CHAPTER 1 Angels and Me

      It is not your aptitude but your attitude that determines your altitude.

       Zig Ziglar

      Like most children I was frightened of ghosts. I have an early memory of running across our landing screaming. I was six years old and we were living in a 100-year-old three-storey house in Birmingham. It was dark and I’d stepped out of bed to visit the bathroom, just a short sprint across the squeaky floor and out of the door to the left. As I walked through the open door, though, a strange white shape drifted in front of me and seemed to float in front of my eyes for a moment before disappearing at the other end of the landing.

      For the briefest moment I wondered if my sister Debbie was playing a trick on me, but she was only six and was snoring loudly in the room behind me, along with my youngest sister Madeline. And the shape hadn’t had any feet and had been floating a foot off the ground. No, I guess she hadn’t learned to levitate just yet! So what was it?

      Terrified, I ran back into my room. Actually, this wasn’t my usual room. I had my own bedroom, but once a year I was chucked out of it so an elderly aunt could come and stay. When she arrived, I was despatched to the ‘big bedroom’ that my two sisters shared. This old house had large rooms compared to modern homes and the three of us fitted easily into the space.

      The aunt, Aunty Edie, was tiny. I remember she used to repeat everything she said at least twice and follow me and my sisters around, walking so closely behind us that when we turned round quickly she would bump into us. We found her slightly scary. It wasn’t her fault, you understand. When you’re aged four, six and seven, a woman in her late seventies is ancient! Aunty seemed so old to me then that I worried she might die in my bed. Would she come back and haunt me? Perhaps my floating vision was the result of my sleepless nights of worry rather than an actual ghost? I’ve never been too sure.

      The house we were in at the time was no ordinary house. It had a lot of character to it, and that character included lots of scary bits. The walls held memories—some good and some bad—and anyone a little sensitive would find it easy to pick up on the energies of that spooky old property. I’ve always had a healthy respect for the supernatural and I’m sure growing up in such an eerie house sparked my interest from an early age, though I do look back on it with affection.

      In many ways it was a fascinating place to live in. It had two large cellars and a wine store beneath the ground floor. The basement area was always freezing cold and we girls were never allowed down there on our own. The stone steps and hard concrete flooring made these rooms a great danger to small children. They were always kept locked with a large old-fashioned key that my mother used to hide. My sisters and I used to make up horrible stories to scare each other and other children, and if someone left the key in the door we would sometimes lock one another in, which always resulted in much frightened screaming as well as hysterical laughter. Kids can be horrible to each other, can’t they?

      The breakfast room had a collection of original servant bells hanging high upon the walls. Originally, Mum explained, they were wired up all over the house and the wealthy owners of yesteryear could summon their household servants from any room in the house.

      The kitchen was more of an old-fashioned scullery. Stone steps led down to an old conservatory, which was always full of spindly geraniums, tomatoes and a great many spiders. My mum hated spiders and for many years we were all terrified of them too.

      I remember we once found a locked tin in the conservatory cupboard that had been left by the previous owners. It remained locked for many years until, bored one day, we persuaded our kindly father to break into it. For years that tin had been full of imaginary treasures, but the reality was a little less exciting: tennis balls, golf balls and other balls of all shapes and sizes. This was hardly the treasure we had hoped for, but it kept three bored little girls quiet for a few hours at least.

      I remember one day getting into a lot of trouble. One of my sisters and I had climbed onto the conservatory roof using the tree at the end to reach up. The thin panes of ancient glass could have shattered at any moment, but that thought never entered our minds as we crawled along the precarious glass until our mother spotted us and gave us a well-deserved telling-off.

      We also used to slide all the way down the beautiful curved banister rails that ran right from the top of the three-storey house down to the bottom. We never had any thought of falling. How my poor mother managed to keep her sanity I shall never know.

      The gardens of all the houses in the area were very long and narrow. Mum grew a lot of plants in ours and it made a wonderful place for imaginative games. We used to pick the flowers and eat the blackberries that grew along the lane that joined all the gardens together at the end. One day we discovered that maggots were living inside the blackberries and were all very sick—probably more from the shock of seeing the maggots than from eating them!

      At the end of this lane there lived a little girl and her younger brother. As the oldest child in our family, I was allowed to visit her and play. Then one day I wasn’t allowed to go anymore and Mum explained that the little girl’s brother had died and the family was too sad to have visitors. It was a natural death; the little boy had had a hole in his heart. I’d never known a young person who’d died before and this was the first time I’d considered my own mortality. At the time I was already suffering from horrendous nightmares and I’m sure this experience didn’t help.

      Later on, while we were still living in this house, my dad suffered a horrific car crash. I remember waking up to the sound of the doorbell and creeping to the top of the stairs to see what was going on. Two police officers were at the door and I could hear them telling my young mother that her husband was in a serious condition.

      Dad survived that crash, but nearly lost his life many more times over the following years, and my fears of dying were much exaggerated by these experiences in my young life. I was so terrified that my father might die that I dared not love him too much just in case. But of course you can’t stop loving someone! I wish I had realized then that he would actually live through the car accidents, perforated ulcer, stroke, brain tumour, coma and many other things that happened to him through the years. These experiences were all very difficult, but perhaps they were part of his chosen life path? They certainly taught us, and Dad himself, many lessons about love. I remember saying to him one day, ‘Thanks for teaching us about unconditional love, Dad.’ ‘That’s OK, my darling,’ he said, as if on some level he too understood.

      Dad eventually changed his job and we moved to a modern family home in a new area. Not that it was safe, especially the way we three young girls carried on. One of my sisters would hang upside down from the top bar of the swing set and we would all climb trees. I even remember following my mother across a very busy main road as she rushed over to the corner shop on one day. Boy, was she mad at that! But children seem to manage to scrape themselves out of serious situations every single day. And perhaps our guardian angels were working hard even then?

      Since that time many unexplainable things have happened in my life. Many of my family had these experiences, too, but I don’t think we are special in any way and I’ve since discovered that lots of families have their paranormal ‘secrets’! It’s funny, some families talk about their paranormal experiences and other families keep them quiet, but if you open up the topic of conversation with a group of people, you soon discover that all families have ‘unexplainable’ experiences or people who have ‘dabbled’ with alternative healing or paranormal ideas of one sort or another. I have the most fascinating conversations about this with people at my local gym. It’s amazing what you can talk about to strangers when sitting in a hot tub!

      Some of our family stories have been passed down through the generations. They include premonitions, out-of-body experiences, lifesaving dreams, alternative and spiritual healing, ‘invisible