It was an odd sort of message for my great-aunt Emma to receive:
“Go and get the car,” it read. “It’s a good car. And take care of Isobel,” signed, “your loving mother.”
It was odder still, because this was the 1970s and my aunt’s mother had been dead for 20 years. Aunt Emma had been sitting in the back of her post office in the Ards Peninsula, mulling over whether to trade in her old car for a new model. She decided that she was too tired to go to Bangor that day and told her sister to go alone. But as she sat at her desk her hand started to move across the page, forming words as if by its own accord. This was very clearly a message from beyond the grave. Aunt Emma had always been a diligent daughter, and she acted fast.
“Change of plan, Isobel,” she called. “Change of plan!”
So, on that cold afternoon she and Isobel drove to Bangor and did their messages early before going to trade in their old car for the new one at the garage, at 5 o’clock. Isobel was none too pleased, for she loved nothing more than a good browse round the shops, especially the Co-op department store near the seafront.
They felt the tremors and heard the blast of the explosion an hour later, when they were taking tea later with my nana and granddad in their house on the Donaghadee Road in Bangor. The IRA had bombed the Co-op and the seafront: the very Co-op where my aunt Isobel would have been idly flicking through the rails had Emma not felt compelled to go car shopping that very afternoon. Until the day she died Emma always believed that her mother had saved Isobel’s life, through the message that she had received, via the medium of “automatic writing.”
My great-grandfather liked to be of help too. Aunt Emma was greatly distressed one day, as she had mislaid some important documents; dockets which had the equivalent value of money. She had upended the post office and was steeling herself to contact her superiors and admit that these were lost. As she sat beside the phone nervously tapping her pen, she felt another compulsion to write, and a missive from her father came through, directing her to the drawer where the documents were safely stored.
This could sound as though my aunt had guardian angels, but alas, some of the psychic forces in her life were not a source of comfort. Sometimes it felt as though malevolent forces were at work to torment her. She would have puzzling dreams or a sense of déjà vu, and would spend days trying to solve the riddle when the phone rang with bad tidings, and she would suddenly connect the dots. One such instance occurred when she woke from a terrible dream, in which her mother and father were gathered, along with one of her brothers and his wife. Everyone was grief-stricken but nobody could tell her what had happened. Aunt Emma struggled what to make of it, but in her gut knew that something was very wrong.
Days later, she received a phone call in the middle of the night. Her youngest brother’s baby girl had died after a cold became a chest infection and then pneumonia. My aunt would always be wracked with guilt after this. With a sickening realization she remembered that her brother in the dream and his wife had lost a baby too. What could she have done to alert them and potentially save the life of the child?
This was also the sort of hocus pocus that was not desirable in God-fearing Protestants of the time. Fortune telling was thought to be the work of the devil and any notion of making contact with the dead was associated with the occult, and not something which Christian people should ever entertain. But how then, did one explain these occurrences, or visitations which my aunt did not actively seek? It was also not unusual for people to be known as having the “second sight.” One such instance was my great-grandmother coming in one afternoon to the news that an elderly farmer in the locale had just passed away.
“Ah sure,” she said. “Didn’t I just see his wraith going up the road?”
The line between the living and the dead was most definitely porous, or at the very least, blurred.
My aunt was the seventh child and rumours often abounded that seventh children were likely to have been endowed with certain supernatural gifts, or a “sixth sense.” What was clear though, was no matter how puritanical the background, in the stanchly religious 1920s when my aunt was born, there was still some room for the unexplained.
Helen McClements is a mother, writer and teacher from Belfast. She can often be heard on BBC Radio where she shares her musings on “Thought for the Day’.” In contrast to this, she writes a blog called www.Sourweeblog.com, where she unleashes her frustrations at juggling parenthood with work and the vagaries of life.
