozens

And most of them get implicated.

My father was born in Bootle, England, a few miles north of Liverpool on the Irish Sea. His family consisted of his father, his mother and eight siblings. There were five brothers and three sisters in all. The eldest boy was Patrick and the youngest was Stephen. One of the sisters, Aunt Minnie, died during a flu epidemic in 1918 while she was still in her twenties.

One of the brothers, My Uncle Michael, was severely injured in a fall from a horse. After that he could only get around using a pony trap (cart). I remember him well because when the weather was nice he used to take Eddie and me for rides on his trap. I also recall that his reliable pony was named Sally. Sadly, he passed away in September of 1956 when he was only fifty-six years of age. I still miss his happy demeanor in spite of his intolerable condition.

My paternal grandfather, also James Mallon, was a small time farmer always struggling to keep his family fed. He did the best he could, but sometimes it was not enough. I never met him because his hard life took its toll before I was born. He developed arthritis so he moved his family to Northern Ireland in the hope of a better existence. He too died much too young. He deserved a better fate.

The Mallon curse also plagued my Uncle Patrick. He relocated to Baltimore and was doing reasonably well there as a travelling salesman. He and his wife had three boys who all met with sad futures. My cousin Jimmy drowned while swimming shortly after his family made a trip back to Ireland to visit Grandma Mallon. When Jimmy died his mother was distraught and turned to drink to try to ease her grief. Their youngest, Gene, was still nursing on a bottle at that time so for some unknown reason his mom started to add some booze to his formula. Gene grew up a hopeless alcoholic.

Later on, their other son, Eddie was a ship’s captain and was doing quite well until he lost his ship, his crew and his life during a bad storm on the Gulf of Mexico.

When Patrick’s wife died he was remarried to a thirty-eight year old woman. He was then in his seventies. He was just seeking solace, but he did not last long after his second marriage.

Fortunately for him, the bad luck did not follow Uncle Stephen. He too moved to Baltimore and became a realtor. His wife gave birth to three sons and two daughters. Two of his boys eventually made a decent living selling insurance and the other became a state trooper. Both ladies married FBI agents.

My Aunt Brigid married and had two daughters but she never left home.

My Aunt Margaret was my father’s third female sibling. As you read on you will learn much more about Aunt Maggie because she played a large part in my life, more than once.

On the other side of the ledger, my mother came from an equally large family. The McArdle’s also had eight offspring. They were evenly split between boys and girls. They were Felix, Hugh, who was the last to die in 1998, Patrick and Michael on the male side and Annie, my mother of course, Norah, Mary and Alice, the female side of the family. Some of them have been or will later be referred to so it is important to mention them. You may recall Mary and her husband John O’Hare who sold us the second-hand beds from their store in Newry.

The last remaining member of that generation of the McArdle clan was Hugh who died in 1998