In London there are a number of different and completely independent bodies. The largest of these, the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain, based in Belgrave Square, offers lectures, workshops, healing and demonstrations of clairvoyance. Similar facilities are provided by the Greater World Christian Spiritualist Association, situated near the Post Office Tower. The College of Psychic Studies in Kensington, though not a Spiritualism organisation, provides sittings with mediums, healing and workshops and lectures on a wide range of subjects. In addition, the Institute of Spiritualist Mediums, to which I belong, which is based mainly in London and Essex, exists to promote a high standard of mediumship and to train mediums through lectures, workshops and residential courses.

The principal organisation for healers is the National Federation of Spiritual Healers. This is completely non-denominational; the word ‘spiritual’ in the title refers to that quality of spirituality implicit in the healing process. The training course provided by the NFSH is quite long and demanding, but at the end of it you will be well qualified and thoroughly versed in your subject. There are other organisations, such as the Spiritualists National Union, which also offer good qualifications.

This knowledge coloured my earliest recollections. I was an only child and I spent many hours by myself, playing in the room that had been given to me as a playroom. But I never felt alone. There were always unseen people with me. I couldn’t actually see them. I just knew they were there. Their presence wasn’t intrusive or frightening. I accepted it as something natural. Sometimes they spoke to me in my head.

I never questioned who these people were. I knew that they had always been there and that, in some mysterious way, they belonged to me and I to them. They were closer to me than my own family, with whom I never quite felt I fitted in. Perhaps because of this feeling of alienation, I was a very quiet child. Often I would become lost in my thoughts and would hardly speak for days on end.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with that girl,’ my mother would exclaim, exasperated.

I didn’t tell her. Even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t have explained this strange feeling. And I didn’t breathe a word about my unseen friends. I was afraid people would think there was something odd about me. At that age I had no idea what a medium was. The word was never mentioned in our house, unless it was to laugh at some dotty old woman portrayed in a television comedy or to poke fun at Aunt Flo.

Flo, who was a relative by marriage, was the only spiritualist in the family. She was generally considered a bit ‘touched’ because she still spoke to Uncle Sid, who had died years before. This didn’t strike me as at all unreasonable. She only visited us occasionally and each time I longed to ask about him but, under my mother’s disapproving eye, I didn’t dare to bring the subject up. I wished I could have sought her advice. She could have explained to me about my spirit friends and told me why I could sense them and no one else could. I could also have talked to her about the family ghosts.

There were two ghosts in the house. One was a tall, thin man, stooping slightly, dressed in an old-fashioned suit. He had a gaunt face and sad eyes. The other was an elderly lady with grey hair and a black dress that came down to the ground. How I knew what they looked like I couldn’t have explained since I couldn’t see them any more than I could see any of my other spirit friends. But I ‘saw’ inwardly, with an inner sense, which is how I see spirits today. Despite my mother’s denial – ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ she would say firmly – I think she sensed them too. My Uncle Harry, who lived with us, admitted that he sometimes felt someone in his room. We all heard the inexplicable thuds and the footsteps that creaked across the floorboards at night. Some nights there were loud noises from the dining room like someone trying to break in.

‘Don’t go down there by yourself,’ my father would say, adding, as my mother set off, poker in hand, ‘Take Harry with you.’

But when they got downstairs the noises would have ceased though the dog would be cowering in a corner and would rush upstairs, refusing to go back until it was light.

I was never afraid of the ghosts. I knew they wouldn’t hurt me and I felt sorry for them. I tried to speak to them but I could never hear any reply. But I felt a response, as if they were grateful for my concern. In some way I couldn’t define I knew the ghosts were different from the other spirit people around me. Their presence was heavier, depressing. Many years later, after I had learned that spirits sometimes become earth-bound, trapped in the places where they used to live, I sent out thoughts and prayers to them and asked my guides to take them into the light. They seemed to have done as I requested because after a while the presences faded away and I felt them no more.

When I was seven I had my first encounter with death. My mother’s mother, who was bedridden, was living with us, being taken care of by my mother. One night she was taken ill and the doctor was called out to her. I heard the comings and goings from my own room and knew that something was wrong. The next morning my mother had to break the news to me that she had died.

‘She’s gone to be with Jesus,’ my mother told me, which is what adults always tell children – and children always know that they don’t believe it themselves. But she needn’t have worried about how I would react. I knew my grandmother was there in the room with us. I could feel her smiling at me. Thereafter, my grandmother became one of those invisible presences that were so much part of my life. She brought me a feeling of comfort and happiness. I missed being able to talk to her and hearing her tell me stories but I was glad for her because I knew she was out of her pain.

Gradually, over the years, I became more and more aware of the spirits. Having kept silent for so long, one day, for some reason, I confided in a close friend at school. Her frightened reaction took me aback. She looked at me as if was mad. She must have told the other children, because I started to get some strange looks.

I was, however, very popular when one child brought in a Ouija board and several of us gathered in an empty classroom in the lunch hour to try it out. As soon as I put my finger on the glass it flew round in a most gratifying way, spelling out messages. We found that we could obtain information that was not known to whoever was operating the board. On one occasion, it told us where one of the class was going on holiday, something which she had told no one about. To our disappointment, our experiments were curtailed when the scripture teacher found out what we were doing and put a stop to it. I realise now how dangerous it can be to play with Ouija boards, which can invite mischievous or malicious entities. I had no idea then of the dangers and can only be grateful to my spirit friends for protecting me from harm.

By this time the voices in my head were becoming clearer. Until then they had never worried me but, because of my friend’s reaction, for the first time I started to think that there might be something wrong with me. I wondered whether I was hallucinating. Then the voices began to tell me things I didn’t know about. They were just trivial predictions about everyday events, but I could no longer dismiss them as imagination. I began to get worried. This was getting out of hand.

There was one place where I thought I might find help. On Saturdays I used to help out in the DIY shop my father owned. Wallpaper in those days came with a border along both edges that had to be trimmed off before it was sold. It was my job to put the rolls of paper into the machine and turn the handle. When there were no customers I used to stand at the door of the shop and gaze, fascinated, at the Spiritualist church next door, wondering what went on inside. Of course, it was closed on a Saturday and I never could get up the courage to return on a Sunday and attend a service. Even if I had, my family would no doubt have thought I was getting a bit ‘touched’, like Aunt Flo.

My only recourse was to go to the library, where I read every book on the supernatural I could find. One day a book on Spiritualism almost literally fell off the shelf into my hands. I devoured it eagerly, with a mixture of excitement and relief. This was the explanation I was looking for. Now I understood what had been happening to me over all those years. I wasn’t mad or deluded. I was one of those curious creatures the book spoke about – a medium.

I felt the need to attend a church and, the Spiritualist church being out of bounds, I took myself off to the Anglican church just down the road, to the surprise of my family, who thought that going to church for anything other than weddings or funerals was an eccentric thing to do. The church turned out to be what in Anglican terms is called a Low Church, evangelical in its persuasion, given to long sermons and earnest Bible study sessions. I didn’t feel comfortable there. All that insistence on accepting Jesus into my life and becoming a True Believer made me nervous. I was afraid that I was going to be dragged off and saved whether I liked it or not. I couldn’t have said with any certainty what I believed in, but the Low Church Anglicans’ conviction that they alone had the truth and that the Bible was the literal, inspired word of God struck a false note with me, so I abandoned them for the High Church a bit further down the road.

This was better. The atmosphere was more tolerant. The music and ritual answered some need within me. I learned to play the organ and sang in the choir. Processing down the church felt strangely familiar. Though I had not heard of reincarnation, it awoke memories of a life I had lived as a nun, centuries before. Religion was very important to me in my teens. I sincerely sought to say my prayers and believe in Jesus. I was beginning to understand that I had a mission in life, though I didn’t know what it might be.

I was confirmed into the Church of England. The bishop who performed the ceremony was Mervyn Stockwood, which pleased me as he had the reputation of being unconventional and sympathetic to mediums. But even while I dutifully took part in the services and recited the creed every week I knew deep down that this faith didn’t give me what I was looking for. It offered no satisfactory answers to my questions such as why, if God is love, there is so much evil in the world. When I asked about life after death it was clear that on this Church too, had no information. I was told that I had to have faith. And no one understood about my spirits. If I tried to talk about them I received suspicious looks and there were veiled warnings about ‘the devil and all his works’.

However, out of loyalty, I persevered with the Church for a number of years, through the rest of my school days and for some time afterwards, when I attended a secretarial college for a year. When I went out to work I even had a job for a while with the Church of England newspaper, the Church Times. On a couple of occasions, hoping that no one would see me, I sneaked off guiltily to a Spiritualist church, either the one that had fascinated me so much years before or one of the other churches in the area.

Compared to the church I was used to, they were plain and simple. There were no pews, just rows of wooden seats. Some had small altars with candles, others had just a raised platform at one end with a table and couple of chairs. The proceedings were conducted in ordinary light and there was nothing spooky about them. It was all very friendly and informal. All this seemed strange to me at first. I missed the dignity of the Anglican services and the pomp of the centuries-old ritual, though the extempore prayers were more relevant to the needs of the day. And I missed the choir. The singing was frequently painful, especially if there was no organ or piano to lead it.

Each service was presided over by a chairperson, who would begin by introducing the medium, a different person each week. The majority were women (which is why I have used the word ‘she’ when referring to mediums in this book), but there were a few men. After a hymn and a prayer there would be a reading from the Bible or some other spiritual book. The medium would then give an address, not a long sermon, often more of a chat about her own beliefs and experiences or some aspect of Spiritualist teaching. If she carried on for too long a warning glance from the chairperson and fidgeting among the congregation would signal to her that it was time to sit down. After another hymn, the medium would continue with the part of the service I had been waiting for, when she would single out members of the congregation and pass on ‘messages’ from people in spirit who were apparently around them. This, I learned, was called ‘clairvoyance’.

I discovered that the standard of this performance varied tremendously from one medium to another. Many were vague and woolly. Nearly everyone seemed to have a ‘little grey-haired old lady’ with them. ‘Could this be your grandmother, dear?’ the medium would ask. And, on being told that the recipient’s grandmother was still alive, she would say, ‘Could it be your great-grandmother?’ The ‘messages’ were similarly vague: ‘I feel you’ve had a few problems recently but don’t worry, things will be better soon.’

This was hardly encouraging. Other mediums, however, were in a different league. They spoke as though they were thoroughly in command of the situation and produced stunningly accurate descriptions and messages that obviously meant a great deal to those who received them. Though I sat hopefully in the front row I never received any particularly impressive messages, or none that sticks in my mind now.

But at least there I could talk about my spirits. Among these people it was perfectly acceptable to have such experiences. It was explained to me that mediumship often begins in childhood. Many children sense or see spirits. Some have invisible friends who may be spirit children. Usually the ability fades as the child grows up, and in time it is lost altogether. In my case, the fact that it had grown stronger over the years was apparently a sign that I had potential as a medium.

This made me quite pleased with myself and gave me a comforting feeling inside. I warmed to these kindly people and I liked what they told me about their beliefs. According to Spiritualism, everyone survives death and heaven is not reserved for Christians. There is no sleeping in the tomb and no Day of Judgement when the righteous are saved and sinners are condemned to hell. When we die we simply leave behind the physical body and pass, in the spiritual body, into the spirit world. This world has many different planes or dimensions. The plane to which people go after death is determined not by what they believed and whether or not they went to church but by the kind of life they led on earth. What counts is living a good life, showing love and compassion to others.

These simple teachings, said to be based on communications from the spirit world, made far more sense to me than the Christian Church, with its exclusive creed and its threat of hell for non-believers. I felt at home in these little churches, in a way I had not done anywhere before. I wanted to delve more deeply into the philosophy of Spiritualism and to find out more about the gift of mediumship and how it worked.

When I was twenty-one my life underwent a complete change. I got married and, with my new husband, moved from London to Blackburn in Lancashire, where he had been offered a job. As soon as we were settled, the first thing I did was to locate the nearest Spiritualist church. I found it in a dingy street just off the main shopping centre. The next Sunday evening, I set off to walk there. But when I got near I hesitated. On one side of the road was the Anglican church, with its bells ringing out from the tall spire and lights shining through its stained-glass windows. The Spiritualist church on the opposite side of the road was small and unprepossessing. I felt torn between the two. The Anglican church stood for all that was familiar to me: the dignity, the music, the ceremonies hallowed by time. I would miss all that. But the Spiritualist church spoke to my heart. It offered a new understanding, a teaching I could fully accept and the chance to explore my gift. But while I stood and thought about all this, my spirits made up my mind for me. As if my feet were being moved, I felt myself drawn towards that simple church whose doors stood open in welcome. I was about to embark on my life’s path.

But there were still many unanswered questions in my mind, so one day I made an appointment with the president of the church, a woman called Alice, and arranged to see her for a talk. We met one afternoon in the church and I gave her what must have seemed like a thorough grilling.

‘How do mediums see?’ I wanted to know. ‘Is it like seeing people on earth?’

I was told that with some mediums it is, but many others sense rather than see. To my surprise, this was just the way I perceived people. In fact, it appeared that some mediums don’t hear at all, they just ‘know’.

‘Why are the “messages” often so trivial?’ was my next question. ‘Surely, if the spirits are really there, they can find something more worthwhile to say?’

I was told that this is not always possible because of the difficulties of communication. A lot depends, too, upon the ability of the medium.

‘Why do the spirits seldom give their names?’

A name, you would think, is the most obvious means of identification. But I was told that names are hard to convey, because of the way in which mediumship works. It is more difficult to get across something abstract than to convey a general impression or an emotion. This explanation I found hard to accept at the time. Later, when I began to develop my mediumship, I realised how true it was.

‘What about seances?’ I wanted to know. ‘Do you ever hold seances at the church, sitting round the table in the dark, and, if so, can I come?’ This was greeted with laughter. It seemed that seances were out of fashion. I was informed that ‘physical’ mediums, who could produce effects such as making tables turn, were in very short supply these days.

‘Can anyone come back?’ I wanted to know.

‘Not necessarily,’ she told me, adding, to my surprise, ‘Some people in the spirit world don’t know that it is possible to communicate. Others find it impossible to get through. Some are in an unenlightened state and don’t even realise that they have “died”!’

I left feeling better informed – and aware that I had a great deal still to learn.

Shortly after that my father was taken ill. It was a long illness, during the course of which he had several stays in hospital and underwent a number of operations. I travelled down to London as often as I could. The last time I saw him he was in hospital again. I knew instinctively that he was dying even though all the family were trying to convince themselves, and him, that he would soon be home. I wanted to share with him what I was learning, to tell him that when the time came he would be met by someone he knew and would find himself in a new world, but I never had the chance to speak to him alone. Yet I think he knew this, in his own way. He wasn’t a religious man but, as people are drawing near the end of their lives, they often seem to develop some instinctive sense of the world to come. It is as if awareness of the soul grows stronger as the body grows weaker.

As I stood up to go he reached out, weak though he was, and clasped my hand. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he whispered. ‘I’m not afraid.’

A few nights later, after I had returned home, the call came from my mother to say that he had died. Of course, to me he hadn’t gone far. He was around me in my home. Now that my mediumship was strengthening I was able to talk to him and I thought I heard him answer me, though I wasn’t quite sure whether it was his voice or my imagination. When I returned to my mother’s home I could feel him there as well. I even felt him present at his funeral, though no one would believe me when I told them so.

‘You’re imagining it,’ was my mother’s reaction.

I was hurt. I thought she would have been pleased to know that he was there. But the thought just seemed to disturb her.

I went back to the church, confident that it wouldn’t be long before I heard from him, but to my disappointment this didn’t happen straightaway. There were a few ‘messages’ that could have been him but they were too vague to be convincing. One of the mediums spoke of a ‘father in spirit’ but the description didn’t fit. For the first time in my life, I felt doubts creeping in. Was he really there or was my mother right? Was I just imagining it because I wanted to believe it?

Gradually messages did start to come through, just a few sentences at a time, from mediums who did not know me and were unaware that I had suffered a bereavement. One of them described my father quite clearly, saying that he was very short (he was about my height and I am only 5 feet 1) and speaking of his sense of humour and his love of gardening. These were quite trivial facts, but to me they were important. These messages put my mind at rest, but in order to be absolutely sure I needed to receive more definite evidence, something that could only come from him. And for that I had to wait some time.

It turned out to be a bigger and more active church than any of the others I had seen. It had a long history, having been founded before the First World War. Some of the most famous figures in Spiritualism had worked there, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a leading protagonist for Spiritualism, and the celebrated medium of the Second World War period, Estelle Roberts, whose meetings in London’s Albert Hall and elsewhere were attended by thousands of people. In keeping with that tradition, the Wimbledon church still attracted well-known mediums. One of them was a middle-aged, motherly person whose name was just then becoming known to the general public: Doris Stokes.

Doris was a remarkable woman, and the first medium to become a superstar. Her books were bestsellers and she travelled the world, appearing before thousands of people. I watched her rise to fame and admired the fact that she never let success go to her head. She remained the same ordinary, kindly person she had always been, which was why people identified with her and listened to her message.

I saw, too, the heavy toll that Doris’s demanding schedule took on her health. In the last years of her life she was frequently unwell and had a number of cancer operations. But still she carried on, partly because of her determination not to fail the public, partly because of the huge publicity machine in which she had been caught up and from which she could not escape.

The stress obviously affected the quality of her mediumship. No medium works well under pressure. Towards the end of her life especially there were criticisms that the standard of Doris’s work was disappointing, and she was accused of cheating by ‘planting’ people in the audience. I never saw any evidence of dishonesty. To me she came across as a humble, sincere person who could never quite believe the adulation in which she was held by so many.

Doris did a great deal to bring to the general public an understanding of Spiritualism and to dispel some of the myths and fears that surrounded it. Since she died, in 1987, a number of other mediums have sought to emulate her, but none has made the same impact or been taken to people’s hearts in quite the same way.

‘I’m not sure if I’m going to get anything,’ she began apologetically as we sat together in the church one evening after the service.

‘Just try,’ I encouraged her.

Ann began by describing my grandmother, saying that she had been unable to walk for the last years of her life. This was true – she had been bedridden for a considerable time. She then began to sense a different personality.

‘I have the name of Alan,’ she told me.

‘That was my father’s name,’ I replied.

‘He had an accent . . . American? No,’ she corrected herself, ‘Canadian.’

This was quite correct. Although he had lived in England for most of his life he had never lost his Canadian accent.

Then she said something very significant. ‘He says that he understands now what you were trying to tell him when he was dying, and he wants you to know he wasn’t afraid.’

For a moment I was too stunned to speak. Those were the very last words my father had spoken to me. Tears filled my eyes. I should have trusted my own inner senses and trusted him. He had been aware of my need and he had answered it.

I suppose that was when I became convinced of my vocation as a medium. I wanted to bring to other people the comfort I had received. But first, I had to develop this latent ability. And to do that I had to find what is called within Spiritualism a development circle, a group where mediums are trained. I sent out a thought to my spirit friends to help me, and before too long my prayer was answered.