An Angel Set Me Free: And other incredible true stories of the afterlife

‘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.

‘Well, that’s not the way to do it,’ I snapped and stormed off.

A few weeks later I was in a coffee bar with some friends when the same guy walked in. Before I could say anything, one of my friends called out to him. ‘Hey Mike! Dorothy needs a lift home. You’ll take her, won’t you?’

The guy who had been supposed to take me hadn’t turned up so I reluctantly accepted a lift from Mike, but as we drove home I made sure he knew that I had another boyfriend with whom I was due to go out that evening. I introduced him to my parents and left them chatting as I got changed and rushed out for the evening with my boyfriend. Imagine my surprise when I got home in time for my ten o’clock curfew to find Mike still there, still talking to Mum and Dad, obviously getting on with them like a house on fire.

I stopped, listened to my feelings, and realised that despite the way we had first met, I liked and trusted this guy. Although at that stage in my life I had turned away from my connection with spirit, I always had strong instincts about whether people were good or not, and he definitely was. Six months later we were married, and we had our son Carl in 1963, then our daughters, Nicky in ‘64 and Tanya in ‘66.

As a young mother I was kept very busy, working as a freelance dress designer as well as running our household. I’d told Mike about my psychic abilities, but the world of spirit wasn’t something I had much time to think about. Then in 1972, my mother was taken ill with a severe cold and rushed to hospital. I drove up to visit her. She asked me to come close to her and she whispered, ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it this time.’ I couldn’t bear to hear it and said, ‘No, Mum, you’re wrong, you will make it.’ The next morning I was getting ready for work when a voice in my head told me that she was going to die the next day. It even told me the time—eleven o’clock.

In my shock, I dismissed it. ‘Go away,’ I thought. ‘I don’t want to hear this. It can’t be true.’

I had to work that day but I rang the hospital first thing and they told me Mum was absolutely fine—quite perky, in fact. And then at quarter past eleven I got the dreaded call to say that she had died very suddenly. I was filled with fierce anger. How could someone so good be taken? Having been warned in advance didn’t help at all. In fact, I was angry with the spirits who had warned me and I pushed them all away in my grief.

I should have known that Mum would come back to me in spirit. Of course she would. The following year, when we were staying with my parents-in-law, I woke up in the night with an unbearably sharp pain in my chest, finding it extremely difficult to breathe. I’d never experienced anything like it in my life and was convinced I was dying but there was Mum’s voice in my head, saying softly, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be OK.’ I was rushed to hospital where they found I’d had a pulmonary embolism—a blood clot in the lungs. The doctors told Mike it would be touch and go whether I made it through the next twenty-four hours.

Meanwhile, my daughter Nicky, who was nine by this time, woke in the night and heard my mother’s voice telling her that she wasn’t to worry, that I’d been taken ill but that all would be well. The next morning when the news was broken over breakfast that I had been rushed to hospital and was very poorly, Nicky piped up: ‘It’s all right. Nana told me she will be fine.’

Of course, I recovered, and when I heard what Nicky had said, I realised that she has the same psychic abilities that I have. She gets visitors too.

Mike and I set up our own catering business that became very successful over the next few years but still I resisted listening to the voices in my head so we made mistakes. In particular, we changed the way our company was managed, even though I knew in my heart of hearts that it wasn’t the right thing to do, and we ended up losing our business, with huge debts to pay off. We had to sell our house, all the antiques and pictures we had collected over the years, and even our youngest daughter Tanya’s horse. It was a difficult time for all the family, and one of the lowest points in my life. It took us a long time to get back on our feet financially and decide what to do next.

A few years later, still searching, we moved in with my mother-in-law in Shaldon, South Devon, where we stayed for several months in a tiny room, cramped in with all our remaining possessions.

I went out for a walk along the cliffs one day, for some reason leaving my dog behind. I was lost in thought, just putting one foot in front of the other, when suddenly I looked down and realised that my toes were protruding right over the edge of the grass. The rocks on the beach were about a hundred feet below and I was more or less suspended over thin air. I’m not the kind of person who would ever consider suicide but I remember thinking, ‘Oh well, I suppose it won’t hurt for long.’

No sooner had I thought that than I felt my elbows being gripped firmly from behind and I was lifted off the ground, through the air and put down again behind a barbed wire fence a couple of yards further back. It was almost like being Mary Poppins. I sat down hard on the grass to get my breath back. What on earth had just happened? Who or what had saved my life?

The barbed wire was there to stop people getting too close to the unstable cliff edge and I’m not sure how I had managed to get on the wrong side of it, because my clothes weren’t ripped at all. I was suddenly aware there was a hand beside me pointing across to the piece of turf I had been standing on. I then noticed that the turf was curved downwards because it was only three or four inches thick and the cliff was eroded away underneath. I should have fallen to my death.

I sat on that grass for a long time thinking about the feeling of those hands that had gripped my elbows and I realised I had been saved by two angels, one on either side. It wasn’t my time to die. There was more I was supposed to do in this life and it was up to me to find it, but to do that I would have to open my mind to the areas I had been trying to ignore for so long. I had to start listening to the messages I received from angels and understanding that most things happen for a reason. It wasn’t just by chance that I met Mike the day he nearly knocked me down—we were meant to be together. It wasn’t by chance that we lost the catering business—I was supposed to do something else with my life.

Shortly after this, I was in a doctor’s reception making an appointment when I heard the receptionist chatting to some nurses about someone who did tarot card readings. I asked who it was and was told there was a lady in Newton Abbot, not far from there.

‘Are you interested?’ a nurse asked.

I surprised myself by answering, ‘Actually, I’m a medium myself.’

I went to see the woman in Newton Abbot and she looked up as I walked in. ‘I’ve been waiting for you for five years,’ she said. ‘I knew you would come. There’s a gold star over your head.’

More and more, the angels were nudging me to work with them but I was still held back by the fear that people would think I was stupid or weird, as they had when I was a child.

‘Trust in us,’ the voices in my head were saying. ‘Have faith.’

The tarot woman told me that I was definitely going to become a professional psychic. I did a reading for her and she must have been impressed with what I told her because she began to recommend me to her friends, and it all took off without any form of advertising at all except word of mouth. It was as natural to me as breathing. Someone came in and sat opposite me, and voices would come into my head. I just had to pass on the words.

It was gratifying work, because I knew I was bringing comfort to a lot of people. When helping clients to get on with their lives after a bereavement, I could show them that the bond of love that had been there on earth was never lost. It felt like a worthwhile thing to be doing. Other people came with financial worries or business decisions to make, or emotional problems in a relationship, or fears for their children, and in all cases I tried to help them through the difficult times they faced.

One day a woman for whom I had done a reading came to me and said, ‘I would love to learn how to do what you do. Would you teach me?’

I told her I didn’t think I had anything to teach, but she thought otherwise. I had no teaching experience but when I considered it further I realised I could probably do it.

I spoke to a few other people and quickly put together a group of six students, which seemed like a good number. I had no idea what I was going to teach, so the night before I sat in my bath and talked to spirit and they gave me the whole format for the course, just like that. The next morning I stood up without any notes, trusting in spirit, and the words came out easily. I think my students were pleased with what they learned because at the end of the day, they all asked if they could come back for more. And then news of my course spread rapidly by word of mouth until I was travelling the world, teaching courses in loads of different countries to groups of ten people each time. It all happened generically without any planning. Someone would phone with an invitation and I’d agree to go and then more work would flow in as a result.