Chapter 1

This is the story of Kathleen Kilbane and the true facts concerning the last few months of her life, before she died at the early age of fourteen. It is a sad story, but the sad stories of this world are very often the best, especially if they engender in others feelings of pity and compassion for little ones who, all alone and friendless, go through long months of sickness and pain, and whose hearts crave for words of encouragement and little presents of remembrance and affection.

Kathleen was born in the industrial town of Perth in Scotland on September 8th, 1933. Her parents, Patrick Kilbane and Mary Campbell had emigrated from Achill Island, on the western coast of County Mayo.

She was barely two years old when her mother died, and her father left the little child in an orphanage conducted by nuns in Lanark.

He then emigrated to somewhere in England and took no more interest in the welfare of his child and the memory of her mother became to the child only a dim memory of the past. Hidden in the heart of the child were those long years of loneliness with nobody to care for her but the nuns, and as she herself expressed it on one occasion: “You know I could not talk to them and tell them when I was sick like I could tell my own Mammy."

However, the annual holiday time was the hardest when she saw the other children gleefully preparing to go to their homes or homes of a relative, while she had no home to which she could go except the enclosure, bounded by the four grey walls of the convent. But in this way she had no experience of the world. She did not know what sin was, and she kept her soul in its childhood purity.

Ten long years passed, and as her twelfth birthday approached it was noticed that she had been ailing for some time, so the sisters arranged to send her to her grandmother who lived in Cloughmore near Achill Sound, in the hope that the country air and the sea breezes would improve her health.

The six months that she spent at her grandmother's cottage by the sea were a pleasant memory to her—a memory which helped her afterwards through the long weary months of suffering. She never tired of dreaming of her day's playing on the strand or walking through the fields, fields which she had never seen in Scotland, or her roaming in the woods near Bleanaskill. However her health did not improve, and an x-ray examination showed that she had contracted TB, the disease from which her mother had died, and she was admitted to Creagh Sanatorium near Ballinrobe on the 12th July 1946. It was here that I got to know her so well.