The Eagle and the Rose (2 page)

For Peter's father, there is no life after death, and the tragedy of his son's passing stays, buried, deep within his heart. He rarely talks about his son, the pain is too deep, and Peter has told me that his father believes that “when you're dead, you're dead,” and nothing can ever change that fact.

Peter knows that to get his father to understand that he is still very much alive is not going to be easy. In fact, as Peter puts it, “It's going to take a hammer and chisel to get through my father's thick skull that there is such a thing as life after death.” Still, he insists he'll keep on trying.

Even as I have been writing Peter's story, I know that this wonderful and sensitive young man has been beside me, making sure that I get every detail right. Because he is the kind of young man who just refuses to admit defeat in all things, and also because for the last five minutes I haven't been able to shut him up, I am going to allow him to have the last word.

“Dad, I am here, honestly I am, and I love you, Peter xxx.”

The Beginning

W
hen Peter's grandmother came to see me I had been working as a medium for several years. For me, Peter's story was not an unusual one. I had spoken often before to others in the spirit world, had heard many sad tales, witnessed the pain and heartache of the bereaved, and had observed their struggle to deal with their loss. I had experienced many other extraordinary things as well, including out-of-body travel, trance work, and the rescue of lost souls. But wait, I am getting too far ahead of myself. How did it begin … how far back must we go as I attempt to unfold the mystery that is my gift, my oh so precious gift?

According to my mother, I have been odd since I was a small child—so much so that she was at times convinced I would end up in the local mental hospital as a patient.

Her reasons for thinking this were, I suppose, quite valid. Having five other children—two boys and three girls—who were in her eyes quite normal, I must have seemed very different, and I know that she found me difficult to understand, and perhaps even more difficult to love. She had a quick temper and a cruel tongue, and because I was so unlike the others I was often made the scapegoat.

Her marriage to my father was a miserable and unhappy one, so there were always traumas or difficulties of one sort or another, and she would often vent her anger on me.

We lived in the Midlands, in the city of Leicester, in a small council house on the wrong side of town. This is where I was born and raised, a year after the Second World War ended, and where I grew up. From my early childhood, from the very beginnings of my life, I can remember seeing faces in the night, unrecognizable and terrifying. They appeared to loom out of the darkness and hover over me in what seemed then a very menacing way. I would hear voices muttering but never quite understand what they were saying. Sometimes the faces seemed so awful, and frighteningly large, in brilliant Technicolor, that I would cry out and my mother would once again have to deal with this awkward child.

My father, a demanding and unreasonable bully with a temper made worse by my mother's constant nagging and moaning, was a professional soldier who had been in the army most of his adult life. This meant that he was away from home for most of my childhood until I was eleven years old, returning only on weekends and holidays, leaving my mother to raise six children. Not an easy task for any mother, but ours had a job working nine
A.M.
to six
P.M.
in a factory, folding and packing carbon paper. Because of my mother's income, we were the only kids in our neighborhood who went on vacation every year. Our house displayed fitted carpets and brocade curtains. Very posh.

I can still remember “bath nights”—Sundays—before modern plumbing was installed. In the corner of the kitchen was a large copper boiler and just above it the dreaded pump. The “copper,” as it was called, had to be filled with water and heated. Then my mother would stand at the pump, working the handle up and down for what seemed like hours, until the bath upstairs was filled with hot water, after which she would haul me and my sisters in one at a time.

God forbid that any of us cried if she scrubbed too hard, which she often did in her frustration, because we would then feel her hand across our bare backsides. And boy, did my mother have hard hands! Tired out, and with patience exhausted by six children, my mother would feel relieved when she had bathed us and tucked us into bed and could put her feet up for what was left of the evening.

I am certain that we could have survived quite well on my father's salary, but my mother wanted to do more than just survive. Her home and our holidays kept her going, but everything has its price, and all the comfort in the world doesn't spell happiness.

I cannot remember ever sitting on my mother's knee or being loved in any way. My childhood memories do not include those of affection and warmth, only loneliness and rejection and fear, real fear. I was a timid and nervous child, never sure, never trusting, always needing. And there was one more thing, an added worry: Was I like my grandmother?

I never met my maternal grandmother, as she passed over when I was only six weeks old, nor have I ever “seen” or “spoken” to her in my capacity as a medium. She was only in her early fifties when one day she collapsed and died, apparently without warning. Her name was Eliza, and although I have never seen a photograph of her, I am told that I look very much like her. My mother was her only child, and from tales that I have been told, Eliza must have had a difficult time bringing her up. My mother was, as a child and as an adult, a very strong-willed and determined person.

But Eliza had another problem, one that must have seemed too great to overcome. She thought she was mad.

Grandmother Eliza used to hear voices whispering in her ear and all around her. Voices of people who weren't there. Voices, but no people. These voices would speak to her—and only her, for nobody else could hear them. So persistent were they, so clear, and so afraid did Eliza become, that she signed herself voluntarily into the local psychiatric hospital—The Towers, in the middle of Leicester.

How often she had treatment for her mental state I don't know. I do know that not only was Eliza convinced that she was on occasions mentally deranged, but my mother was of the same opinion.

Now, here I was, a young girl with what? A vivid imagination? Perhaps seeing faces or hearing voices was my way of getting attention, or could it be that in addition to my grandmother's features I had inherited her madness? Even as I write this passage I can still hear my mother's voice screaming at me—whenever she was frustrated because I hadn't perhaps behaved “normally,” or when I had done something that was, to her way of thinking, “strange”—“You'll end up like your grandma … in The Towers!”

Although this was said partly as a threat to make me “behave,” I think my mother believed I would indeed end up in this notorious mental hospital. Even as I grew older and learned not to tell people about the things I saw and heard, my mother's suspicions about my state of mind remained with me. The threat of madness was there, always in the back of my mind.

It is true that things said often enough, particularly in childhood, stay with you for the rest of your life, and my mother's words, “You'll end up like your grandma,” were to haunt me for a very long time. Whenever something strange or inexplicable happened, this specter of madness would rear its head. It was only my involvement with my church and my belief in God and in Jesus Christ that helped me hold on to my sanity. There were many times in my life that those dreaded fingers of fear would clutch my heart and squeeze tight, taking my breath and making me believe that I must surely be insane.

Growing up was torture, always being afraid, never daring to tell, and, naturally shy and sensitive, I grew timid and more nervous as the years passed.

At sixteen I fell in love. My John was twenty-two, gentle, loving, and a dream come true. We were engaged to be married on my seventeenth birthday. My father disliked him intensely and had thought in the beginning that as I was so young the relationship would fizzle out. It didn't. But then one year after we were engaged my father banned John from the house and made our lives together impossible.

John had been my protector, my strength. Now I was alone and afraid again. Afraid of my “gift,” afraid of my father, afraid of life.

I was nineteen years old when I met and married my husband, a man my father approved of. He seemed stable, secure. He told me the things I needed to hear—and he seemed also to be my best means of escape. I couldn't have been more wrong.

Still I hadn't told him or anyone of my gift, not even John, whom I had loved dearly, still loved; still I had explained to no one about my visions and voices, those voices that would come to me in the night.

Less than one week after I was married, I discovered my husband had taken a girlfriend to bed just two days before the wedding. That set the scene for the next fourteen years, and although there were some happy times, I knew that I had escaped one emotional prison for another.

In my early thirties, with a ten-year-old daughter, many things in my life had changed. I had been deserted—perhaps “abandoned” is more exact—by my husband, who believed that responsibilities were all right as long as they weren't his. Responsibilities included me, our daughter, the house, financial affairs, and so on.

In all those years, I had never spoken to him of my experiences with the spirit world, or of my fears concerning my sanity. I had worked so hard and for so long to live a “normal” life, to be a “normal” human being. I just wanted to “fit in,” to be like everyone else, and had I talked to him or anyone else of my gift, which to me at that time was not a gift but a curse, I would have been admitting to them that I was not normal at all, but some kind of freak. Many times while I was married I would wake in the night, shaking and terrified and needing the light on, having had yet another scary “nightmare,” but only one time in all the years that we were together did my husband witness more than this.

I had arranged a small dinner for my husband's boss—they were in the fashion business—and a friend of mine, Susan, who made up the foursome. It was a simple affair, relaxed and easy. I had known Maxwell, my husband's employer, for some time, and this was not the first time he had been to our home. It was over coffee that he began to tell a story, unbidden by the rest of us, of how a few years earlier he had visited by chance a “spiritualist” church. He told how he had stood at the back of a small room filled with people, strangers he had never met before, and how a man at the front of the crowd had pointed him out and told Maxwell of his life and of his grandfather, and how he had revealed some of the more intimate details of Maxwell's life that no one there could possibly have known.

We listened, intrigued but skeptical of his story. Then he turned his attention to me. “Do you believe in life after death?” he asked.

Wary, but wanting without knowing it to talk, I said very carefully, “Yes, I do.”

“Do you believe that someone is watching over and protecting your three-year-old daughter?” Maxwell then asked.

Again, warily, I answered that I did, and when he asked me who I thought that this might be, I replied that it could possibly be my husband's grandfather who was taking care of my child.

With that he jumped up from the table and asked for a pack of cards. He took hold of my hand and led me into the sitting room, my husband and friend following, and told me that he could help me find out who my daughter's “guide” might be. Now I was nervous, but Maxwell was my husband's boss, a guest in my home, and I was naturally respectful toward him. I allowed him to continue with what I thought was his silly game.

He sat me do at one end of the sofa, and he sat opposite me at the other end. In one hand he held the pack of cards and in the other he held my husband's grandfather's wedding ring, which he had asked my husband for. As I watched, now quite intrigued, Maxwell cut the cards and placed the two halves of the pack facedown, side by side, and then he placed the wedding band between the cards and just in front.

“Now,” he said, glancing up at me, “I want you to concentrate hard on the ring. There will be on the top of these”—he tapped both piles of cards with his finger—“either a jack, a king, or a queen. The ring,” he continued, “will tell you which pile to choose, and if, when you have chosen, the top card is a king or a jack, you will know that it is a male spirit who watches over your daughter. If, on the other hand, I turn up a queen, well then, that will tell you that there is a female spirit, possibly a grandmother, who watches over your child. Concentrate on the ring,” he said again, “and it will show you which pile of cards to choose.”

I thought he was mad. I had never heard such rubbish. Did he really expect us to believe this, or was it a joke, an elaborate hoax, and I the unknowing “straight man”? Well, I thought, he's the boss, so just humor him. So it was with these thoughts that I looked at the ring.

Only seconds passed … and the ring moved. I blinked my eyes shut—imagination, I told myself—and opened my eyes again. Seconds passed and again the ring moved … or seemed to move, over to the left. This is ridiculous, I thought, angry with myself for getting caught up in Maxwell's drama. Then the ring moved again, and before I knew what was happening I was caught up in a drama all of my own. Something, some power, had seized hold of my body, and a huge weight seemed to be crushing down on me, pushing me down into the sofa. I was paralyzed, just couldn't move, couldn't escape this tremendous force, but my mind was screaming out in sheer terror. Slowly then, very slowly, it began … that creeping feeling I had had so many times before when, as a child and as an adult, I had lain terrified, unable to move, as some unseen force tried to pull my face away from me. I sat on the sofa, tears pouring down my face, unable to move, even to blink, trying desperately to lift my hands to my face to protect myself, screaming in my head, God help me, please someone help me!