Lucia Santos, one of the three children who saw Our Lady of Fatima, wrote down and recorded for us her memoirs and her experiences, especially those regarding the apparitions of Our Lady. Many of these memories are from her childhood before the Heavenly apparitions took place.

On one occasion, little Lucia asked her father, Antonio Santos, what food there was on their lands that was ready to eat. Antonio replied, "The fruits of the Holy Spirit are broad beans, peas, and cherries." By this, her father meant what foods would be ready to eat around Pentecost, using the phrase "fruits of the Holy Spirit" to illustrate his point.

"I kept this reply in my head," writes Lucia. At her next catechism class, the priest asked the children what the fruits of the Holy Spirit were. Insisting that she knew the answer, Lucia stood up before the whole class and confidently recited aloud - "Broad beans, peas, and cherries."

That night at supper Lucia’s mother, Maria Rosa, told Antonio about their daughter’s answer at catechism class. Antonio laughed, realizing that Lucia must have taken his play-on-words literally. "It wasn’t entirely wrong," he said gently to Maria Rosa, "as these are the gifts of the earth through the Holy Spirit."

Turning to her mother, Lucia declared, "So you see, what I said was right."

Her mother, however, was not as easily convinced, "No, you gave a list of the fruits of the earth, whereas the parish priest asked you what were the fruits of the Holy Spirit, which are different: they are charity, joy, peace, long suffering, meekness, faith, modesty, continence and chastity, patience, benignity and goodness."

"And," Lucia wrote, "she set about teaching them to me there and then, so that the next time I would be able to say what they were."