It was the year we had deep snow in Essex It all started off with spiritualism.  I wasn’t interested in it at all and only liked to read Science Fiction, and I only started reading that when I was 16.  I liked Colin Wilson,, in the late 80s.  We were snowed in on Canvey Island.  I was working in Petticoat Lane. 

I was driving along and I heard on the radio there would be a meeting at the Women’s Institute on Canvey Island so I thought I would pop along.  I hadn’t spoken to my ex-wife before about spiritualism even though we lived in a very haunted house at the time, but that’s another story. But actually, thinking about it, living in a haunted house did make me think about things.  Anyway,

I went home and asked her if she wanted to go and she said yes.  What I didn’t realise is that at the time she had already been having séances with an old lady called Lilly Fryer who was a local healer, or what might have been called a ‘cunning woman’ in the old days.  She later went on to teach me her style of healing.Anyway, we went along to the spiritualist church.  Well, it wasn’t really a church as such, it was a Women’s Institute where they held tap dancing, scout meetings and so on.  More of a village hall, nothing religious, although they did say the Lord’s Prayer at times. 

The medium came up straight to me and said, “you’re a healer.” I didn’t know what the hell he was on about, so I said, “no, I’m not.”The medium said “yes you are, I can feel it from here,” along with a load of other stuff.  I went again the following week and the medium gets up – a different medium.  I went from there to a series of spiritualist churches, and every one I went to, I got the same thing, “you’re a healer, you’re a healer.” Finally, one evening I went to a place called Blue Waters that’s run by a guy called Barry and his wife, Betty.  They were a Jewish couple, but very into spiritualism.  So they wore the Star of David and then under the lapel they had the little healing cross, as quite a lot of Jewish people do, so you get the best of both worlds! As I went in there, I bumped into another guy who I had known since I was five years old but I had seen him over the years and had lost contact, but this guy was the last guy in the world you would expect to see in a place like that. 

He was a bit of a scrapper to say the least, and I was quite taken aback – but that’s another story with David. Anyway, the meeting went on and some guy dressed as a Catholic priest came in and did this ritual thing and some of the mediums left because they thought it was beyond the pale.  I didn’t leave because I didn’t know what the hell was going on anyway!  It turned out he wasn’t an actual Catholic priest, he was just some guy that liked dressing up but it entertained people.  I went back a little while later during the day – Barry DeRose actually asked me to go back.  I walked through the door and he said ‘ah, hello, you’re a healer, aren’t you?”  “No,” I said, starting to get a little fed up with hearing the same thing from everyone.  Within a minute, a little old lady was literally being carried in by her two daughters.  There was nothing of her, she was just skin and bone and she was obviously in a lot of pain. 

I realise now she was probably dying of cancer.  They laid her on the raised bed.“Come on, give us a hand!” Barry said.  So, feeling a bit awkward, I put my hands on this woman and the tears just started pouring from my eyes.  But I wasn’t crying because I was emotional.  The tears were flooding down my face.  Barry looked at me with a smile. “You’re a bit of an old softie, aren’t you?” he said.  But what he didn’t realise was it wasn’t me crying.  Something was crying through me.  It was a very weird experience.  I didn’t feel emotional, it’s difficult to explain.  I felt a series of energies, if you like.  The tears felt as if they were just pouring out.  I can’t remember much of what happened after that.The next time I went to a place to The Healing Hands Church.  That evening, the people that were running the place, a woman called Sheila Spooner and her husband, Dave, said to me, “why don’t you stay and watch the healing?”  So I thought, okay, I’ll stay and watch.  I asked my ex-wife if she minded me staying and watching and she said she didn’t mind.  What the Church used to do was have a hall with a stage and curtains around it. 

The people who required healing would sit on one side of the curtain and on the other side would be the healers.   They would have a chair with a male and a female healer and they would do the ‘laying on of hands’, with one healer at the front and one healer at the back.  I was sitting there watching this thinking that the atmosphere changed when the healers started, and it was a good feeling.  You could really sense that they were doing something, they weren’t messing around.  As I watched, my forehead began to pound and then the feeling moved down to each of the charkas in turn.  It felt as though I were being hit from inside with hammers and the next thing I know, I’m laying on the floor next to the seat I’d been sitting on.  I felt as if I were being thrown around all over the place. 

The healers came over and grabbed me and took me over to the back of the hall out of the way of the healing.  I didn’t know what was happening, I felt as if I’d had a real beating.  If I’d been in a cartoon, there would have been two little dickey birds flying around my head.Sheila came over to see if I was alright. “You’d better come back to my place for a cup of tea.” How very British, I thought, with a smile.  We went to her house and sat down in the kitchen.“What do you think happened back there?” she asked as we sat drinking steaming mugs of tea.“I haven’t got a clue,” I replied.  “I felt as if I were getting absolutely smashed from inside and to be honest I think I passed out and I don’t know what happened.”  And from there on we entered the spiritualist belief system. 

That’s not to say that further down the road, I believe it, but it doesn’t matter because you need to have signposts and roads in order to get anywhere.  That doesn’t mean to say that when you get there it’s going to be quite the destination you thought it was going to be.“How would you feel,” Sheila asked, “if you were to be a healing guide?  You’ve had so many people in this church tell you that you’re a healing guide.” “Yes,” I agreed, warily, “and at other churches.” “Okay.  Well, let’s put it like this.  If you can imagine that there’s healing going on right there on that stage,” she said, “and the only way that healing guide can get energy through to those that need healing, is through you.  And basically, the healing guide is getting so aggressive, he’s literally trying to force his way into you and through you to do what he’s meant to do, and that is healing. 

Take it or leave it, I don’t care.”  So, that was Shelia’s explanation.  And from there I started with the healing. 

David

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 Ronnie and Rosie

At one time Magi and I were renting in Southend, right at the back of the conservation area.  We had a garden flat (in other words, the cellar) and it was literally at the back of town.  The landlord, Ronnie, was always after Magi, he was the original lecherous landlord and his wife, Rosie, had been married to an Evangelical American, and she’d had servants and stables and was a bit of a plumb, but I don’t think he had been too good at ‘doing the business’. 

When Ronnie came along, he was a right bit of rough, and he had been a Rolls Royce engineer for the aeroplanes, working at some secret place near us.  Ronnie was Rosie’s bit of rough.  Rosie’s mother, who we called Lady Hamilton, because she had several properties and we said we would pop over and visit her, but she said she ‘only received at one’.  She actually used the word ‘received’!  I mean, do me a favour…It was a case of upstairs, downstairs.  Our paths didn’t cross very often.  We used to go out at about ten at night to go to our Circle, have something to eat at about two in the morning and we wouldn’t get home until three or four in the morning.  We would usually come home just as they were getting up to go to work.  We would be going down out stairs to our flat to go to bed as they were coming down their stairs to go to work and we would say good morning. 

They wondered what on earth we were doing but Rosie was quite a diplomatic person.  The house, if you can imagine, was on Runwell Terrace, which was the original part of Cliff Town, which was the original place built for the rich of London to come down on the newly constructed railway line.  It was the equivalent of your Spanish Costa Brava, I suppose.At the time, I had built a little altar.  All that was on it was a candle and a crystal ball a proper crystal ball, that is, not a bit of glass.  Rosie must have clocked this altar and she would drop hints here and there.“There are some very ‘in touch’ people over in America, you know, David,” she would say.  “You should really, you know, speak to them.”“Okay, Rosie, I’ll nip over and have a chat with them, shall I?”In the end, we got quite friendly with Ronnie and Rosie, even though Ronnie was always trying to get his hands on Magi.  It was so blatant, you couldn’t even get offended about it.  You could almost be forgiven for thinking Ronnie had lost the plot, it was so obvious, and Rosie would just humour him. 

She knew what he was like and Magi just ignored him. On this particular night, Rosie came and found me.“David, would you like to have a glass of wine with Ronnie and I?” “Yeah, alright,” I said.  “Shall we come upstairs or are you coming down? ”Oh, we will come down and see you in your flat.”At the time, Rosie’s friend, it was actually Ronnie’s mother, lived in Wales. She was very ill, close to death, in fact, so the pair of them had been doing a bit of commuting to go and see her.  The following day, early in the morning, they had arranged to go to Wales to see Ronnie’s mother.  They came down to our flat with a bottle of wine – Al Policello was their favourite tipple.  Ronnie sat there with his glass of wine with his thick glasses and thick northern accent and Rosie sat next to him.  Every time Magi asked if anyone wanted anything from the kitchen, Ronnie would follow. 

Rosie completely blanks what Ronnie’s up to and it’s so blatant what Ronnie’s up to, it’s not annoying it’s just plain embarrassing!  This was the way the evening was going.  The time of the evening arrived when Rosie was obviously going to broach whatever she wants to ask about.  She wanted something.  She was a person who didn’t speak to anyone unless she wanted something.  Rosie said she had had an experience, she didn’t tell us what it was, but asked if I could help her to make contact with something.  At the time I had a crystal that I used as a wand and it worked.  It was a wand. “Well, what do you want me to do, Rosie?” I asked. “Well, I don’t really know, David, whatever it is that you do.  You do these things, don’t you?” Well, I didn’t really know what she wanted and Ronnie was just sitting there scratching his nuts. “Okay,” I said.  I got my crystal wand and all of a sudden it just came to life on its own, shooting a ray of energy into poor old Rosie, who started twitching and acting like she’s having a heart attack!  And Ronnie was just sitting there as if nothing was happening. “Oh shit, I’ve hit her too hard!” I thought.  “What’s going on!?”  And this went on for a little while. 

Even Magi was getting a bit worried.  Ronnie, on the other hand, was still looking around, waiting for an opportunity to grab Magi’s arse, completely blocking everything out and ignoring Rosie as if nothing was happening.  You can’t work with someone like that in the room, so Magi came to the rescue and said:“Would anyone like any cheese and biscuits? ”Perfect.  Magi left the room with Ronnie hot on her trail and I could do something to help Rosie.  As soon as they left the room, I shot around behind Rosie and began feeling her aura, because that’s a good way of telling what’s going on and I then went into healing mode.  A few moments later and she was back with me.  The second she was back she began sobbing hysterically and very, very loudly. “Oh, that’s it,” I thought, “the flat’s gone.”  Then Ronnie’s come in with his cheese and biscuits, wondering what’s going on.  Rosie’s crying her eyes out and I’m sitting there trying to be a bit nonchalant, offering the odd, “you’ll be alright, Rosie,” here and there.  She calmed down after a while.“Are you okay, Rosie,” I asked.  Clearly, she wasn’t okay and it was a bit like asking someone who had been hit by a train if they had a bit of a headache.  “What happened?” I asked, offering her a coffee and some cheese and biscuits.“I met my son,” she said. “What do you mean?” I asked. “My son,” she said.  “I never told you, but I lost a son when he was six years old.  Just then,

I was in a beautiful orchard garden, and as I looked, my son came walking towards me.  I was absolutely overcome.  The only thing,” she said, “was he was dressing in a red jumper.  I hated him in red.  I never dressed him in red, so why was he wearing a red jumper?” “To show you that it wasn’t a memory, Rosie,” I said.  “He was showing you that you weren’t imaging it, because you would never have dressed him in those clothes.” “Oh,” she said, still looking a bit overwhelmed, “I see, I see!”  She was convinced she had met her son again.  Ronnie carried on drinking his Al Policello, coffee and eating his cheese and biscuits as if nothing had happened. The next evening, they returned from their trip to Wales.  They were going up to their flat just as Magi and I were on our way out. “David!  David!” I heard her call.  Oh no, I thought, this is it – marching orders to get out of the flat. 

“Could I have a word with you?” So, I went upstairs and Ronnie was home. “Would you like a glass of wine?” he asked. “What?  Oh, yeah, great, go on then,” I said.  Then Rosie cornered me. “David, I’ve got to tell you,” she said. “What’s up Rosie?” I asked. “I didn’t tell you this last night, but just before I saw my son in the orchard, I could see all this scenery, you know, hills and mountains and so on.”“Oh yeah?” I said, wondering where this was all going. “I fell asleep in the car today, on the way to Wales, and I woke up, the precise scene I witnessed before seeing my son was right there in front of me, down to the last tree, the last bush, water, everything. 

I just wanted to tell you that for me that was confirmation.  That was proof to me, one hundred percent, that what I had experienced wasn’t imagination, it wasn’t that you’d hypnotised me or anything like that.”Rosie said she hadn’t done that journey before and could never have seen that scenery before.  And we were allowed to stay in the flat, but they didn’t come down to visit us anymore after that.  Ronnie used to give us a few funny looks though....

David

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Another story: Keiron
I used to work in the markets and this was in the era of Maggie Thatcher, the darling lady.  She came to power and within six months the markets and everything else were slaughtered.  I used to demonstrate down at the market and the particular line that I worked in was called MER – it was a car polish.  There’s a lot of history with MER, you might have seen it on the TV and they used to set fire to the car as a demonstration, the stuff came from Germany and a guy brought it into the country and I was the second person in the country to demonstrate the line.  It was a massive line that took off, made loads and loads of money.  I used to work in Hoxston Street Market, which is an extremely poor part of London, very multi-national, east end part of London. 

I was working there one day when a little kid came up.  He was a right little street urchin, with ginger hair, about twelve years old, and I was about thirty at the time, and he stood watching me work.  I was getting the crowds in, giving them the spiel and trying to extract money from their purses and pockets.  This kid watched me for about an hour solid, just staring and staring at me.  He made me feel a little bit unnerved.  In the end, he walked up to me when I’d just finished working, and he said to me, “’ere Ginge, I’ve been watching you!”“I know you’ve been watching me – I’ve been watching you.  You’ve been stood there for the last hour watching me.

“That’s bloody brilliant, that stuff, innit?” nodding at the car polish.  “You know what I’ve noticed about you?”“No,” I replied.  It was like talking to a twelve-year old, old man.  “You tell people exactly what they want to hear, don’t you?”“How do you mean?”“Well, when there’s a load of women, you tell them one thing, and then you get a load of men and you change it slightly when you sell it to them.  Everyone who comes up, you know how to talk to all the different people.  That’s good that, innit!  Can I have a go?”“Do what?” I asked, laughing.“Can I have a go?”“You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?  I’m trying to earn some money here.”“Ahh, come on,” he wheedled.  “Just one go? Go on, go on.”  Right pushy little thing he was.  “Oh, alright then,” I said, “you can have a go.”  So he got up on the box and starts selling, did the demonstration, and sells four bottles of polish to a group of ladies.  Obviously they were thinking he was a very cute little lad and, yes, we’ll buy a bottle because he’s so cute.  After a while, I told him to get down and I carried on working and he sat there for the whole day. 

At the end of the evening when I was packing away, he said to me, “there’s something different about you, Ginge.”“Oh yeah?” I said.  “What’s that then?”“I dunno,” he said.  “I can’t work it out.  There’s just something different about you.”“Well, different or not, you sold four bottles of polish, here’s a couple of quid.  Time for you to go home.”“Okay,” he said, and off he went.  The following week, I got to the market early in the morning and I hadn’t even started unpacking my stuff when there he was.“You’re up early,” I said.“Yeah, I thought I’d come down and give you a hand.”“Oh…okay.  You can give me a hand.”  And suddenly I had an assistant I didn’t realise I needed and that I soon couldn’t do without.  “You want me to get you a cup of tea, Ginge?” he’d ask.  It was always ‘Ginge’, because back then I had red hair and a beard.“How are you getting on at school?” I asked him.“Yeah,” he said proudly, “I’ve started doing French lessons, it’s great.”“You’re into French, then?”“Nah, but you ought to see the teacher!”“What do you mean?”“Well,” he said, slyly, “she’s French.”“How old are you?” I asked.  “You’re telling me that you’re twelve years old and you’re taking French lessons just because you like the teacher?”“Yeah,” he said.  “She ain’t half nice.”  I couldn’t believe it. 

Anyway, he stayed with me for a while and then things started getting a bit quieter.  One day he said to me:“There’s something different about you, Ginge, something different…”“Well, I do meditation and things…”“Wassat?” he asked, all excited.“Meditation… well, you close your eyes and relax and you stop thinking and see what comes into your mind.”“Can I do it now?”  Remember that this is in the middle of Hoxton Street Market, you’ve got the barrow boys yelling out about tomatoes and all sorts, it was Saturday afternoon with hundreds and hundreds of people milling up and down, shouting and calling out.“What do you mean, can you do it now?  You’re meant to do it when it’s quiet.”“I can do it now,” he insisted.“Well, where are you going to do it?” “I’ll get under the stall.” 

The stall was about six foot long, four foot wide and I worked on top of it.  People tend to stand really close to it, too.  And with that, he got underneath the stool just as some people walked over asking about the car polish.  I had to start demonstrating, and as I was working, I couldn’t help wonder what he was up to.  Then I literally felt him go – whoomp.  I thought, I don’t believe this, he’s gone.  I looked underneath the stall and he had gone, completely.  I carried on with the demonstration, which went on for about five or ten minutes.  I was hooting, hollering and banging on the table, polishing things, setting fire to them, hoping that none of the polish would drip under the stall, as it was want to do on occasion, and set the kid alight.  I came to the end of the demonstration.  I was rushing a bit because I was beginning to panic a bit, wondering what’s happened to the kid.  He was still gone.  I knew he wasn’t back. 

The customers paid up for what they’d bought and I told them I was going to take a break for a bit.  I dived under the stall, and as I looked under, he was laying on his back with his eyes shut, and then all of a sudden they sprung open.“Fuckin’ hell!” he exclaimed.“What? What?” I asked.  “Keep it down!”“I don’t believe that, Ginge!”“Where did you go?”“It was weird,” he said, “really weird!  I shot off and I found myself in this big green field.  I was in the open countryside.  I looked across the field and there was all these blokes dressed in white, all these old geezers with big long beards!”“Yeah?” I said, carefully.  “What happened?”“They was calling me over.”“So what did you do?”“I thought to myself, piss off, I’m not going there!  So I had a bit of a wander around, but I watched them for quite a while.  Funny lot, with all these beards and everything.”I crouched there looking at him thinking, I don’t believe this.  He’d gone straight out onto the astral in one go underneath a market stall in Hoxton Market while I’m demonstrating on top, and other people say they have problems just meditating.  This is great, I thought.  I’ve got a little apprentice here.  This kid was a natural born mage. 

He could be trained up.As we were packing away that evening, Kieron said:“Can I do that meditation anytime?”“Well, yeah, but it’s better if you’re indoors.  If you do it on the train and fall asleep and you don’t come back for a while, you can find yourself miles down the line.”“Yeah… yeah…” he said.  “What else can you do?”“How do you mean?”“You can do other things, can’t ya?”  That kid was so perceptive, it was unreal.  “What do you mean, other things?”“You know what I mean,” he said.  “You can do, like, magic and stuff, can’t you?”“Nah,” I told him.“I bet you can.  Anyway, how about doing some magic or doing something to stop my dad drinking?”“Does he drink a lot then?” I asked.“Yeah, he gets drunk every night.  He’s a real alcoholic.  He gets a bit loud and me mum’s left because of it.”“That’s a different sort of thing,” I said with a sigh.  “That’s interfering with people’s free will.  Well, you know, Kieron, that’s not a thing to do, to interfere with what people do.  It’s not really right.”“Oh, okay, Ginge,” he said.  “I won’t bother then.”  The next week came and he turned up again as I was unpacking and we got chatting, you know: did you have a good week, how’s the French lessons and so on.

“Did you get kept in after school?” I’d ask him.“Nah,” he said disappointedly.“How did you get on with your meditation?”“Yeah,” he said, smiling.  “I meant to ask you about that.  I had a really funny one.”“What was that?”“I was in this really dark place and I couldn’t see anything.  I looked up and there was a little window but it was barred.”“Yeah?”“And then this voice spoke to me.”“Oh yeah?  What did it say?”“It told me that in order to get out of this place, I needed the keys.”I don’t believe this, I thought.  He’s got a contact here and they’re telling him that there are successive things he needs to do to break free, or reach the higher self, or whatever people want to call it.  To be told that you need keys – I know they were speaking to him symbolically and he didn’t realise it, but nonetheless, it’s still amazing.“So, how’s your dad?”“I’ve done that,” he replied simply.“What do you mean, you’ve done it?”“Yeah, I’ve done that.”“Has he stopped drinking?”“Well,” Kieron said, “he hasn’t been down the pub this week.“Really?” I asked in amazement.  “Do you think he’ll go next week?”“Nah, doubt it.”“But he’s been drinking all his life!”“Yeah, like I said, I’ve sorted that.”  And he didn’t say anything else about it after that. 

He’d sorted it.  In time I spoke to him about various things that I was doing, how he could do certain things, working elementally etc and that I could teach him.“When are you gonna teach me?”“When you’re eighteen.”“What?” he whined, “I’m only twelve!  I can’t wait that long!”“No,” I told him.  “I honestly can’t introduce you to that until you’re eighteen years of age.”  Anyway, they introduced licensing for stallholders after that and I couldn’t be bothered with all that nonsense, so I didn’t go back to Hoxton Street Market again.  But I did see Kieron one more time and that was in London.  I was working in Petticoat Lane at the time with a family down there called the Saltings.  He walked past me, he must have been working on one of the stalls because he was pushing a barrow – he was probably running it – and he looked at me.  I looked at him and as he went past I could see the recognition in his eyes, and I thought I know you, but he didn’t stop to speak, just looked a bit uneasy and walked on.  He must have been about seventeen by then.  I’d love to know what he did with his skills, I’ll probably never know. 

I don’t even know his last name, just that he lived off Hoxton Street Market with his dad.  I never asked him what his surname was, people don’t ask that sort of thing in the markets.  It astounded me to meet someone – you’re always looking for the apprentice, you’re always looking for the young lad and he was it and I was gutted that I lost touch with him, but the thing is I actually wondered what I could teach that kid.  He knew everything.  He was an absolute natural.  He could have taught me.  He obviously recognised whatever it was in Dave to bring it out in himself.  There was a strong connection between the two of us, he felt it and I felt it and you don’t go around telling twelve year old kids the sort of things that I was telling him.  Both of us had ginger hair and we were often mistaken for father and son.  He was a lovely lad, a proper street urchin.  A wise kid.  He was the sort of kid that they were taking on in London on the Stock Exchange and things like that because although his education wasn’t great, he didn’t need it.  He was a survivor.  One of Fagin’s best. 
 
If you ever read this Keiron it would be great to hear from you!

David

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Tintagel

If you are visiting the county of Cornwall then you will surely want to visit Tintagel with all of it’s Arthurian connections. The fish and chips at the local chippy are not to bad either. Just a short way from Tintagel is St Pirans Church and it really is worth a visit.

This is St Pirans Church near Tintagel in Cornwall.  It stands near the Entrance to St Pirans glen, a beautiful steep wooded glen with a swift river running down its length.
It has the feel of real age to it and is as I would imagine as close to an original ancient place of Christian worship as you will ever find.

Come out of the Church and take a short walk along the lane and suddenly you are climbing up through a wooded glen along side a fast running river heading for a place called the Hermitage.

The Hermitage was where St Piran lived out his life of devotion many years ago and there is, after a bit of a climb, a tea room built over the site of the Hermitage which is still there.

The tea room is still not accessible by road and all goods and services have to be manually carried down a steep incline to this isolated destination.

The establishment is run by a cantankerous old woman and her long suffering son who seems oblivious to her loud and long criticisms screamed from her bedroom window, of his perceived weaknesses, whilst he is trying to deal with the customers at the tea rooms.

Leave the tea rooms and make your way down another steep bank and you come upon a high waterfall set in a huge secluded open topped cavern.
This place is hidden from the world even though signposted, at least that is how it felt to me after making the rather slippery decent into it's depths.

Pagans seem to have claimed this place as their own as the many hundreds of offerings upon the nearby rocks give evidence.
Take a closer look and you will find coins and baby's toys together with photographs of baby's, father’s, lovers, and pets all now departed from this world.  It is now that you realise that this lovely place is in fact a 21st century pagan place of the dead.

Only then does the significance of the offerings and pictures hit you and you look closer and see more detail.

It leaves you sad looking at how the dreams dreamt by lovers, sons, daughters, and mothers came to and end but it made me appreciate even more the fact that I could touch the rocks and hear the crashing waterfall and know that I have had 63 very interesting years of life on this planet and it makes me realise that everyday is simply an accidental bonus.

The picture above left is a tiny fragment of the offerings the spirits of the dead

Dave

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