Introduction

 

“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32 The Holy Bible).

 

Words that have resonated with me since I was a child, finding a personal faith in Jesus Christ that no one wanted to know about, and those who I did tell often derided me. Twenty years after finding that faith I sat in a cold church one autumn night preparing to lead worship when, the Spirit within me took me to the top of God’s mountain, where a voice so real it could have been standing right next to me said, “this is your last time here. No more will you come to my mountain until you have discovered the truth and journeyed further along your life’s path. Only then will you be free to come here again.”

 

Sure enough, a week later I had left the church, my life seemingly falling to pieces.

 

Step forward another twenty years and a wonderful person came into my life. How that happened had to be planned by the angels for she lived on the Isle of Wight and I lived just outside London. Yet we met, and I knew instantly I had found my guide. More than that, as you will find later in this book, I sensed we had had a connection that went way back in time. We have been in touch almost every day since and though I know Dorothy thinks I am there for her, actually I KNOW she is there for me. Spirit works that way sometimes. She has been instrumental in my personal journey of finding the truth, gently leading me over the past few years in my own spiritual journey, and now I know I am free to go back up that mountain and discover the next stage of my journey. In many ways, after all these years, my journey is still just beginning.

 

I am thrilled and excited to be able to now publish Dorothy’s autobiography. I urge you to read it and to use it to continue your own journey in life. I am sure you will find the same inspiration I have found and that you too will discover your journey will be uplifting, and fulfilling and my fervent hope and prayer is that your journey will bring you the kind of deep, inner peace, that only a true angel can bring you.

 

Stuart Holland, November 2017

 

 

MY LIFE WITH SPIRIT

 

(I have so much to share with you!)

 

The Journey Begins

 

This is a skeleton outline of a journey through a life that has truly been ‘full of surprises’, a prediction given during a reading I had fifty-seven years ago by a respected medium. I went with apprehension and excitement, holding on to the words my mother said, ‘ask for a reading, nothing else’ and still remember the sense of awe which swept over me as I sat with her. She took my ring and began to talk to me. Love life, beware of jumping out of the fire into the frying pan’ – she was right about that. There was more which the years have erased. Then she said, ‘I wish I could show you your life as I see it, full of surprises.’ She was right about that, too. I remember the girls walking up her path as I left, two teens asking, ‘can we have our fortunes told?’ They were sent away with the sharp words ‘I don’t tell fortunes!’ So, there was the reason for my mother’s instructions. When I finally go home I will look for her and give her my heartfelt thanks. Her influence has persisted through my working life as a medium, her quiet way, her quiet voice, her sense of conviction in all she said and did, her surety of the words being right.  Just as I know I am.

That’s the main thing I recall and the one thing I am aware of; I know when I’m right. It’s more than a ‘knowing’, it’s going cold because spirit move in and make me go cold. A physical reaction to a non-physical happening, a physical reaction to a psychic happening, in effect. It happens when you’re open to spirit 24-7 as I am, much to the dismay, sometimes disgust, sometimes anger of some mediums. They worry about my security, my sanity, my life. Why? I have rings of psychic defence, I have half a ton of love around me at any given moment and the spirits I love walk with me at all times.

Those mediums don’t know what they’re missing…

 

What is the most important part of me, the medium or the writer? My past lives reveal I was either a wise woman or scribe or writer of some kind or a combination of the two.

 

A priestess in Ancient Britain.

A wise woman in Alfred’s time.

One of Henry’s queens.

Scribe to Charles I.

 

Many lives, many experiences. In this life I’ve studied herbs and trained as a spiritual healer. In this life I have written many, many articles, stories and books. In this life I finally said, ‘I want to be a medium.’ (More accurately, I said, during the service in the first spiritualist church I attended, ‘I want to do that.’)

This life is where the two sides of me became one, the writer and healer became a channel for spirit authors, translating their words into modern English so people can read it, understand it and appreciate the nonsense historians have written about them over the years. Writing their life story helps them heal. This life is the last one I will live on this side of the divide: I have work to do when I go home. It’s good to know I’ve almost achieved everything spirit wanted me to do.

Let’s not forget I was not unwilling: everything I’ve done was agreed to before birth. This isn’t something every spiritually minded person believes but I do and so do many others. It’s the only thing which makes sense of why we experience such things as illness, accident, deep lasting sorrow, poverty, or conversely, good health, wealth, love and comfort. We need to be sure that the lessons we learn are the ones which will help us on our onward progression as spirits.

There is a way to go before then. I experienced much before I opened myself to spirit. This is a good point to say I’d already opened myself to Christ. I carry the faith of a Christian into the work of being a medium. I don’t consider myself a Christian Spiritualist as such, but He is part of my spiritual life.

My 74 years sit easy on me tonight; this book is beginning to flow. It has been a while since I wrote anything, I now realise the time had to be right. Everything spirit does is all mapped out, but you can only see it when you look back. The paranormal site I visited every day closed down. The historical organisation where I helped out closed down. The writing site, the centre of my writing life, closed down. What was left was time to write this book.

Spirit always get their own way. Be sure of that!

 

***

 

I arrived in this physical life in 1943, a war baby. It would be boring for you if I was to relate the family life at the time, but I need to slide a comment in here which was to follow me for many years, my mother saying, ‘I think I brought the wrong baby home from hospital.’ Because I am so unlike all the rest.  Not physically, I am a copy of one of my cousins, we could be interchangeable, but mentally and, I later discovered, spiritually. The spirit side of my current life can be seen in hindsight, but none of us realised it at the time. I was just ‘odd.’

Many children have ‘invisible friends’ (spirit children) to play with. I had a friend also called Dorothy. We spent hours together, discovering the world in a garden full of flowers, trees and vegetables, always something to explore, things to work out. Later I dropped her, as it were, and concentrated on being many things, a code breaker, copying the odd graffiti on brick walls and signposts, looking for the connections, looking for signs. It is only now, looking back down the tunnel of years, do I realise that I was then looking for signs, indicators, directions for my life which seemed aimless and pointless. I went to school, I wrote stories that had the teachers asking for more, I ignored the subjects I didn’t like (such as art, I wrote poems on the back of the paper instead). I discovered books and the skills an author can bring by using words to make a character live. I read everything I could find, from my father’s Western collection to the children’s encyclopaedias which raised more questions than they answered.

I remember sitting with my mother’s special china cup. It had little squares inside with tiny pictures in them. I finally discovered that you drank the tea, then swilled the remainder around in the cup, tipped it upside down in a saucer and looked to see where the leaves were. (This was before the magical tea bag was invented, of course.) That was your fortune.

My mother had an often-quoted statement; ‘I brought the wrong baby home from hospital’. When she found a true story in a magazine of a woman who did really take home the wrong baby, the child’s blood group didn’t match either parent, this added to her belief I was ‘wrong’. I felt wrong. I felt out of place.

My sister arrived when I was five years old. I don’t remember my mother going to hospital for the birth, so if this was a home confinement, she couldn’t say she had brought the wrong baby home for a second time. My sister was ‘all right.’

I started Sunday School at the age of seven. I don’t remember how long it was before I took Christ as my personal Saviour after an evangelical preacher came to talk to us, but I remember doing it. I discovered two Sundays later I was the only person who had. All the others looked so blank it was almost laughable. I was young, yes, but the faces gave it away. No one else had taken the message to heart. The Sunday School teacher asked why I hadn’t said anything at the time, that ‘Uncle Fred’ would have been pleased to know. I wondered why I hadn’t said anything. From this distance of time I think it was a private thing between Jesus and me, not something to tell to anyone else, even if that other person had been the one to open my heart and mind. I keep a lot to myself even now; it’s not a bad habit to cultivate.

Was this me looking for something outside my day to day life? My lovely Nan gave me a bible, which I still have. Her inscription is dated 1955. I used to look at the colour illustrations, put the little biblical texts we got from Sunday School teachers in the appropriate pages, everything except try and read it and make sense of it all. It was too early in my development, I now know, and too isolated from the way my family thought, too. No one said grace; no one went to church outside of weddings, christenings and the inevitable funerals. Religion, as I heard about it in Sunday School, didn’t match what my family did. I had no way of knowing many were like that.

 

My family was large, loads of aunts, uncles and cousins, most of whom gathered at Nan’s house every weekend. How much I picked up there cannot be really separated from the memories of the gatherings, but I became aware that at least one neighbour ‘read the tea leaves’ which confused me and that another aunt was asking ‘Lily’ to leave her alone. How I knew Lily was in the spirit world is another mystery of that time. It was many years before I discovered who she was, one of Nan’s children who didn’t survive.

It was at one of these gatherings an uncle gave me two magazines he thought I might like: Fantasy and Science Fiction and Astounding. Would I like them! I devoured them, especially Ray Bradbury’s story in F&SF. Through them I discovered fandom, that wonderful world of like-minded people who wrote endless letters, went to conventions, produced their own fanzines and seemed to like what I was writing at the time.

I created my own fanzine, only one issue, which I called Trial. Double meaning, would it work/I was a junior in a solicitor’s office. Writing was emerging as something I not only wanted to do, but had to do. The magazine wasn’t the answer, but it was worth the effort just to get feedback.

I was working in the City of London, a place of shades and shady places, intricate ancient paths leading into courtyards or to the main streets of the main place, the financial centre of England. There were booksellers in virtually every street I walked; I bought Ray Bradbury’s books to read on the train to and from work.

I also bought Lobsang Rampa’s ‘The Third Eye’ (without knowing why) and couldn’t understand it. That was immaterial; the fact remained there was an emptiness at times, a longing at other times, a need for information without knowing what the information was I needed and that was a start. I tried to read Betty Shine’s books, but they didn’t make sense, my lack of knowledge of the spirit world, of mediums, tarot readers and everyone else, rendered them useless to me.

Again, at this distance of time, I can’t remember what prompted me to ask where I could get a reading. Maybe a magazine article or someone at work? Either seems logical. Whatever the reason, I was directed to Mrs Palmer, an elderly lady who held an item belonging to the sitter to make her connection. I don’t think she needed it, she just did it. That was when she told me my life was full of surprises.

I heard a story later which may or may not be true, but it fits the lady I met. The story is that a young man went to see her, she took his ring, held it, then handed it back and said, ‘sorry, here’s your money back, there’s no one there.’ The young man was killed the next day on his motorbike. If this is true, it’s an object lesson for any medium on how to handle bad news.

I found out recently that the first real help and advice the international medium Stephen O’Brien had was from a Mrs Palmer. This is not the same person, mine was in Essex, his was in Wales, but what a nice coincidence.

For the sake of continuity, of mentioning his name, I want to slide in a little anecdote here as I can’t remember exactly where it comes in my spiritual history. I’m sure you won’t mind.

We had a meeting at which the medium told me I was full of questions and that I would find all my answers on page 132 of a particular book by Stephen O’Brien. As it happened… some of us in the meeting had tickets to see Stephen O’Brien who was giving a demonstration here on the island. I had three weeks to wait to get my answers…

On the night I went over to his sales stall with great anticipation, bought the book and hurried back to my seat where friends were waiting. I flipped through the pages – it was one of those books where the new chapter started on a new page, regardless of where the previous chapter finished. Page 132 was blank. We collapsed with laughter, it was so obvious, find your own answers. I do now, all the time. I still can’t get over how precise that message was, right down to the page number.

By the way, it was a brilliant demonstration by Stephen O’Brien, names, house numbers, road names, personal information and moving messages. He’s one fine medium.

 

I read more than I wrote at that time, not a bad thing. I listened to a lot of radio drama, serials in particular, which meant I absorbed the concept of cliff hangers. The short stories were a challenge, one I tried to live up to, but there was a lot of writing to do before I got it right.

I was married in church, aged nineteen. It meant a lot. My new husband was a tall suave good-looking soldier, wearing dress uniform, serving with the City of London Fusiliers.

When he was demobbed I thought life was going to be wonderful. Instead it crashed, eighteen months exactly from the date we were married, casting me out into a cold world where others were preparing to be married and I was single again. (It was too much to ask a twenty-one-year-old to wait ten years for a registered paedophile to be released from prison. I was advised to divorce him.)

Through this I rediscovered my Christian faith, was confirmed into the Church of England and found a refuge in a cold world. Everything was related to God, all the signs I know now were spirit I allocated to God. It comforted me, and I think that was right for me then.

 

As a family we emigrated to Spain and then came what was really the first amazing ‘happening’, which I gave back to God. I was ‘governess’ to the Deputy Mayor of Bilbao’s three youngest children. (My task was to teach them English.) I went to work by train. One day I realised I only had enough money for a one-way ticket. It was going to be a long walk back home. I was early, so I slipped into a chapel, knelt down and asked for help. When I opened my eyes, every statue in the chapel wore a halo of gold light. I went to work with a lighter heart.

The Deputy Mayor’s wife met me in the playroom. ‘Here you are,’ she said, handing me my wages for the month. ‘I thought you’d like this a week early.’

Is it that simple? Yes, it is. It’s called Trust.