Against the Tide by Noël Browne Read Free Book Online

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their small farm or business in order to pay for medical expenses or hospital care. Consultants would agree to treat patients only so long as they had money; as soon as the money stopped, the
treatment also stopped.
    There is a tombstone in a graveyard by Newcastle Hospital, on which the names of nine young children of the same family are inscribed. Not one of the children was more than three years of age at
death. Each name is recorded — Michael, Patrick, Mary, etc. It is of interest to note that the last name on this tombstone is the father’s name; he died at the age of eighty years. It
is more than probable that this man, unwittingly, was responsible for the deaths of all his children.
    From the day on which the consultant gave his diagnosis on my father, life for the Browne family followed a pattern which was a prototype for tens of thousands of families in our class in many
countries. There was only the most rudimentary concept of what became known as welfare socialism throughout Europe. There was little or none in Ireland, where influential religious teaching
rejected the ‘creeping socialism’ of state intervention in time of family need. I recall a curate in Newtownmountkennedy informing his flock from the pulpit on one occasion, when he had
thundered ‘communism’ because of the local people’s attempt to feed the school children a hot mid-day meal in winter: ‘They can come to my back door and ask for it, if they
need it’.
    At times of impending disaster, young people appear to be preserved from understanding and appreciating the facts of what lies ahead for them. I continued to go to school and to deliver milk on
my wonderful donkey-drawn equipage. My father had to stop work. Later still he was no longer seen around the house and was compelled to stay in bed. He was visited once by a doctor, and by a
Franciscan priest on a number of occasions. Our aunt Bridie, a nurse, appeared more frequently at the house, and I began to notice a sad subdued mood within the family. I still had no idea that my
father was dying.
    Late one summer evening, in August, 1925, I was called to his bedroom. There was a crowd of people whom I did not know outside the room and around his bed. Though a son of the house I was unable
to get to him, being crushed on the landing outside, too timid or unwilling to push my way in. There was an air of great solemnity among the grownups who, in the dark of my father’s room,
murmured prayers in the awful rhythmic singsong ritual for those about to die. Someone had made him hold a lighted candle, and called for prayers for his soul and his happy death.
    My father raised himself and, in a falsely strong voice, claimed ‘Joe Browne is not going to die’; then he sank back. Sometime during that night he must have died. It was possible
that I was sent off to bed and had gone to sleep. I recited the Hail Marys with the others, not knowing why; I had not been conscious that he was dying or about to die. I did not know or understand
about death. Later, in a dark corner in our big outhouse, I studied the oblong yellow pine coffin lid with its brass plate bearing the words, in black print, ‘Joseph Browne, aged fifty-four,
R.I.P.’ The inexorable breaking up of the family had begun.
    I sought to avoid walking behind the black horse-drawn hearse on its way to St. Mary’s Church, although Jody did. I have no idea why I felt this reluctance. Possibly I wished to deny his
death or to recall him from the dead. He was buried the next day, as he had requested, in his family plot in Craughwell, Co. Galway. This was the first occasion on which I had met his brothers and
sisters; I stayed with them for about a week and then returned home to Athlone.
    The families of my parents had disapproved of their marriage and each of them had given up their own in order to be together and live out what came to be a tragically short life of mixed
happiness and tragedy with each other. There was