one day, I pointed to a woman on the other side.
‘That lady is going to die soon,’ I said.
‘Goodness!’ Mum exclaimed. ‘What makes you say that?’ I was only three or four, so a bit young to know about death.
I frowned. ‘I just know.’
Sure enough, the lady did pass away shortly afterwards and I heard the adults saying she had died of duck egg poisoning. It made me too scared to eat duck eggs, and to this day I always avoid them!
I started in the local Catholic school at the age of five, and we had an assembly in the church every morning. A kind man in a rough-textured brown suit used to sit next to me and explain what the Latin sermon was about and I listened, fascinated by the beauty of it all. He never told me his name but in my child’s brain I assumed that he was God, and that’s how I came to think of him. Woe betide me, though, when I mentioned to one of the nuns that ‘God’ had been speaking to me. I soon learned not to refer to my brown-suited friend any more because they were very liberal in their use of the strap at that school, particularly for what they thought of as blasphemy.
Sometimes the man in the brown suit took me out of school to a nearby park. I loved riding on the big wooden roundabout but was too little to climb up myself, so he lifted me up to stand on the platform and span it around. We had to cross several busy roads to get there but I never came to any harm. One day I stopped in front of the sweet shop window to peer in at all the tempting goodies on display. Suddenly I realised I couldn’t see the reflection of my friend, although I could see myself clearly.
‘That’s right,’ he said, reading my mind. ‘Not everyone can see me.’
Gradually I learned not to mention him to anyone at school because I got teased so much. ‘She’s the one who talks to God,’ the other girls would mock. They wouldn’t let me join in their games in the playground because I was thought of as a kind of oddball, an outsider.
I still hadn’t learned to censor myself and sometimes I passed on things I had been told by an angel. One day a girl called Carol was crying. I was always drawn to anyone who was sad, so I went over to her. I knew her father had been injured in the war and that there was something wrong with his lungs, and I also knew that he wasn’t going to live much longer.
‘Everyone says he will be all right,’ Carol sniffed through her tears.
‘No, he won’t,’ I told her matter-of-factly.
She gasped. ‘You’re being horrible!’
‘But he’ll be all right once he dies,’ I said, ‘because he will be an angel and he’ll be with you all the time then.’
She asked me about angels—what they look like and how you talk to them and seemed reassured by my answers, that you can’t always see them but that they talk to you in your head. I told her to tell her daddy that she loved him because I could sense she was a little scared of him and had never actually said those words before, and she promised she would.
Not long afterwards, Carol’s father passed away and she and I became very close friends for the rest of our time at that school. But I was beginning to realise that it is better not to tell people bad news most of the time. You can help a lot more by passing on nice messages rather than negative ones.
When I was young, Mum and Dad seemed quite accepting when I told them I talked to God and saw angels. ‘You’re a very lucky girl,’ Dad said once. But I think the whole family was disturbed when I started passing on messages from my Uncle Charlie, who committed suicide by sticking his head in the gas oven when I was ten. (He wasn’t a proper uncle, but a family friend we knew by that name.)
When Charlie first appeared to me, his tongue was sticking out and his face was contorted just as it must have been in the moment of death, but I wasn’t scared for one moment. It felt totally normal. Charlie told me that he had killed himself because he’d found out that his new wife was leaving him for someone else and he just couldn’t face life without her, but he wanted the rest of the family to know that he was fine now. He came back with love rather than hatred or resentment. He was a gentle man, a caring soul.
We often went for Sunday lunch at the home of Charlie’s mother, who we called Granny Watts, and Charlie would give me messages to pass on while we were sitting over our roast. I think it made the grownups round the table very uncomfortable.
Things really flared up, though, after a nun at school accused me of cheating. I had written something that my brown-suited friend ‘God’ told me was the correct answer to a question. After the nun read it, she charged over and hit me across the head.
‘Where have you copied this from?’ she demanded. ‘These words are too adult, these are not your words.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘they’re God’s words.’
The nun looked down at me with her podgy face close to mine. ‘Read my lips,’ she snarled. ‘You cannot hear God. It is not possible.’
I got a good hiding that day, and it was reported to my parents that I was cheating at my schoolwork and disrupting the class with my cheeky answers when challenged. Next thing I knew I was being marched off for an appointment with a psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist was an austere man with dark hair and glasses, who kept firing questions at me and scribbling notes on his pad. I looked down and there, in front of his desk, was a little blond boy who told me his name was Peter. He was a very pretty-looking child and seemed to have a glow about him. He told me the psychiatrist was his father. He had died of leukaemia the previous year and mentioned that his dad had put a little teddy in his coffin. ‘Tell my daddy I’m here,’ he said, so I did.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ the psychiatrist snapped, so I described what Peter looked like and all the details he had told me about his death, including the teddy bear. The psychiatrist was very taken aback but asked me some questions to pass on to Peter and soon I was passing information between them quite naturally.
Finally, the doctor said to my parents:’There’s nothing wrong with this girl. She’s got ESP.’
I had no idea what he meant and asked if it was catching, which made the adults laugh.
‘You’ve got a special gift,’ the psychiatrist told me. ‘You can talk to people who are dead. But you mustn’t tell anyone because other people don’t have it.’
I was only ten at this time, but as I entered my teens I realised his advice was good. If anybody found out I could talk to spirits, they would nag me the whole time, wanting me to contact their dead grandmothers or beloved pets or whatever. I just wanted to be a normal teenager, accepted for who I was and not labelled as ‘weird’ or ‘different’. I was interested in fashion and boys—although being at a girls-only school I had little access to the opposite sex.
When I left school, I went to college to study fashion design and started making my own clothes. It was the early 1960s, and fashion college was an exciting place to be. One day I was crossing the road, wearing a white swing coat with two big black buttons that I had designed myself, when a car drove up and bumped into me, nudging my leg.
I leapt back and yelled, ‘You idiot! What are you trying to do?’ I recognised the driver as a young man I had seen in a jazz club but had never been introduced to.
‘I’m trying to get to know you,’ he said, grinning.
