The Polish Connection 24-25

Chapter 24

April –1917

I just met the most unusual young lady. She is called Josephine Outram, in her late twenties I would guess, and she is spending the week holidaying in the Marple area. She is a keen cyclist and was thinking to cycle up our road, and of course it is not of very good quality, so she was pushing her bike and feeling most put out when she noticed that her tire was flat. I was out gardening when she walked by, and we got talking. I invited her in for a cup of tea and then let her use the garden to mend her bicycle. We got on very well.

I told her that the best place to visit in this area is Mellor Church, but that she would find it much easier to walk there. So she left her bicycle at our house and I decided that I would walk with her, as there was plenty of time before I needed to fetch Beth from school.

Mellor Church sits close to the top of a hill, and the views on a clear day are such that you can see for perhaps forty miles all around. You certainly get a very good view over all of south-east Manchester and its adjoining towns and villages. But the path up to it is very steep, although there are footpaths and stiles the whole way, showing that the path has been regularly used for centuries. As we went along I told her a bit about  the history of the church.

It is suggested that it was formed as a place of worship in the early 14th century, just before the Black Death. There may have been a wooden church on the site earlier than that but no evidence of it has been found. The tower with its perpendicular doorway and window is fifteenth century.

We walked up Townscliffe Road, and although the shortest route would have been through the golf club, the route Rebecca used to take to school, I thought it better than we should walk from Townscliffe Farm right down to Knowle Road and then take the path from there up to the church, as we wouldn’t want to get in the way of the golfers, and also it is a bit less steep a climb.

We were able to go into the church and I showed Jo the pulpit carved from the trunk of an old oak tree, probably the oldest such one in the country, and the carved stone baptismal font which is supposed to date from late Anglo Saxon times. And in the graveyard I showed her the Saxon cross which is part of a sundial, and also the stocks, which thank heavens, are no longer used. I can say that with even more conviction when I think that adultery in the past was certainly punishable by spending time in the stocks.

We walked back through the fields behind the church, down to Mill Brow and past the Primrose Mill, where Peter worked for those six months in 1915, along the well worn trail to the golf club, and then back down our road.

While we were viewing the church, Jo asked me if I was a member. I said, “No, I am a Catholic.”

“Oh,” she said, “I wouldn’t have thought you would be one of those.”

“Whatever do you mean by that?”

“Well, they are so false in their concepts.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You know confession. Do you go to confession every week?”

“Yes, I do go, but not every week. We are supposed to go at least once a year.”

“Well, I have a friend who is a Catholic, and she goes to the Catholic Church in Bourne. Every Saturday night, she goes to Confession. She says she has a non Catholic friend who goes with her for company. And she says she makes up the sins because she has to go – and she doesn’t really have anything to say, but thinks she must say something.”

“Oh, dear. That sounds very odd to me. But most of us sin all the time. There is no need to make up sins. Just think of the occasions when one is proud or selfish or the little lies we all tell.”

“In my opinion, she has more sins than that to confess, but doesn’t want to say what she really does. She says every time her penance is to say the stations of the cross, and her friend does the six on one side and she does those on the other, and then they go off to the dance, full of grace, or so she thinks, and goes ahead and sins some more, if you take my meaning.”

“Well, I don’t know your friend, so I can’t comment on her situation. But I think that if what she tells you is true, she hasn’t understood the concept of confession at all. To be properly absolved of sin, you not only have to be genuinely sorry, but you have to promise not to do that particular sin again, to the best of your ability. So if she regularly sinned on Saturday after going to confession to confess that very sin, she would be badly mistaken in thinking that she had made a good confession. I know it is a difficult concept for people to understand. A lot of churches think that directly addressing your sorrow for sin to God is the most honest way to go. But there is something very comforting for me, knowing that if I have done something that I know is wrong, that I can experience direct forgiveness, as long as I have a proper sense of contrition. It doesn’t give me the license to commit that sin again, but it should give me the grace to avoid the temptation involved in committing that sin in the first place. The priest is taking the place of God. In the Bible Jesus tells his disciples, ‘Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them’”

“Well, I will tell my friend what you said, but somehow I don’t think she will alter her interpretation. And personally, I am quite pleased we can use the direct to God method.”

“It’s our differences that make life interesting.”

Jo and I became such good friends so quickly and I think she will be writing to me. She seems keen to keep up our fledgling acquaintance, which pleases me. She lives in Ropsey near Bourne, an area where I have never visited. She and her sister Adelaide live with their brother, who is rector of the local church which originally was under the care of their father, but he died in 1896. Their 82 year old mother lives with them. She told me quite proudly that her brother’s living is worth £370 annually, which is quite good wages.

It looks as if the Americans are going to finally come into the war. At least the President has asked Congress for a declaration of war on Germany. It might take some time, but at least it is a move in the right direction.

The Royal Family have now decided that from henceforth they will have the last name of Windsor. I wonder if they are thinking that they don’t want their German background to be quite so obvious. The name was adopted as the British Royal Family’s official name by a proclamation of King George V, replacing the historic name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The paper says, “With the Great War against Germany raging on, George took the politically astute decision to sever all familial links with his Teutonic cousins. All the German titles throughout the family were exchanged for British peerages.”

Chapter 25

May - June 1917

I have had my first letter from Jo. She writes just as she talks – all aflutter and rather skipping around. She starts by thanking me for my help when she was visiting here. She went on about how she loved this area and how her best friend, Dorothy, says that she looks ever so healthy after being here. She says, “We all had a jolly chat in the drawing room. Dorothy got reciting poetry. So enjoyed the evening.”

She obviously is quite keen on one of Dorothy’s brothers called Cyril who is a subaltern in the Royal Artillery and posted to France, as she spent much of the letter talking about him and his letters.

Another of Dorothy’s family, her sister Edie, is a nurse at a children’s hospital in Margate. She quoted a letter they had received from her about an air raid. “Besides the terrible air raid on London when about 41 were killed and 400 injured in the East End, Edie says four German aeroplanes visited Margate. No one killed or injured as far as I have heard; some houses smashed about, the water mains damaged in one place, one bomb dropped uncomfortably close to the building where there is ammunition stored. Lucky for us they didn’t quite hit it. I was doing a round with the doctor when the first explosion came but didn’t take much notice of it at first then another came and we made for the verandah to get the beds in. Guns were banging away and bombs dropping every minute and I expected one to land in the middle of us before we could get the children in. One shell from our own guns went over the hospital and landed on the cliff opposite. Then we heard firing in the distance for some time. Poor London has caught it pretty hot.”

We learned this week that three peasant children in Fatima in Portugal say that they have seen the Virgin Mary above a holm oak tree. Nobody believes the children, so we shall have to see if they see her again, and a miracle can be proven. It is very exciting to think that we are actually living in a time when the Virgin might again be seen. Our Pope, Benedict XV, has made repeated but forlorn pleas for peace, and finally he made a direct appeal to Mary to intercede for peace in the world. The church is now saying that God’s response was Mary’s first appearance at Fatima just over a week later.

Fatima is just a small village about seventy miles north of Lisbon; the three children to whom she appeared were Lucia dos Santos, aged ten, and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, brother and sister, aged eight and seven respectively.

However, I have been reading about it and the paper says it was in the spring of last year that the children say they had their first joint supernatural encounter. As they were looking after the sheep one day they saw a dazzlingly beautiful young man, seemingly made of light, who told them he was the Angel of Peace; and he invited them to pray with him. And then twice more they saw him. The children did not tell anyone about these visits of the Angel, thinking they wouldn’t be believed.

Then on the 13th of May the three children took their flocks out to pasture on the small area known as the Cova da Iria. After lunch and the rosary they suddenly saw a bright flash of something like lightning, followed quickly by another flash in the clear blue sky. They looked up to see in Lucia’s words, “A lady, clothed in white, brighter than the sun, radiating a light more clear and intense than a crystal cup filled with sparkling water, lit by burning sunlight.” The children stood there amazed, bathed in the light that surrounded the apparition, as the Lady smiled and said: “Do not be afraid, I will not harm you.” Lucia as the oldest asked her where she came from.

The Lady pointed to the sky and said: “I come from heaven.” Lucia then asked her what she wanted: “I have come to ask you to come here for six months on the 13th day of the month, at this same hour. Later I shall say who I am and what I desire. And I shall return here yet a seventh time.”

The Lady finished with a request: “Say the Rosary every day, to bring peace to the world and the end of the war.” With that she began to rise into the air, moving towards the east until she disappeared.

The children got together and tried to think of ways they could make sacrifices, as the Lady had asked, resolving to go without lunch and to pray the full rosary. Francisco and Jacinta received more support from their parents than Lucia, but the attitude of the local inhabitants was skeptical and even derisory; the children had much to suffer, just as the Lady had told them.

I would like to believe it, but it all sounds so very odd. I will have to wait until I hear more and then make up my mind. However, I looked out my rosary, and will make an attempt to say it more often. I do find it boringly repetitious however.

On May 18th the American president was given powers of conscription, and it will be started on June 5th. We do need the Americans in this war.

I had a letter back from John, commenting on my enthusiasm over the Fatima visitation. He says that he greatly distrusts any vision that talks about bright lights. Apparently, this year of 1917 is predicted as being one with many occurrences of sun spots, and that people often describe the effects of the sun spots as very bright lights which shoot out. So he said, if there are any future visits by Mary, take note of whether they coincide with unusual sun activity. I think I will ask Peter when I next write to him to get the consensus of opinion of his friends at the camp about the visitations.