The Second Blow

Alfie goes into Preschool and announces out loud (LOUDLY)  I’M NOT FINE!!A three-year old tells it like it is, and quickly moves on. 

Alfie’s father, Darren,  suffered a massive stroke on 6th December, and the family’s future became instantly and very dramatically, uncertain. 

What is there to say? Friends and family have rallied round with shock and compassion. “We are here.” 

How can we process this? 

The Bhuddists put it very well: “Don’t receive the second blow.” 

I am wounded. This shouldn’t be about me, forgive, me, my life has changed too, my daughter is broken-hearted, my son-in-law is fighting, with a degree of success ( thankfully) with  a life-changing stroke. How should I be, right now?

I am resisting  the “second blow’. Accept the new now, Refuse to be angry at “fate” . Give up the, “What if’s” Hold  on to “what is,” not try to, “fix it”, but  hold it, bear it, and let it go..

“Love bears  all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things!” Paul of Tarsus. So often, with elderly friends, suffering grief and loss during this pandemic, I have preached these words. Now I must proclaim them to myself. 

I’M NOT FINE.

But I’m here, and I’m staying. I am upheld, and I feel a foolish optimism, that is  from Elsewhere. Some of you will know. 

Thank you. Bless you. 

Darren with newborn son Frank: January 2016

Once Upon A Miracle

Keeping Active

“Mary Ellen, You come back here, you little … ! Don’t let me have to chase after you!” I was in trouble; my mother, who loved me to distraction, only called me ‘Mary Ellen’, when I was in trouble. I didn’t care. I let the wind carry her protest away, and left her to do as she pleased.

 I recall this as the first day back at home, back on my feet , after a spell in hospital. I was five years old. I didn’t know that the cerebral hemorrhage I suffered, following a fall, had nearly killed me; I didn’t know the long sleep I had enjoyed had been a coma; I didn’t know the reason I limped, was because my left side had suffered paralysis. I only knew that the sun was on my face, there was grass beneath my feet, and I could RUN!

I have slowed down considerably over the years, due, in part, to a love of flowers. It’s not possible to study plants at speed, so now I potter, meander, ramble , and dart about between clumps of greenery with a field guide and a camera. An activity that barely looks like activity, and drives all my walking companions, but one, to distraction.

 A chocolate box 1950’s childhood, which mine was, was an endless exploration of the capacity of the juvenile human body to walk, run, climb, wade, swim and swing, in and out of trouble. My mother stopped chasing after me when I was about seven. She opened the doors of our council house at the foot at Robinswood Hill, on the outskirts of the City of Gloucester, and let me go: “Look after Adrian mind! And be home for tea!” My brother Adrian, was twenty months younger than me, and like me , a pirate, an astronaut a cowboy and a smuggler.

I recall in particular, a warm day in early May in 1959. I can pinpoint the time, because late primroses and early bluebells were scenting the woods and hedgerows, and, with Queen Anne’s Lace, in a haphazard bouquet I had picked to take home. By now, Adrian and I had explored ‘The Hill’ from base to summit; a gentle ascent of just over 600 feet. We were investigating a disused reservoir that we had recently discovered. It was hidden in plain sight, next to St Katharine’s Church, Matson, and a stone’s throw from Matson Lane.

 The object of our attention had been abandoned many years ago; it was a tangle of hawthorn, bramble and nettle, so overgrown, that it was only our persistence in conquering the rusting defences, that had led to us finding the water at all. The reservoir seemed huge to us, though it was probably less than thirty feet in diameter. The temptation to sail across it was irresistible; we were, after all, pirates.

 This was the day Adrian nearly drowned. Naturally, we told our parents nothing of this. A tale we decided that he had lived NOT to tell, in case our misadventure lead to us both being permanently grounded.

 It seemed that fate was lending a hand in our aquatic enterprise. An old zinc bath lay half-in, half-out , of the water close to the ‘shore’. It wasn’t easy to free it, but, eventually, we pulled it clear. It must have been filthy, but we were too excited to notice, and probably wouldn’t have cared anyway. Adrian, as pirate chief, took to the water first, and paddled confidently to the middle of the reservoir. At the point furthest from safety, the bath began to sink.

I was nine years old, and really didn’t know how to panic. Neither did Adrian. He paddled faster and faster, out-distancing the incoming water by a few feet, sufficient distance to sink the bath in water shallow enough for him to scramble to safety. For many years afterwards, mother recalled with fondness , the afternoon when her two oldest children squelched up the garden path, a rusting zinc bath oozing mud, and smelling of the ditch, roofing their heads. Two pairs of wellington boots protruded from beneath it, propelling it unsteadily forward. The story the mucky pair told to explain the fact that Adrian was soaked from head to foot, came nowhere close to the truth.

 My turn to take to the water came eight years later, when in the Sixth Form at Ribston Hall High School For Girls. I was offered the opportunity to exchange hockey, which I loathed, for rowing, which I was willing to give a go. A short cycle ride to the canal, eight swift strokes forward, and, freedom!

 My sporting achievements at school , up to September 1968, aspired to modest. I specialised in coming third in events that the House Captain couldn't get anyone else to enter, and I was easily persuaded . In 1965, I streaked away in the 100m hurdles shattering a personal best (never having hurdled before in my life). My proudest moment, however, was achieving 3rd in heaving this huge weight down the field; an activity that, to this day, I have to work hard at remembering if it's called 'shotting the put' or 'putting the shot'. Both work for me.

 In 1967, I missed a place in the School Swimming Gala by not paying full attention during the, 'Someone's got to do it', plea and diving in to swim a length in the wrong stroke. I thought at the time, and still do, that my willingness to take part, so vaunted in British sportmanship, should have been rewarded, at the very least, by an, 'Oh, I say, well done!'. But no, I was disqualified.

 I was not always an ‘also-ran’. Indeed, records show, that in July 1969, I was in the shell that beat Stourport in the final heat of 'The Ladies' Coxed Four' at Gloucester Regatta. I was ‘bow’, that is, position number one; rowing backwards at the front of the boat.

Records LIE. Stourport Ladies beat us by a canvas. (If we were horses, that would be ‘by a nose’.) The referee was either biased or blind. One of the Gloucester Men's Eight compounded the deception when he misdirected The Citizen sports reporter. This was almost certainly deliberately, because the Gloucester ladies' captain had chosen to row for Stourport , and there was, in consequence, a general feeling of miff around the boathouse. I have a photograph mother cut from the newspaper. I am leaning on an oar clutching my ill-gotten gain, a Prinknash Potttery tankard. I cherished it for years, until the day I said, “Where’s the pot I won rowing?” and nobody knew.

 I married Ray Francis, a football fan, from choice, and have never regretted it, but I have had to fake 'sportgasms' on numerous occasions since our first date. March, 1970. We were huddled over a tinny transistor radio in Ray's lodgings in Warrington. The blessed Sunderland were playing against the mighty Liverpool. Sunderland scored, probably, as usual, in the last minute , where all this team's games are won or lost. Ray yelled with excitement and leaned over... Our first kiss!

In April 1971, the year Sunderland was demoted to the Second Division, we married. My sympathy for the demoted endures to this day.

 Some time ago, around about the turn of the Millennium, I decided it would be a good idea for Ray and I to share an interest. I quickly realised that flowers would never be his thing, and I was not going to want to spend time checking out the railways. So footie it had to be. I joined a 'Fantasy Football League' and, with some help from experts, and a little studying of form, I managed to pick a squad that sank without trace within minutes of going online.

There is a rider to this story that proves, beyond doubt, that no experience is ever wasted. I was attending a Head Teachers’ Conference in Oxford in 2001, and happened on a table at dinner with four boy heads and one other girl. The topic soon turned from education to football. To my utter amazement I found myself hogging the conversation: “Oh no! Don't talk to me about Babayaro! He's in my Fantasy League team and he's been; on the bench... , sent off … , fouled …, x number of times, in the past month alone!” With a few judicious open-ended questions, and a lot of tut-tutting, I held my own for twenty minutes! I was SO proud. And the boys! Thrilled! One offered to show me a ’ Chelsea’ programme from the previous Saturday, that he happened to have brought with him, and was sitting on his bedside table. An invitation I politely declined.

To spice up my sports-life, I decided, within a year, to ditch Fantasy Football and enter the real world. I became a highly inactive fan of Newcastle United Football Club, then just demoted to the First Division. As a ‘Teaching Head’, I shared responsibility for a Key Stage Two Class at Pauntley Primary School , ten minutes away from where I live, in Newent. My new-found passion for the beautiful game was a big hit with some of my students. Floyd , ten years old and a fellow ‘Magpies’ fan, was keen to know why I supported Newcastle: “ Because,” I smiled, “ Mr Francis supports Sunderland.” Clever boy, he got it at once.

Not For The Sceptical

I don't believe in ghosts So what the hell was going on here, I have no idea.  Many years have passed and I am still trying to process the story to make sense of it; to acknowledge, indeed,  that something beyond my understanding was afoot. 

I was young, in my mid-twenties, and living in London. My family home in Gloucester, which I visited frequently,  was the old stationmasters house in Pembroke Street near California Crossing,  opposite Gloucester Park It was a 19 century three-storey dwelling updated in the 60’s to meet the needs of a modern household. 

Shortly after taking up residence, my mother reported that  strange things were going on, which,  being sceptical about such things, I laughed off. Until it got serious. This is my mum’s story: 

“I was carrying Jan (a baby at the time) to bed, when I saw, standing on the landing,  half-way up the stairs, a young man dressed in army uniform, smiling at me. I was very startled not knowing who it could be, thinking it must be Adrian larking, about,  then, before I could say anything, the soldier said, “Know me by my cap,” which he touched,  and immediately disappeared. This made no sense to me at all. I put Jan to bed, went downstairs and discussed it with your dad. “What was he wearing?” I described the uniform. “And the cap?” Sort of triangular … 

Dad sorted through his things in the dresser and found a photo of a young soldier dressed in fatigues and wearing a “forage cap”I recognised  him at once as the man I’d seen on the stairs: it was your uncle Leonard, who died of TB contracted while fighting in Italy during the Second World War. “

That was just a beginning of the story. On my periodic visits home mum would tell me of frequent visits by “Uncle Len”  always at night, when she was asleep. So she was dreaming,  then? Apparently not. She’d be woken up and engaged in conversation. My dad recalls one occasion when he woke up too, and observed mum in a trance-like state holding what looked to him like a one-sided conversation with a person he could not see. It scared him sh*tless. 

She ( they) became increasingly uneasy. These were troubling occurrences,  and I could tell mum was being adversely affected by them. Eventually, whatever the source, she wanted them to stop. 

It’s many years since this happened and I remember at the time believing it was almost entirely in my mothers head,  and didn’t take a lot of notice, until the story took a very dark turn. ‘Uncle Len’ claimed that my cousin David would, “Gamble away all his money, then gamble away his life.” At this point,  my mother became really scared, and she asked me for help,  because I went to church. Mim did not go to church, but she had an idea that the church might be the go-to place for this sort of thing. According to the movies, anyway. 

I admitted that my experience of church,  had nothing at all to do with figures appearing on landings and revealing unwanted information,  but nevertheless,  I went to my vicar and asked for advice.  

We asked around, because the church is a repository of wisdom on this sort of thing, and it was decided that I should pray in the house, and for mother, sprinkle Holy Water here and there, and see what happened.. Consultations with psychiatrists were recommended too, which mum would have none of. 

 Fools rush in where angels fear to tread and yes, I I did it I prayed in the house, and for my mother.  I sprinkled holy water copiously, I told her to tell ‘Uncle Len’ to go away the next time it manifested itself, as it's highly unlikely it be anything to do with dad’s brother,  and to this day, 50 years later, cousin David is still alive and well. Did I have faith in what I was doing? Not at all, at the time, but my mum did, and that clinched it. End of apparitions. 

I thought that might be the end of the matter. It wasn't, although the figure in the army inform and forage cap never put in another appearance. 

The True Story of Mervyn And The Poltergeist is for another day. 

July Garden

April

Eliot's an idiot

If he thinks April stinks.

I like April.

I get to write poems 

Tapping away without a care in the world beyond

Scaring a metaphor  out of hiding 

Finding a  a rhyme

(Which is as easy as tickling a simile

Out of my stream of consciousness.)

Lending an ear to assonance and 

Holding a meter to ransom.

Oh yes!

It's Good. All good.

Easter Poems

Today is an odd day. Caught between the awful recollection of the crucifixion of Christ on Friday, and before the celebration of the resurrection, on Sunday, the  Church has little to say. Perhaps this IS the lesson: before such deep mystery, silence is the correct response. 

A few years ago, I was inspired to write two poems. The first  drawing on an ancient homily by a bishop who is now dust: Today is the day the king sleeps ... the second, a shout-out fir the joy of resurrection. 

The Christian religion, by which these poems are shaped,  is my heritage, and  my nurturing ground. Time was when I received it and believed it uncritically. No longer. Maybe it took the shock of clerical abuse to wake up to the fallen institution that the Church is, or needs to become. The horrors of pogroms and crusades, of support for imperialist expansion, the failure to oppose slavery, the inaction on climate catastrophe and political corruption - oh yes, I come to my faith deeply humbled by weaknesses that are also my own, but I stay. 

The crucufied man was a Jew, a reformer, a campaigner for justice and peace,  who hangs before me in silence, his battered body witnessing to this. Forgive me if I shock you: 

 “ Folliw me, and the bastards will do this to you, too.” 

I have to believe that the other side of the ghastly defeat of the cross is victory over everything that erected it and nailed Jesus, Yeshua,  to it.

Yes, I do. 

So, the poems:

The King Sleeps

I will mine the agony of my God with a pick and a lamp.

I will hew the stones and teach them to cry ‘Hosanna!’

I will fashion a tomb to bloom in a garden

I will fracture the face of Israel with a blow

That will become an earthquake

To  awaken the dead.

I will set my lamp beneath a splintered tree

I will close my ears against the forsaken cries of the Holy One 

I will seal my mouth against the acrid taste of blood

I will shut my eyes to hide the corpse that hangs above me. 

His eyes, not -closed.  His body, not-clothed.

‘IT IS FINISHED!’

 

It’s over.   God - 

Adored, outpoured -  passes over. 

Numbed, beyond fear, I whisper a lullaby into the dark:

‘Be still.        Be still. 

Night dawns.  

Death dies -

The King sleeps.’ 

God Awakening

I will celebrate the victory of my God in silence, and in song.

I will gaze upon the likeness 

Of the one-who-was pierced.

I will touch the mystery 

Of the dead-one-living.

I will trace his signature over my heart:

North to South

East to West:

King of Kings

Lord of Lords.

I will open my mouth to sing the serenade of the stars,

The song of the angels before the throne of God.

 I will shout into the sunrise, a canticle for my King:

‘Rejoice!   Rejoice!

The Lord is Risen -

Alleluia!’ 

I will bury myself in his joy, 

And, with laughter,

I will rise again.

Love Is Always Kind

The inspiration for this post came quite casually from an exchange with Chrissy, a fellow tweeter. Chrissy is Roma, and I reached out to her to explore the last remnant of Roma history in my family. I fear all knowledge of it will die with me, and there’s no-one left that I can share it with. So thank you, Chrissy for reaching back. 

My Roma history will be for another post, because what I’m full of today is a topic that rarely gets a mention as a serious object of study: the supernatural. 

This is not the best word to use, but is commonly understood. 

I usually wrap what I’m going to write in caveats, because, you know. I don’t want people to think I’m crazy, but today I’m going to tell it straight. 

An Awakening

I should have died before  I was four. I fell off the back of a chair several feet onto a concrete floor  and suffered a cerebral haemorrhage that  in 1954, should have killed me, but my mother prayed and a miracle happened. I woke up undamaged from a severe bleed into my brain. Even the doctors called it a miracle. My mother tells the story of how she was sitting on the toilet in the hospital and heard a matter-of-fact voice say, “Mary’s going to get better.” Convinced someone was in the bathroom with her,  she pulled up her drawers in haste, and ran. 

My father heard the voice, at the same instant and he ran too, they met in the corridor and told the same story: “I heard a voice ...” The next day, I woke up. 

“God gave you back to us.”

Those are the first words I can remember my mother saying to me. I remember them because an enormous well of gratitude arose in me, and I woke up. 

I have no other way of saying this. I became connected, I was truly alive. But I’m four years old. As far as I know, this is what happens to everyone. Maybe it does, I have no way of knowing. 

My family were working poor, my childhood idyllic. That’s blogged of elsewhere.

Growing in Love 

Moving on. I remember skipping down Matson Lane singing to Love in a language I made up in my head. I remember saying, “When I have the English to tell you how I Love you, I won’t need to do this any more.” And one day, I stopped. 

Matson Lane is the site of St Katherine’s Church. I went there often as a small child, alone, this was the 1950’s, we kids wandered unsupervised everywhere ... I went to talk to my best friend, Gary who was buried in the graveyard, He died of polio when I was five. That he never talked back, didn’t phase me in the least. 

I was twelve when the Inner Voice said of St Katherine’s, “That’s my house, and those are my people, and it’s time you joined them.” So I did, I became a choir girl and at sixteen I was Confirmed in the Church of Christ, Anglican flavour. 

(I am a mystic, not a saint. This is an important distinction, because I am not a ‘good’ person. I jokingly tell people I have broken eight of the Ten Commandments on a regular basis, and I leave the two that I’ve left untouched to your imagination.)

I can see this is going to be more of an autobiography than a blogpost, I apologise, but I’ve started, so I’ll finish. 

I never was a regular church-goer. I am now, but as a Roman Catholic: the telling that story can wait, but to say that I owe much to the Anglican Church and am grateful for everything I learned there. 

The Healing of the Demonised 

I learned, rather surprisingly you might think, to be a “ healer of the demonised” .  Let’s go there:

In 1982 I was a breastfeeding mother of a nearly two year-old daughter whom I was failing to wean. So when Michael Porter, my Vicar suggested a team of us go off to the Anglican Church in York (St Michael le Belfry) to be trained in the healing ministry of Christ,  I thought this would be the ideal opportunity to move on maternally. So, no great spiritual motivation there. 

The group met to discuss which of us would attend the various training seminars everyone else plumped for one or other of the aspects - physical/emotional/memories ... not sure I can recall what the others were. No-one volunteers for, “The Healing of The Demonised” Can’t think why ... Not touching it with a barge-pole, probably. 

In tense moments, I cave, it’s my one weakness, so because no-else would, I volunteered to go get trained to cast out demons. Incredible. In an Anglican Church in 1982, I learned how  to perform what used to be known as an exorcism. 

Let’s be honest. I only believed in demons and the casting out of them, because Christ did, though not in an experiential way. At best, I thought he was using the language of the day, dealing with that which we would have termed, “psychosis” because we know more and have moved on. I seriously did not expect to have much to do. And, full disclosure, thank Love, I haven’t! 

Now this is important. I’m writing this post to “out” myself as someone who knows there is a. whole aspect of experience we daren’t normalise because it’s too crazy. We experience a reality that defies logic, that is untouched ( other than to be derided) by science, and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. We have known good and seen evil. Some of us have connected with the dead, others have glimpsed past lives or future realities. We are conscious of “other”. 

Think. Two random people like Chrissy and myself begin a conversation and there it is. If there are two, there are more.  I want to continue the conversation with others: to be conscious  of the full range of human experiences, with an open mind, to remain curious and sceptical but also to be affirming and accepting, because many people may be helped by having people trained in the healing of the demonised standing by. The church in its widest most inclusive sense must leave the building,  because the people who need it’s supernatural ministry have already gone. 

Power Healing 

John Wimber, who founded The Vineyard Church in California made a huge splash in the 1980’s with his books  ‘Power Healing’ and “Power Evangelisation” I don’t know the history, but I guess it’s through Wimber’s testimony that he connected with David Watson, rector of St Michael Le Belfry Church in York, and through that connection, David Watson put on the course that I attended in the Spring of 1982. Boy was I educated! 

The rest of this blogpost is my lived experience resulting from what I learned back then. Like I promised, no caveats, no embellishments: I’m telling  it straight.

Jan

Imagine a very ordinary Anglican Women’s Prayer Group.  We met for prayers and intercession  every Monday Morning. We began by invoking the Holy Spirit and set to work. One day, Jan joined us, lovely lady, new to the church. Immediately after the recognition of the presence of Love, Jan fell to the floor and began to writhe and make weird noises. 

Shocked, surprised, uncertain. I turned to Viv and mouthed,””Is this what I think it is?” She nodded, and quietly, without fuss or ceremony, just as I’d been taught to do, I said, “In the name of Jesus Christ, Son of God, I command you to come out of her and never return.” 

We then prayed for the infilling of the Spirit of God from feet up, just as we’d been taught, and saw before us a woman transformed. 

Was this a spiritual healing, or a deep psychological one that replaced years of therapy? I don’t know. To Jan, I doubt it matters. 

As an Anglican, I was under the authority of the church, and straight after the meeting went to report to our vicar the unprecedented event. 

“What must I do if it ever happens again? I wanted to know. Mike thought a bit, then said he’d ask the Bishop. 

A while later, I received my answer, I was permitted to perform what John Wimber termed an, “expulsion”, within the Diocese of Chelmsford, but, “Only in an emergency.”! The wisdom of those words lives on. Only EVER in an emergency. This business is not something I’d seek out. I do believe that everyone should, though,  be prepared for such an emergency. 

Betty

I did find Betty quite hard to like, because it probably isn’t possible to like everybody. Frankly I put her behaviour down to attention-seeking. This was very wrong of me, a judgemental attitude is one of the biggest hindrances to a just society. I’m on Twitter, I know. 

Anyway, her weird tales of demonic possession became more lurid. This particular day she reported that an evil presence had held down her daughter in her bed, scaring her. Finally, I decided to tell Ron Davis, the new vicar that I was concerned, and that maybe something should be done? 

Ron gave me permission to go and “ pray in the house”. Technically this was beyond my training, I knew nothing about possessed buildings, and honestly, had I thought about them at all, a 1930’s terraced house in an outer-London suburb, would not have been on my radar. 

So to respect the suffering of a deeply disturbed woman, I went to the house, alone ( something I would never do now, we are,  ‘sent out in pairs’ ) armed with a small bottle of holy water and a wobbly sense of authority. 

Oddly enough, I am immune to psychic experiences. I don’t see visions or dream dreams, and this I see as a huge help, because I don’t suffer from them. And suffer is often a very apt word. I do, however, practise the gift of discernment of spirits. I know they’re present, and can name them, but that’s it. So imagine my amazement, when, entering the room where the child was attacked, something laughed at me. A horror-film sort of laugh, deep and theatrically dastardly. Not imagined and not human. 

My reaction? A visceral anger. “How DARE you attack these people!” I stood up on the inside and COMMANDED whatever it was,  that ten minutes before I’d doubted existed, to be gone by all that’s Holy and never return. 

Prayers of protection and blessing followed and that was it. 

  

Disaster Strikes

An honest account admits failure. 

Carol’s husband was seriously ill with depression. 

Clinical depression  is a serious physical ailment and is an all-too common experience: I have suffered it myself. it is nothing to do with spiritual oppression. I know this: spiritual oppression or possession is in my experience very rare. I don’t move in circles where the demonic is sought after,  so this is to be expected. Others may have different stories to tell. This is mine. 

So, as healers, we should not have prayed as we did, because though our motives were good. The result was terrible. 

Nothing had helped this poor man. Drugs and therapy were of no avail. He was literally bound to a chair by his illness. He could not leave it. 

So we prayed for him to be able to leave his chair. That seemed harmless enough. He got up left the house and killed himself by jumping into a canal. 

Yes, I do hold myself partly responsible. 

Family Matters

Mum

Demonic oppression is rare. Demonic possession even rarer, so I was taken off-guard when it showed up in my own family. This predates the encounter with John Wimber’s  team, and may be the beginning of the story. Perhaps I should have noticed the link beforehand. 

In the 1970’s my parents and younger brother and sister lived in a Victorian semi in Gloucester. As usual, I detected nothing sinister about the place, and I really hadn’t the language or experience to formulate these memories. I have to say, I initially thought the participants were delusional, and I remember returning from visits home with these weird tales recalling them with a degree of morbid humour. 

My father, much like me, experienced nothing. My sister was under-five and not affected either, it was my mother who was afflicted first. In her own words:

“I was carrying Janette  up to bed and there was a man in army uniform standing on the landing. He smiled and said, “You’ll know me by my hat.” Which he tipped, and then disappeared...” 

I’ve often wondered about the sheer banality of reports of most spirit encounters. “You’ll know me by my hat!” How ridiculous. I laughed. Mum then described the “hat” it was a triangular army regulation  forage cap. Dad went white. The only person he knew who wore such a cap was his brother Leonard who died of TB contracted whilst serving in the army in 1946. 

A photo was found and mum confirmed. It was Leonard. Or looked like him. 

After that first encounter “Leonard” appeared regularly,.  One night my dad observed the encounter. He woke up  to find mum sitting bolt upright in bed, in a trance-like having what appeared to be a one-sided conversation. He was “bloody terrified.! 

Mum was aware that dad was awake because Leonard told her so, adding,” He can’t see or hear me.” 

As I said, mum’s accounts of these conversations made -for me - amusing stories. It all seemed harmless enough, and to be truthful, I don’t remember most of them. Then things changed. Mum was becoming apprehensive about them, the tenor changed. When she reported that she’d been told,” David (a cousin) will gamble away all his money, then gamble away his life.”  I became frightened for her, and discussed the problem with my vicar. My parents had no connection with a church, so that put me in the frame. I prayed to break the connection, and as far as I know, it worked. I heard no more about it. But I do know that David if ever he was a gambler, did not gamble everything away, and is still alive! 

Trevor 

Not everything odd in that house was bad. We were what would be called today a ‘blended’ family. Trevor was one of my five “Pitt” cousins that came to live with us when they were orphaned. It was my 21st birthday party, going full-swing, when  Trevor shouted, “Mervyn needs help” wd rushed to the bathroom to find a very drunk Mervyn choking on his own vomit. Trevor had no idea how he knew that Merv’s life was in danger. 

Mervyn

Mervyn is a lovely man, yes he’s my brother, I’m supposed to say that, but it’s true. He is like my dad in that he is a happy man, generous and kind. He’s like my mum, in that in him too, the veil between the material and the ethereal world is thin and sometimes lifted.

He’s a man of great conviction and has always been so. We argued a lot about religion when we were young, and one Christmas, I gave him a copy of, “The Thoughts of Jesus Christ” a little yellow book to be read alongside “The Thoughts of Chairman Mao” which Mervyn was apt to quote at me at length. The millions who Mao pulled out of poverty would have one view, those persecuted under the Cultural Revolution another. I do not pass judgement. The relevance of the Yellow Book will become apparent.

Mervyn’s room was at the top of that house in Gloucester, and after one horrendous night he bolted for the guest room where Ray ( my new husband) and I stayed when “coming home”

Mervyn tells it like this:

“I was woken by fear. My face was to the wall, it was pitch black, the middle of the night. I could hear the room being turned over, and a young child’s voice asking over and over again, “Where is it, Mervyn, where have you put it?””

I asked Mervyn what the child looked like, he replied,” There was no way I was going to turn round to look” and when I asked what the child was looking for he said “That little yellow  book.”  

I asked him if it could have been a nightmare. “Only if I trashed my own room!” He remained awake, staring at the wall until daylight and he heard my father moving around below. 

We neither of us made head or tail of the incident, but when I returned home later, requiring the guest room, I took my large wooden cross ( it was the seventies, we all wore them round our necks in those days) and hung it over the light switch. 

“There’s no magic in the wood, Merv, but it’s here to remind you that prayers have been said for your protection.” Three days later, I collected it from his headboard. A decade later, Mervyn became a Christian. 

In conclusion 

Tell your own stories of the supernatural ( extra-natural?). Let them teach you. I was lucky, I woke up as a child, it’s easier then. I woke in a Christian culture with a Christian framework, so I describe a Christian experience (and one limited to a Western mindset too) but it is short-sighted and very wrong to believe Awakening is restricted to any one paradigm. Christ, after all, was not a Christian, and wherever there is Love, there is God. 

For anyone vexed by tangible evil, the simplest prayer of all, “God help me!” works.

I and every person of faith reading this blog, will be praying for your freedom. 

Called Up

Today, 30th January 2021, one year after the first person in the U.K. died of COVID-19, I received notification that a vaccine is on its way, and I should be receiving a call from my doctor within fourteen days, to go get jabbed. I can't wait. I'm fully aware of the contoversy surrounding the vaccine, and am by no means going to try to persuade anyone to do what doesn't come naturally to them, but here's why I'm getting in line with my sleeve rolled up. 

 I am seventy years old, and I remember the time before vaccines were routine. I remember the harrowing black and white photographs of children in iron lungs, and the depressing death tolls that resulted from recurrent polio epidemics. 

 My first friend was GarySalisbury, the boy next door. We were five and six years old, and were inseparable. That is until the day when my mother told me that Gary couldn't come  out to play, because he was poorly. Then he was in hospital, then he wouldn't be coming home at all, because he had died. 

I remember the last time we played together, in a stream behind the row of shops at the bottom of our road. That's where he contracted polio, and I didn't. 

 I remember the emergency vaccination  clinic set up at the Community Centre. 

I remember the sugar cube that meant my mother would never have to suffer the loss her friend Agnes had. 

 So yes, I'm not allowing myself the luxury of denial. I'm staying home until the epidemic  has subsided, as it surely will: quickly, if 70%+ of us get vaccinated before the virus mutates, or slowly if we don't.

Please don’t let a future cohort of seventy-year olds remember for the young, that COVID-19 killed a quarter of a million British people, because the lessons of their elders had been ignored. 

Death toll to date: 107,807

Newent in Three ..

Church

Snowdrops.

Lake

Telling My own Story

Happy New Year!

 Five years ago I made the only resolution I ever kept - not to make any more resolutions, because I never kept any. I did, however makes one mid -year resolution last year. In March, at the onset of the nation-wide lockdown, I resolved to blog every day, to record for posterity the trials and tribulations of survival in a plague season. 

I envisioned myself a modern Samuel Pepys, diligently scribing a diary that would be poured over by sociologists and historians hundreds of years later, as source material for an inter-galactic docudrama on The Great Pandemic of 2020. Ālmost immediately, I hit a snag. Unlike the estimable Mr Pepys, I wasn’t going into the Naval Office daily, or giving a doxy one in the alleyway. I have insufficient Parmesan to bury, and no servant to chide. I believed I had no story to tell. 

 That’s never true of course. I took up knitting, I made a banner for Church, I recorded stories for my grandchildren and uploaded them to You-Tube I shopped weekly in a face mask and I binge-watched Doc Martin on the telly. I failed to make sourdough bread. These things may indeed be of interest to my notional intergalactic screenwriter, but I have my doubts. 

So, I am listening to an uplifting Ted Talk yesterday, a dialogue between two men about the human tendency to make things up as they go along. I am a little miffed, as I believe this theory originated with me, and I’m getting no credit here. I really must listen again, because I missed much of it, having been suddenly overtaken by the principle thesis: there is no objective reality, we get by through the invention of a story that enables us to make sense in an otherwise chaotic and meaningless cosmos. 

 I am very taken with this. I can look at the tv and watch the absurdities of others and frame it as ‘their story’. Take, for example, the historic unfolding of events in Washington DC this week: the President of the USA is inciting a mob to invade the seat of his own government in what many will rightly call an insurrection. 

 My attention is caught by footage of a young man, distraught at an airport, being refused a seat on a plane as he is now on a no-fly list, branded as a terrorist, and about to confront unlooked-for and very unpleasant consequences. Already the recipient of mocking derision, this man weeps as his heroic myth of a patriot opposing a corrupt system, unravels before his eyes, in front of the world, and he, in this new story, is an extra on the set of the drama of a malignant narcissist desperately trying to cling to power. 

 Will the “hero” ever see it this way? I do not know: only he can write his own ending, and I suspect it will not be a happy one. 

 Pause to reflect on the story I am writing for myself. Unlike the anti-hero above, I am not caught up in the delusions of a despot, and I am self-aware enough to be skeptical of my hopes and dreams. 

 Stuff happens. Much of it beyond my control, it’s the raw material of a narrative I concoct for myself. Maybe I will make a resolution this year, and maybe this will frame that narrative. Or not.

 I think the reality is more like watching Doc Martin. The drama unfolds, I laugh out loud and nod to the Story-maker: This is my cup. I will drink it with gratitude, and when we write the last paragraph together, let us be satisfied.