Nancy Bestsy Cartwright, my mother's spirit guide, said that my laryngitis was due to an entity that had latched onto my throat to silence me and force me finally to atone for some wrong done in a past-life. I lost my voice because I had to learn, karmically, what it was like to not be able to cry out when I needed to, because there had been a time when I shouldn’t have cried out, but did.
My mother's psychic abilities burgeoned in the mid-nineteen seventies when she was senior medical secretary at St Thomas's Hospital. Her boss, social worker Mary Clapham, remembers that she would go slightly limp over her typewriter, her pen-on-a-rope clattering into the keys, and shake her head as though trying to clear her vision. Then she would intone, describing her remote visions.
'There’s a purple mist in the air. Oh, it’s clearing now. Iestyn’s having an asthma attack over Pipkin, the school rabbit, but is still insisting on looking after it during the Christmas holidays. I’m going to let him. Kill or cure.'
Pre-Ventolin inhalers, this was; so verged on ‘kill’.
'Iestyn’s put a garlic bulb in the sweet crêpe mixture in the little saucepan on the camping gaz stove that Dr Cross brought in specially for the Experience French Culture lesson they're having this morning...'
Mr Cross never became a doctor of languages, actually.
'Iestyn is forcibly describing an orgasm to classmate Susan Jewell. In home economics. She’s so traumatised she’s stopped being OCD about her ankle socks.'
Oh, as if. At fifteen Susan Jewell was got up the duff in the flats past Coombe's sweatshop by the assistant school caretaker, who used to turn up to our discos wearing white shoes, nylon puffa jacket, Hackney's Brylcreem allowance and start off the Space Invaders’ dance.
Anyway, fast forward another three years, mum feels she is 'seeing' enough to try her hand at being a stage psychic.
'The purple mist is clearing now - and Charlie’s come through for that woman in the stalls, seat K6. Charlie’s your father, am I right? He’s saying he didn’t die of natural causes, ask your murdering bitch of a mother.'
Anyway, fast forward another three years, mum feels she is 'seeing' enough to try her hand at being a stage psychic.
'The purple mist is clearing now - and Charlie’s come through for that woman in the stalls, seat K6. Charlie’s your father, am I right? He’s saying he didn’t die of natural causes, ask your murdering bitch of a mother.'
Promoters decided she mustn't do stage psychictry any more.
And just as well because the brethren at the Kohkahycumest Spiritual Healing lodge, which she was 'led' into joining shortly after the Hemel Hempstead incident, are discouraged from being psychic and from having past lives and spirit guides. This stricture comes from headquarters of the international association of healing lodges to which Kohkahycumest belongs. Brother Superior of the Kohkahycumest Lodge, Abel Hart, has to be seen to rein in certain members:
'No, just because you’ve been regressed and seen different, we’re not going to petition the National Association of Needlearts to rework the rampant mis-stitchings in the Bayeaux Tapestry.' Or:
'No, let’s run through it again: Van Gogh: ear; Nelson: arm and eye; Anne Boleyn...head, actually, you seem to have missed that rather large one – but previously not lack of finger, but extra finger.' And:
'No, Heathcliff and Arthur Scargill weren’t contemporaries; and one of them was fictional.'
The other one...
And just as well because the brethren at the Kohkahycumest Spiritual Healing lodge, which she was 'led' into joining shortly after the Hemel Hempstead incident, are discouraged from being psychic and from having past lives and spirit guides. This stricture comes from headquarters of the international association of healing lodges to which Kohkahycumest belongs. Brother Superior of the Kohkahycumest Lodge, Abel Hart, has to be seen to rein in certain members:
'No, just because you’ve been regressed and seen different, we’re not going to petition the National Association of Needlearts to rework the rampant mis-stitchings in the Bayeaux Tapestry.' Or:
'No, let’s run through it again: Van Gogh: ear; Nelson: arm and eye; Anne Boleyn...head, actually, you seem to have missed that rather large one – but previously not lack of finger, but extra finger.' And:
'No, Heathcliff and Arthur Scargill weren’t contemporaries; and one of them was fictional.'
The other one...
So mum kept her spirit guide accessory a little on the QT.
'She's a little girl who died in the slums around the time of Edward the Seventh, Iestyn,' she told me, when I didn't ask. 'You know all those passages and windy-ways round Spitalfields? Well I’ve narrowed it down to one out of six of those for where she used to live before she died. Cholera. Nancy Betsy Cartwright, she was called in full. There I was minding my own business, not thinking about spirit guides at all, sitting with my back to St Bart's, eating my last little bit of chicken drumstick, when suddenly from limbo I could hear Nancy’s racking cough. So possibly it's her sympathy for illness that led Nancy to say you must come into the lodge for some healing on your throat.'
The members heal by projecting beams of multicoloured light at the ailing person's aura.
'Nancy said - and don’t pass this on - an entity has cut your voice off in its prime. She saw it latch on to your throat, clear as day, in the early hours of the night before last. Nancy says you're getting a second chance to atone for a previous abandonment. And when she said that, it came straight to me: when you were six or so and your father was meant to be taking you on holiday to Bargoed but left you with his Aunt Bron in Ystrad Mynach so he could go off and see that woman in her mobile home, remember? You rang me up to come and get you. And you oughtn’t to have rung, Nancy says, because you missed a chance - by staying there and keeping schtum - to atone for the past-life where you cruelly abandoned the soul, that this time round came back as your father to abandon you and adjust the karmic scales.'
'But, mum, if Nancy Betsy's point is that karmically I shouldn't cure the laryngitis just now, why would she want me to come to the lodge and have it healed?'
So, no I wouldn't go into the lodge as ghostly Nancy Betsy, clearly in a loop with herself, advised. Like everyone else I planned to use my tried and tested home-remedies. TCP gargle; saline douche; fasting for six days and six nights, running myself up a baby-doll habit from laurel leaves taken from trees outside the Old Spring Baths in Strand Lane when the moon was waxing gibbous, bidding on E-bay to have a random cow in Exeter inseminated by an equally random bull brought over especially from Colchester, hurtling down through Richmond Park in the laurel leaf habit to carefully collapse half in and half out of the Thames.
'All in invocation of Canens, Roman Goddess of Song, mum.'
She was silent for a few seconds.
'Nancy said you would refuse to come in for the healing, Iestyn. And she went so far as to remark on your constant mickey-taking about the past-life issue.'
'She's a little girl who died in the slums around the time of Edward the Seventh, Iestyn,' she told me, when I didn't ask. 'You know all those passages and windy-ways round Spitalfields? Well I’ve narrowed it down to one out of six of those for where she used to live before she died. Cholera. Nancy Betsy Cartwright, she was called in full. There I was minding my own business, not thinking about spirit guides at all, sitting with my back to St Bart's, eating my last little bit of chicken drumstick, when suddenly from limbo I could hear Nancy’s racking cough. So possibly it's her sympathy for illness that led Nancy to say you must come into the lodge for some healing on your throat.'
The members heal by projecting beams of multicoloured light at the ailing person's aura.
'Nancy said - and don’t pass this on - an entity has cut your voice off in its prime. She saw it latch on to your throat, clear as day, in the early hours of the night before last. Nancy says you're getting a second chance to atone for a previous abandonment. And when she said that, it came straight to me: when you were six or so and your father was meant to be taking you on holiday to Bargoed but left you with his Aunt Bron in Ystrad Mynach so he could go off and see that woman in her mobile home, remember? You rang me up to come and get you. And you oughtn’t to have rung, Nancy says, because you missed a chance - by staying there and keeping schtum - to atone for the past-life where you cruelly abandoned the soul, that this time round came back as your father to abandon you and adjust the karmic scales.'
'But, mum, if Nancy Betsy's point is that karmically I shouldn't cure the laryngitis just now, why would she want me to come to the lodge and have it healed?'
So, no I wouldn't go into the lodge as ghostly Nancy Betsy, clearly in a loop with herself, advised. Like everyone else I planned to use my tried and tested home-remedies. TCP gargle; saline douche; fasting for six days and six nights, running myself up a baby-doll habit from laurel leaves taken from trees outside the Old Spring Baths in Strand Lane when the moon was waxing gibbous, bidding on E-bay to have a random cow in Exeter inseminated by an equally random bull brought over especially from Colchester, hurtling down through Richmond Park in the laurel leaf habit to carefully collapse half in and half out of the Thames.
'All in invocation of Canens, Roman Goddess of Song, mum.'
She was silent for a few seconds.
'Nancy said you would refuse to come in for the healing, Iestyn. And she went so far as to remark on your constant mickey-taking about the past-life issue.'
Well, I'll just point out that Brother Superior, Abel Hart himself, insists that in one of his past lives he was Abelard (names tend to echo down from incarnation to incarnation.)
'Castrated, Abelard. Awful,' mum told me. 'And all his life, just about, Abel Hart has been forced to wear Tena Lady pads, apparently.'
On account of suffering from sympathetic karmic stigmata of the nether-parts, apparently.
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