An Angel By My Side: Amazing True Stories of the Afterlife

‘She’s showing me a ring.’

‘Um, maybe,’ Debbie added.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think I understand.’

Mum’s friend Pat had given my mother a brooch and a gold ring set with a large crystal stone about two years before she died. It seemed a strange thing to do because Pat was several years younger than my mother and I remember thinking at the time that it was more usual to hand down jewellery rather than hand it up. But Pat had sons rather than daughters of her own. Maybe she thought that the pieces might go to her friend’s daughters after she passed? I’d hoped so, as she was like an aunt to us, and it would be natural for Mum to pass us the jewellery at some future date.

The stone in the ring looked like a large solitaire diamond and we jokingly called it the ‘Elizabeth Taylor’ ring. It was a ring I had coveted a lot and I occasionally borrowed it. I secretly wondered if this was the ring she meant, but I was wary of giving anything away so said nothing. My Mum promised to leave it to me in her will, but I teased her that I would get a real diamond instead.

‘Hang on, I’m getting a name now. Pat?’

Debbie and I both slumped back on the sofa in relief. It was Pat! How exciting that she’d given us a great description but then the name too. I was impressed, it wasn’t as if she’d given us a whole list of names … just the one. The medium smiled and we stopped and had a mouthful of tea before she carried on.

I looked around the room. It was fairly dark and dusty in Sandra’s spare room. I knew the medium had been unwell for a long time and when I looked at her now she looked frail. A twinge of guilt hit me in the stomach. Sandra had put off our appointment twice due to ill health and I remembered how anxious I’d felt for our visit, feeling a little cross inside about the inconvenience of the delay. She had a long waiting list and each cancellation meant another wait of several months.

Now as I looked around the room I wanted to search out a duster and rush around the room with it, to help her in some way. But I knew if I’d have even mentioned such a thing I would have totally offended her. The poor woman. Of course she would be offended. What did the dust matter anyway, she wasn’t bothered by it so why should I be? Random thoughts flickered through my mind as I heard gentle chatter in the background. For a moment I just totally zoned out. She was talking to my sister Debbie.

Unusual objects seemed to have been left in the room. A sweater was folded over the back of a chair and a strange newspaper cutting was propped up on the mantelpiece of what would have once been a fireplace. Also on the mantelpiece was a pair of mismatched glasses: one was a wine glass and the other a short tumbler. They seemed out of place. Had someone had a drink and left the glasses in the room? Both had been decorated with glass paints in bright reds and orange. The room was a little untidy and I guess I had wanted mystical chic.

You don’t comment on other people’s things unless you are going to say something nice and I couldn’t think of anything to say which would have made any sense. I realized I had been staring and someone was talking to me. I turned back to face the medium and I smiled as she handed me a pack of tarot cards.

‘Shuffle the cards, dear, and place eight of them on the table. No make it ten, no fifteen.’

Debbie and I looked at each other. We were excited and bemused.

‘Yes that’s it, place them face down on the table. Ok now turn up the first two or three.’

She began talking again and I blurred in and out. Debbie was furiously scribbling notes for me whilst the medium gave me a reading from the tarot cards. I felt that the reader was using the cards more for my benefit than her own. As I turned over each card at her request I noticed she didn’t even look at them.

‘I see you writing,’ she said. I nodded. ‘Writing a book. In fact, although it’s going to be slow at first, eventually you’re going to have more work than you can handle. You’re going to write a lot.’

I grinned and looked at Debbie who was trying to note it all down as fast as she could. Sandra asked me to place another ten cards face down on the table and turn over half of them. Again she didn’t look at the cards.

‘I do write, actually. I’ve just started.’ I muttered.

‘Good, good. Yes I can see you on TV.’

‘TV? Really? Not radio?’

In my mind I’d thought that one day I’d like to go on radio and chat about my new research into angels and the afterlife, but I’d never thought I would go on television.

‘Yes, radio too but TV, lots of TV. You’re going to be well known.’

‘I am? Cool!’

I was thrilled. Was I giving something away in my body language? But why was I pleased about going on television. Am I shallow? Did it matter?

‘You’ll have published your first book within eighteen months, they’re telling me. Then there’ll be others … lots more.’

As it happened, that book took a little longer, about two years actually, before it finally hit the shops, but whether the event was pre-ordained or I’d been encouraged to succeed by the message I’ll never know.

I was desperate to know more but she asked me to pick up the cards and pass them to my sister. It was her turn now and I scribbled furiously until her turn ended, way too soon. I could see how people became addicted to this stuff! Perhaps it’s the ego hearing what it wants, taking what it wants from the message. But she’d already started talking again.

‘I have another lady here, on your mother’s side,’ she began. ‘She’s with someone, her husband I think, and they are showing me a horse and cart. He’s making deliveries door to door.’

We both nodded again. Could this be granddad? He used to be a milkman.

‘Now I’m seeing a bakery. It’s connected to the lady. She’s making cakes and things.’

We weren’t sure but later Mum reminded us that our Nan worked for years in a bakery called ‘The Home Made’. How could we have forgotten this piece of family history?

‘You don’t know? That’s okay. Write it down, she says, and ask your Mum later. She’ll tell you. The lady is showing herself surrounded by children, loads of them, and she’s wearing a uniform.’ She continued.

This was brilliant stuff. How could she have known? Our nan had worked in an orphanage for years and years. There were pictures at our parents’ house of Nan in her uniform with her starched white apron, surrounded by forty or fifty children!

There were other relatives who came with messages that night. Brief appearances were made by friends and relatives from both sides of the family. I remember looking at my watch again. We had already been at her home for two hours and I wondered if it was time to go. Was she going to ask us to leave now?

‘Do you want to have a go on the table?’ she asked.

Debbie shrugged and smiled.

She beckoned us to stand up and behind her armchair was a low glass table. Stuck on the table were the letters of the alphabet spread out in a big sweep all around the edge. The table was set up to look like a ouija board, or a ‘talking board’. She reached over and picked up one of the glasses from the mantel and I suddenly realized what the painted glasses were for! They hadn’t just been left in the room. When I looked closer they were quite pretty. Maybe someone had made them for her as a gift? The glasses were to be our pointers, to move around the table to spell out words – messages from the other side?

Momentarily, I was nervous. Weren’t these things dangerous? I had a flashback, memories of one day as a teenager. Sitting in my parents’ old house, my sisters and a couple of friends and I had laid out our own felt-tip letters in a variation of what kids all over the world call ‘ask the glass’. We taped the letters onto the back of an old drinks tray and ceremoniously selected one of the best sherry glasses out of the cabinet before placing our fingers on the glass to ask our first question.

As someone called out, ‘Is anybody there?’ the glass began to move at once and we all ran in different directions.

‘Did you push that?’

‘No! Of course not, you know I wouldn’t do that. Swear it wasn’t you! Go on, swear.’

‘I didn’t move it, it wasn’t me. Oh my God, oh my God, do you think it was a spirit?’

‘It wasn’t me, really it wasn’t. Swear it wasn’t you!’

Someone was crying. We were all so scared that we never really got started. I remember someone suggesting that we burned the letters so that the spirits wouldn’t get us. I think we probably flushed them down the toilet or something but that was the first and the last time I had done anything like that … until now.

The medium was explaining what to do and had already muttered some words of protection before placing her finger on the glass and indicating that we do the same. The four of us sat around the table and the medium began to ask questions.

What on earth were we doing? I felt like a naughty schoolgirl but of course we were not naughty – we were adults and we were doing this on purpose. I tried to calm myself down; after all, ‘the medium is in charge and she must know what she is doing’, I rationalized!

The glass spun over to the letter ‘V’and then the letter ‘I’. What was that? I felt disappointed. The medium began chatting in a very normal tone as if a neighbour had popped in to say hello.

‘Is that you, Vi?’

The glass moved over to the word ‘yes’.

I felt annoyed again. ‘We are paying for this and she is chatting to her friends’, I thought crossly, but unreasonably. I felt like a real cow. A spirit friend had crossed the dimensions to communicate and I was quibbling about who it was. Maybe this Vi would be able to hear my thoughts? She would know what I was thinking, she would know that I was a cow.