“If he looks at us he’ll think we’re the boat people” said the woman with the rain running down her face from the useless plastic bag that she was trying to make into a rain hat. She was sitting on a folding chair that had been mended with a clothes hanger, up to her waist she had a sleeping bag, around her thin shoulders she had a blanket. There were still six and a half hours before the helicopter would land. She was in marvellous form.

“Haven’t we the best seats in the place,” she said, her eyes invisible behind her rain-spattered glasses. “If I were a bishop I wouldn’t be any better off.”

The handmaiden was in her mid-50s. I had met her earlier in the year on another wet Sunday, when only the people who worked in Knock really believed that the Pope was coming and everyone else was being a bit polite about it. She had a cup of tea and some sandwiches on a little tray and was taking it to a severely paralysed woman sitting near the front of the 3,000 invalids in the basilica.

She broke up the sandwiches into little pieces and fed them slowly into the woman’s mouth. “I’ll tie your scarf around your neck and you’ll look lovely for the television cameras,” she said to the woman. “Is that what they are?” said the paralysed woman slowly. “That’s very good. I thought they were lights for an operating table.”

“I won’t get lost, please let me go and get a hot-dog,” said the boy with the four flags. “I don’t mind you getting a hot-dog,” said his mother.

“I suppose we’ll get some kind of a handout about it when we get off the bus, but apparently half the angels or something appeared on the wall of something and people all go there and bow down and worship it,” said a weary-looking young journalist from an English newspaper to his photographer. “Oh,” said the photographer gloomily, “will I try to take a picture of the wall?” The journalist, who admitted he was more accustomed to shock horror love-nest stories, said he supposed the wall would be the thing to go for. At this point in the dark wet morning light Knock came into view and the thousands and thousands of patient people standing cheerfully in the rain. “I think you got it wrong, mate,” said the photographer. “It can’t have been half of heaven on a wall. It must have been something more substantial.”

The old man was getting a lot of stick from his daughter as they walked along the road. First she was annoyed that he waved at cars with his stick. Yes, all right, so he did that normally, but there was no need to do it today; he wouldn’t know anybody. Then she did not like him not having shaved, it wasn’t respectful, he never went to Mass without shaving. he said. It was 8 am. But most of all she didn’t like him wearing his cap backwards. “It looks so ignorant,” she said finally. “It’s keeping the back ofmy neck dry, girl,” he said and ploughed along to see the Pope.

The woman in the basilica held her child as gently as if she feared she might break. In fact, she might have broken, so frail did she seem. She was like a little doll with hardly any use of her limbs. She had golden hair and a doll’s face. The mother was radiant, literally giving off rays of happiness as she watched the Pope on the big screens in the basilica while he was still in Galway.

She didn’t hope for a cure or a miracle. She didn’t know if her only daughter could even tell whether anything special was happening. She only knew that at night when she used to pray for the Pope’s intentions she never knew that God would be so good as to bring the Pope himself over to Mayo to bless her and her little broken girl.