was about a metre long, and had probably crossed my leg within thirty seconds but those seconds felt much longer than normal seconds, as though time was suspended. Once past, the snake headed off into the undergrowth without a backward glance.
As soon as I was sure it was well out of the way, I reached into my rucksack to look for the tourist authority leaflet on snakes, and straight away I saw a picture looking exactly like the creature I had just encountered. The text underneath read: ‘The Eastern Brown Snake is the second most venomous snake in the world. They are reluctant to bite but if they do, their venom is highly toxic and can be fatal within two hours. They react to movement so if you come close to one, stay completely still and it will ignore you.’
My father’s advice to be still had possibly saved my life. My mouth was so dry and my throat so tight that it was some time before I could speak to tell my friends what had just happened. But I felt a warm comfort in the knowledge that my dad was still protecting me just as he used to in the past when I was a kid. It was a very spiritual experience.
Missing the Ferry
Sometimes it takes an intervention from more than one guardian angel before the message gets across. A woman called Marjorie told me a story about a narrow escape she and her family experienced while on holiday in March 1987.
My husband and I had taken our two children, aged eight and ten, on a camping holiday in the Netherlands. We’d toured around, stopping at different campsites, and had a lovely time exploring the countryside. On the day we were booked to catch the ferry home, we started to drive towards the port, but I heard a voice in my head saying, ‘There’s plenty of time. No need to rush.’ It sounded like my dead mother’s voice but I’d never had a psychic experience before so I didn’t think anything of it.
‘We’re very early,’ I said to my husband, ‘And there will be nothing to do at the ferry terminal.’ We were passing a town that looked very pretty. ‘Why don’t we stop here, have a look around and a bite to eat and we can get going in an hour’s time?’
He agreed that it would be daft to rush all the way there and have to sit in a concrete ferry terminal for ages, so we parked the car and strolled along the pretty streets of the town, looking in shop windows and admiring the spring flowers in the gardens. We sat down in a café and ordered some food, but the café suddenly got busy and the waiters were very slow bringing our order. My husband was glancing at his watch and beginning to feel stressed by the time we’d finished eating and paid the bill.
We left the café and walked back towards our car, but as we rounded the corner we saw a crowd of people gathered around it. What on earth had happened? As we got closer, we saw that an elderly man was lying on the road just by our car, with a badly broken leg. I could actually see the bone sticking out at an angle and it made me feel sick to look at it. He was moaning quietly as someone tucked a folded-up jacket under his head to act as a pillow. I couldn’t understand what the bystanders were saying and wasn’t sure whether he had been knocked over or had just fallen badly, but there was no way we could move our car. We would have to wait until the ambulance arrived and the man was taken away.
Within a few minutes an ambulance pulled up with lights flashing, but the ambulance staff took a long time examining the elderly man where he lay on the ground. They put an oxygen mask on him, listened to his chest and tied splints to his leg. We didn’t have mobile phones back then but my husband went into a public phone box nearby to try to ring the ferry port and tell them we were running late. He speaks a smattering of German and hoped he would be able to make them understand, but he couldn’t get through to anyone who seemed to have a clue what he was saying.
At last, the elderly man was lifted into the ambulance and we were able to jump in our car and get on our way, but by this time we had only forty minutes left to get to the port—Zeebrugge—and we were about an hour’s drive away. My husband put his foot down and did his best to get us there but as we turned the corner into the ferry terminal, we were just in time to see it chugging away.
‘It’s only just gone!’ I moaned. ‘Look—they haven’t even closed the back door yet.’
Dejected, we turned back to the ferry office where we found someone who spoke English but he explained that all the ferries for the rest of the day were fully booked and we wouldn’t be able to get another one until early the next morning. By this stage we were running very short of money but we didn’t know of any campsites in the vicinity so we drove to the outskirts of Zeebrugge where we found a reasonably cheap hotel in a back street and booked in there for our last night.
We all felt a bit flat as we tried to fill the remaining hours of our holiday. I remember hearing lots of police cars and ambulance sirens and wondered if there was some kind of drill going on. A woman was crying in the foyer of our hotel but I didn’t speak the language so couldn’t attempt to ask her what was wrong.
We had an early night and as we set off for the port the next morning I remember seeing a picture of a ferry on the front covers of some newspapers in a newsstand. Still, I thought nothing of it until we arrived at the terminal and found that it was blocked off with police cordons. We got out to ask what was going on.
‘Have you not heard?’ an official told us. ‘The Herald of Free Enterprise sank yesterday as it left the port.’
‘But we were supposed to be on it!’ I exclaimed, and I felt the blood draining from my face.
‘You and ten others missed it,’ he told me.
I was deeply shocked when I heard the whole story. One hundred and ninety-three people died on that ferry and if we had caught it, it could have been one hundred and ninety-seven. Those back doors that I’d noticed were still open as the ferry sailed off had caused it to let in water and sink not long after it left the port. I remembered my mother’s voice in my head and knew that it had been her who saved us that day. I’ve got no doubt about it at all. The suggestion that we should ‘take our time’ just came into my head, in her voice, and it saved my family from drowning in a horrible tragedy. I still feel very shaken whenever I think about it, and overwhelmed with gratitude for the help we received.
I believe that several angels were at work that day to save Marjorie’s family. There was her mother, of course, but there were also the angels who made the café they chose suddenly get busy so as to slow them down, and then the old man’s accident was caused by an angel in a way that also served a purpose in his life. Their time simply hadn’t come and they were not supposed to be on that ferry.
The Red Striped Motorbike
It’s not just mothers and fathers who can come back with warnings. Any relative you were close to can come with a message; I have even heard of great-grandparents who had never actually met the person in question bringing advice, but in those instances they tended to be a well-known family character who everyone was familiar with.
One woman I know got a message from her grandmother and was asked to pass it on to her son. Maybe he wasn’t listening and that’s why his mother had to be the go-between, but this is how it happened.
Sarah had a very disturbing dream one night. She saw a boy’s severed head rolling along the ground in a motorcycle helmet, and she saw the bike lying on its side with red stripes on the bodywork. Her grandmother’s voice came through in the dream, saying, ‘Please don’t get it. Please don’t.’
The very next afternoon her twenty-year-old son Nicolas popped in for tea, looking very pleased with himself.
‘I’ve
