neighbour actually was burgled, and strangely I slept through the whole thing! I often wondered if this had been a premonition of some sort.
When my husband John and I were first married I often used to see spirit people in my room at night, in the way that I had as a child. Sometimes it was one person and on other occasions there were whole crowds of people. My bedroom was fast becoming the local waiting room for spirits. The whole thing frightened me until I shared my experience with a more knowledgeable friend. ‘Ask them to go away,’ she suggested and I tried it. I was amazed that it worked and I began to get some sleep at last.
All the time I was growing up, I longed to be psychic but of course I already was – we all are, in our own individual way. When my girls were small I used to work in a local pub on a Sunday. Much of the work was boring and as I cleaned tables my mind would wander and I would often pick up very unimportant premonitions of things that might happen later in the day or sometimes in just a few minutes’ time.
One day I distinctly heard a question in my head. ‘What’s in those spray bottles you use to clean the tables with?’ In my mind I answered the question but then a few minutes later, a gentleman walked up to the bar and, passing me on the way, stopped to ask me the very same question, which I believe he’d been thinking about just a few minutes earlier, and I, in my daydreaming state, had somehow picked up his thoughts. It was just washing up liquid and water and I’d already rehearsed the answer in my head. This ‘day-dreaming’ state is the perfect opportunity for us to pick up information psychically or hear messages from our guardian angels.
One of the waitress’s jobs in this pub was to make up the complicated ice-cream desserts which we layered with fruit, sauces and cream into tall glasses. I remember one day looking longingly at a particularly delicious chocolate concoction and I clearly heard a voice in my head say, ‘There will be a spare one later today and you will be offered it.’ Right at the end of the afternoon, one of the waitresses made a mistake and created too many of the chocolate ice-creams and the manager suggested that she offer it to one of the staff. She picked me. No one knew of my thoughts and even I remember mulling over this experience and wondering what the purpose was of such a seemingly useless premonition. I enjoyed the ice-cream just the same…
The thought of the ‘useless premonitions’ came back to haunt me when some weeks later my sister-in-law telephoned us at home. She had some horrific news for us. Her husband Anthony had died at work. He’d been found dead at the bottom of the hold of the ship where he had been working for Customs and Excise, and it blew the bottom out of our world.
The world literally stood still for several moments as I digested what she had said, and passed the phone over to my stunned husband. Anthony was dead. How could this be? He was a young dad with four children. I immediately went into shock.
I had no idea what to say as denial flooded my brain. My husband immediately packed a bag and drove the two hours to Cardiff so that he could be with his sister. I remember how awful it was to stay home at the time but the girls were small and it was just impractical to travel with them. Strange memories of the year before came flooding back over the next few days…
Twelve months before I’d had some outlandish psychic predictions which came to me like pieces of a puzzle…had I had some idea that this terrible thing was going to happen? I remember feeling really shocked one day when I had a vision of jumping out of a plane with a parachute. My mind’s eye was focussed on the ground and as it got closer and closer my palms began to sweat. I felt like someone we knew was going to fall and I said so to my husband. It seemed a strange thing to say but it seemed to unlock a psychic doorway and this was just the beginning.
As the weeks went by I became more and more obsessed with the idea that someone was going to fall and die, and when one of my sisters and I spent the day together I talked to her about it too. We stood looking out of my children’s bedroom window one day and I actually said to her, ‘It’s a bigger fall than this,’ as if I were searching desperately for what I had been given. I couldn’t make any sense of what I was experiencing and of course I didn’t want to hear what I was hearing. Then when we took the children to the local swimming pool I looked over the restaurant balcony to the swimming pool below and my palms began to sweat again. ‘It’s not as high a fall as this,’ I said crazily.
I remember another day when we had recently finished decorating our smallest bedroom, and how proud I was. I commented on how my sister-in-law would love to stay in the room. But then I reasoned out loud that this was a ridiculous idea. Why would my sister-in-law come and stay without her husband…unless he died? I was totally shocked at what I had said. These were just random thoughts mulling through my head, or were they? Why would I say such an awful thing or even think it? I couldn’t even fathom such a thing and immediately wiped it from my mind.
Of course, you don’t ring someone up and tell them that you have just had the most awful thought about them, and so I pushed the idea to the back of my mind. Later, when I heard the details of the accident over the phone, all the other pieces of the puzzle came together, and I realized that I’d had what amounted to a premonition but without enough information to do anything about it.
We used to visit the family every few months or so but for some reason we had become enthralled with the idea of moving to the Cardiff area where they lived in the three weeks before Anthony died. My husband John was working in Birmingham at the time so it actually didn’t make any sense to move out of the area. Nevertheless, we visited and stayed with my sister-in-law and her husband for three weeks in a row whilst we ‘house hunted’. I remember on the third weekend, having a conversation with Anthony about the afterlife and I shared with him my knowledge of what happens when you die and go to the ‘light’. It was probably the most intimate conversation we had ever had and the last proper conversation we had together. The following week he died.
The whole crazy ‘let’s move’ idea had given us the opportunity to spend some time together before he passed and for that I will always be grateful.
I was at home alone, a few days after he passed. John of course was still in Cardiff. I was in the kitchen when I suddenly felt I was not alone. For just a few moments the energy of the room changed. I momentary saw a streak of light pass my vision. It was nothing definite but I still knew what it was.
‘Is that you?’ I asked into the air. I called his name. In an instant the energy changed back to normal and I knew I had been visited by Anthony’s spirit one last time.
I travelled down for the funeral. Another relative looked after the children and my parents drove me there. Everyone was amazingly ‘together and calm’ as they celebrated his life with joy. The house was full of people as it had been over the whole week apparently. Later, as John, my sister-in-law and I drove to the church for the funeral, the streets were lined with hundreds of Customs officers. Police were directing the traffic and had to stop cars to let us through. It was a bizarre sight. So many people had lined the streets to show their respects for this well-loved man. We knew that he would be watching down and laughing at the commotion he had caused. We laughed too. It’s amazing how human beings have the ability to laugh along with their tears.
After the Mass, we walked to the graveside. My sister-in-law stepped forward. It occurred to me that another adult should be supporting her in her grief, but as my husband was helping to carry the coffin, I understood with disbelief that this role was mine. I was the chief mourner’s first support. I became a real adult that day.
We visited most weekends for nearly a year after that. We all wanted to be together as one large family. John attended to many maintenance jobs in my sister-in-law’s house, putting up shelves and so on. We cleaned and cleared, almost as if moving the sadness out of the home. One afternoon, after a busy day of maintenance, we sat down for a coffee in the small family room at the front of the house. John had isolated the electrics only moments after the
