Tom Davies: Road to the Stars Part 1

by Tom Davies

A couple of years ago, the writer and journalist Tom Davies followed the old pilgrimage route through France and northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela. In three extracts from his book, "Road to the Stars", we travel with Tom on this journey through Europe and through faith. This week, Tom finds a cure in Lourdes.

THE PROCESSION OF THE Blessed Sacrament was about to start and the first of a great crocodile of wheelchairs began rolling into the forecourt in front of the Basilica, accompanied by a peal of bells. A tenor voice rose up and a white drift of nurses swept through the crowd. A baby near me was grizzling unhappily.

I wanted to get nearer to the altar to watch the service but was stopped by one of the volunteer brancardiers holding a rope. "Mais je suis un journaliste," I said hopefully, a ploy that sometimes opens doors because everyone is afraid of upsetting the Press. Everyone, that is, except this man.

"Non, non. Pour les malades."

"Je suis malade."

"Vous êtes journaliste."

"Oui, oui. Je suis un journaliste et je suis malade and je needs to get closer to the altar to see what's going on."

"Non, non. N'est pas possible. Allez-vous en."

He actually pointed to where I should stand and I duly stood there feeling foolish as I again tried to work out what was happening. By now, I guessed, there were some 3,000 sufferers in wheelchairs lined up in front of the Basilica and they had been struck down and torn apart by some of the deadliest diseases known to man. Faces were deformed and tongues lolling. Backs were hunched and legs but twisted stumps. Some were blind and others wore deaf-aids. Vacant faces stared blankly and wildly. But this was Lourdes. This was the last port of them all and these invalids had come with a gambler's hope in their hearts; all in the market for a miracle. Lord, they whom thou lovest are sick.

THE SACRED HOST was held up over every sick person. Another huge prayer rolled up to the very gates of heaven. Rosaries were held out and hands held high. Next a great silence trawled through the world as their eyes widened with a hope – a terrifying hope they might be made whole again.

But no miracles were on offer in the market today even if the spirits of the invalids seemed visibly lifted as they were wheeled away to the accompaniment of a sweetly sorrowing gypsy violin. In its 100 years of business more than 5,000 cures have been recorded by the Lourdes Medical Bureau, with 64 having been pronounced miracles. Most of these cures have taken place during this service and, just behind the officiating priest, a small group of doctors had waited and observed. Lord, that I may hear.

Yet as I was left alone in the rapidly thinning crowds I was feeling as confused as at any time in my confused life. The problem was I really hadn't lied to that brancardier since I was seriously malade myself and if you were wondering why I wasn't doing this pilgrimage to Compostela as I was supposed to – on my own two feet or, at the very least, on a bicycle – it was because I had a heart condition and a serious operation beckoned.

One of my coronary veins was shot, with two others on the blink. This being Thatcher's Britain, where you can get almost anything if you can pay for it, the waiting list was waiting forever and, meanwhile, I was finding it difficult to get up any sort of hill and any reasonable sort of walk reduced my legs to lead. Few pilgrims in the long and arduous history of pilgrimage could have been quite as knackered as me and I could no more have walked to Compostela than climbed Everest which was why I was doing this one in a camper van in which I could always pull over and snatch a little snooze whenever I got too tired.

The reason for my confusion here in Lourdes, then, was that I was not at all sure how I should behave in a place of healing. What, if anything, should I ask for? Should I go down on my knees right now and ask God to sort out my arteries? And how might I put it?

Now it may have been something to do with my own lack of faith or it may have been something to do with unanswered prayers in the past or it may have been something to do with a more or less perpetual sense of guilt about not being a good enough Christian – whatever a good enough Christian might be – or else it might have been all these factors rolled into one – plus a few I had not yet thought of – but here in Lourdes, in a famous place of healing, I did not know why or how I should petition God, if indeed I should petition him, since I have always had an instinctive belief in God's better judgement. I was sure he knew when I was going to fall off my perch and there was absolutely nothing all the prayers in the world could – or should – do about it.

SO IT WAS WITH a strange and undecisive unease that I stood there looking in the direction of the Pyrenees, with that brancardier still eyeing me suspiciously, as if I was about to start some trouble, wondering what to do next when, right at that moment, my unformed prayers were answered and I received what I still consider to be a miracle cure, even if the Lourdes Medical Bureau might have a few problems with it.

I turned and spotted a small figure being wheeled towards me, in one of the blue invalid carriages with a hood and big wheels. I had seen plenty of suffering and illness since I had arrived here but the sight of this small figure hit me across my face like a wet towel and I actually reeled backwards.

This boy was but a Belsen wraith with a thin, pointed face and a shrunken head, barely any hair, cold dead eyes and blotched skin. There was a dreadful lack of animation about every part of him to the degree that he barely seemed alive at all though it was his lower forearms and hands which caught my attention: nothing but parchment skin on bone with fingers that could only be described as tiny and skeletal. This boy was not a boy so much as a terrible disease imprisoned by a human shape and you knew – you just knew without a shadow of a doubt – that this terrible illness, perhaps Aids, was soon going to leave him for dead.

I was still reeling from the shock of seeing him as he was pushed past me and did not even notice who was pushing him. I was focusing so powerfully on him and his shrivelled limbs that I took in nothing around him.

But, after I had calmed down, I was left with only one question: what was I feeling so sorry for myself about? I'd had a full and exciting life, three sons, a good marriage and written a few decent books. I had even planted a tree in Israel, fulfilling that ancient injunction that every man should father a son, write a book and plant a tree, and I had almost constantly roamed the world and tasted many of her greatest sights and pleasures.

Yet this lad had clearly never been offered anything except a handful of spit and a bucket of broken glass. He probably couldn't even read a book let alone write one. He would certainly never know the exquisite joys of holding a woman and would never journey much further than a sick bed and certainly not on his own. That boy was but a vegetable with no future, no present and not much of a past. I was not to know it at that time but that Belsen wraith cured me of my own health problems. My coronary veins remain occluded but, for the rest of my pilgrimage to Compostela, I never once worried about them. The real danger with most illnesses, I have long believed, is the constant worry about them.

When I lost my breath or my legs felt weak I simply stood there until my breath returned and my legs could get going again. My anxieties about my forthcoming operation disappeared and I more or less accepted that, when I dropped off my perch, I dropped off my perch, end of story. I also decided there and then never again to ask God for anything at all and to be content to receive whatever he might be gracious enough to offer me in the sunset of my years.

Later in the afternoon I went down to the baths just next to the grotto where queues of pilgrims were waiting to be dunked by the brancardiers. Prayer cards in the baths are written in 19 languages and each bath can process 85 pilgrims an hour. Early in the morning the water can be really freezing but, towards the end of the session, it gets quite warm and soupy. Around 2,500 persons are bathed here each day. They can be suffering from ailments like boils, syphilis, cancer and tuberculosis but no one has ever been infected by this water and the brancardiers often drink a glass of it at the end of each working day as an act of faith.

AT THE END OF THE evening service I hung around the grotto long after the crowds had gone, sitting in the darkness and feeling the undoubted power of a century of prayer. The many huge candles lit and left here during the day by pilgrim groups from such places as Toledo, Zagreb and Santa Barbara, were still glowing over the jagged rocks of the grotto, making many of the discarded crutches appear to float in the darkness. The river was murmuring softly behind me.

This place of candles and water, prayer and pain is valuable. As well as brightening up wayward travellers like myself and offering solace to the suffering, it also brings the maimed and sick out into the open when our instincts are to lock them away. We are judged by the way we look after our sick. How we tend our ill reveals if we are a civilized society or not.

And as I remained there in the cold darkness I felt some of the warm pleasure of God that so many of the old and broken of his flock had made their way here in acts of faith. These invalids, with their multiple and horrific injuries and disabilities, were close to him, I decided. And they were especially close to his son who knew everything there was to know about welts of pain, the cruelty of rejection and the illnesses that destroy everything, including hope itself.

Tom Davies has worked as a seaman in the merchant navy, as a social worker in New York's Lower East Side, and as a Fleet Street journalist. Now a freelance writer living in Penarth in Wales, he is the author of 13 books, including "The Man of Lawlessness", "Landscapes of Glory" and "The Celtic Heart".

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