There’s still a ragbag of memories to share with you about the time I spent in that house. If they have any common theme, I suppose it is wonders and miracles. I’m not saying there actually were any miracles: just incomprehensible things.
I mentioned in a previous post that my mother started to suffer from various medical complaints at this time, which I have lumped together unkindly as hypochondria. I should be the last person to accuse anyone of that, so perhaps I am mocking my past self in saying it. One of her complaints was what she called fibrositis which gave her a chronic pain in the shoulder. Anyhow, Sep installed a sun-ray lamp in the front room, turning it into a small clinic, because certain friends were invited to take advantage of its reputed health-giving properties. You could set the device for ultra-violet or infra-red: the first was extremely bright and you had to wear an eye-mask and time your skin’s exposure to its rays. It always gave out a funny smell, which I thought of as mercury vapour, although that was supposed to be sealed in the bulb, and if we had inhaled it, the results might have been less than healthy. The infra-red was more tolerant and supposed to help painful shoulders amongst other things.
That same front room became a sanctuary of spiritual healing. I mentioned in an earlier post that my mother used to attend a Spiritualist church when she was married to David Wheeler, as a kind of refuge from the marriage and in hopes of contacting her first husband’s disembodied spirit. Sep Charlton was her third husband There was a Spiritualist church in Cowes, and even though we lived now in Newport, five miles away, she continued attending, driven there by Sep. The congregation tended to be elderly and the services were tedious. His hobby was inventing and constructing things, so he made a fine Ouija board, from which he discovered he was a medium. H We started to hold seances, everyone putting a finger on the planchette and messages being spelt out. Spooky: I didn’t like it. Then Blackett had an inspiration to do “automatic writing”, a communication with spirits all by himself. He bought cheap rolls of wallpaper, plain white, and covered them with large handwriting whose peculiarity was that the words were all joined up because the pen never left the paper. He would go in a trance-like state and receive whatever was sent. I don’t know how many weeks, months or even years he did this: but the spirits told him he was a healer. This was pretty convenient for my mother, to have free spiritual healing on the premises. But he also let it be known in the Spiritualist church that he had been singled out for this special grace, and we started to receive clients. Maybe I have missed out a step, for there was a time when my mother corresponded with a healer called Harry Edwards, who charged no fee though he accepted donations. I think they went to see him once. Blackett after getting approval set himself up as an affiliate to Harry Edwards. I know this because he constructed a Perspex illuminated cross within a circle, which was the logo of Harry Edwards’ organization. It’s still going strong, though Edwards died in 1976, and it appears to have dropped the cross and circle logo.
Anyhow, one evening we received into our front room a blind girl, aged about 17; a wraithlike creature who hardly spoke, and was accompanied by her mother. I had to be there because an intrinsic part of healing is to sit in a circle holding hands and praying or allowing the divine vibes to activate. I found the whole event acutely embarrassing and felt sorry for the girl, having little faith in a miraculous outcome. My scepticism was unfortunately justified, and Blackett confined his healing thenceforth to members of the family. He continued this general line of interest for many years. When he wasn’t inventing and making, he was always fond of sitting still for long periods and staring into space. When my mother asked what he was doing, he’d reply, “Oh, just plottin’ ’n’ plannin’,” and my mother liked that, for she’d imagine he was plotting and planning some new ingenious feature for the house, to please her. But in his last years, his sitting became “astral travelling”, and she learned not to disturb him, because he’d gone somewhere else and left his body behind. They call it “distance viewing” these days, and I believe it is taken seriously by the American military.
These eccentricities were on the periphery of my life, and I suffered them with a certain resignation, not sure whether to be proud or ashamed that my parents were so different from others, and my life had already been so chequered.
But I’ll tell you a few little things that happened to me alone. One day I was outside the house, perhaps coming home from school, when the sky went strangely dark and there seemed to be some distant explosion, and a mighty wind came from nowhere. I thought it was the Bomb and that we must have been plunged in World War III. There was a feeling in those days that it could happen just like that. It was exciting and tragic both at once. This was two years after the bomb Bravo was exploded on the Bikini Atoll and I remember reading in the newspaper about fishermen reporting a kind of snow which fell on to their boat, which we later understood to be nuclear fallout.
One evening in early December, I was walking up the hill after school in the gathering twilight and saw a tiny spaceship coming down. Down the hill, not down from the sky. It was shaped somewhat like a flying saucer at any rate. It couldn’t possibly be a car, it was too small. This was exciting. I told Blackett and he, being up to date with all things mechanical, told me it was a Messerschmitt, a name I had only heard in connection with German aircraft in World War II. It was a bubble-car.
Going up that same hill, on a summer evening, I was excited to hear some extraordinary music coming out of the Boys’ Brigade meeting hut. Various instruments were each playing their own tune, weaving in and out in a sort of jiving dance. The door was closed so I could see nothing, but distinguished a trumpet, clarinet, banjo and perhaps other instruments too. I had never heard “trad” jazz before, and had the privilege of first hearing it when played live by amateurs.
Have you ever read Émile, Rousseau’s famous book on education? It advocates a child discovering things personally, rather than being told them at second hand. Going back earlier in my life, to when I was four years old, I remember on different occasions my first taste of corn-on-the-cob, wild-gathered fried mushrooms, pancakes with sugar and lemon. I know many people never stop chasing new experiences, to keep alive that childhood sense of wonder. For this they have ambition, to earn significant money, to travel and see the Taj Mahal, to eat exotic or gourmet food, to indulge extreme sports. My own temperament and circumstances are different, and it seems that all my life I have been obedient to the dictum of William Blake:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the wingèd life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.
a wayfarer’s notes 
When I was about 17 I bought a book on Astral Travelling and spent weeks trying to master the art so that I could visit girls' bedrooms and watch them undress. Of course, I never succeeded and my attempts to do the latter by merely asking earned me a slapped face. Still, bizarrely, I wonder if this internet is a form of astral travelling. After all, I can watch girls undress in their bedrooms whilst my body remains firmly at home? 😉 Again another wonderful memoir! And sorry for being a lousy blogger this past month or so!
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I'm of the breed who will put up with severe inconvenience to experience something new and sink myself again in the unfolding wonder of life! I'll confess I cringed yesterday at your description of your mother as hypochondriac – you know this situation the best, but there are so many pains and problems still not understood…..
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What tha! Looks like the car old Bucky Fuller came up with except I believe his had the single wheel at the front (a stability disaster).
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Hi Vincent, your comment on Cuckoo's Call – I didn't take the pic. It was taken, like all the others on the “Calcutta Photoblog” series, by the teachers of Talimi Haq School, in Aug 2006.
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i have heard about planchet but never heard it first person.
of course i heard about it from people who claimed that they have undergone it. but i discounted them as too unreliable to believe.
it was never clear to me.
i believe you. thanks for making me understand what is this actually.
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I'm familiar with these things: automatic writing and even mediumship. I tried it but I'm not very good at it.
Once I acted as a medium for Jesus. Scary business. I didn't like it. I didn't want to deceive and mislead people. So I ran away for my life.
There was a younger boy who initiated me in these things. He had certain gifts like ventriloquism and other abilities. Once he wrote something on the ground while in a trance. It was dark and he did it without thinking about it and very quickly, I was instantly convinced of his powers.
We acted like prophets. And I ended up playing the role of Jesus. Terrible!
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I've owned an Ouija board since I was in junior high school. I always tried to play with it myself and never had any success with it. I couldn't get my best friend from high school to play with me because I think she was afraid of demons or something coming to possess her. So, this Ouija board has just been sitting on my shelf all these years and finally last year I found someone to play with me. Astonishingly, with two people, it worked! I was hooked. It became my obsession last year and I kept asking my friend to play again and again, every time she visited. Though I did keep asking her, “Are you sure you're not the one moving it?!” 🙂
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Hayden, the cringe (at my description of my mother as a hypochondriac) was the reaction I had hoped for from a reader! Calling her that represented my opinion (and Blackett's) then. Since that time I have had personal experience of a disorder which is very real but which also offers a kind of escape from tangles one cannot otherwise cope with. Illness may be used to manipulate others, and as I now realise, that doesn't make it any less real.
I would be more charitable today.
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Vincent,
Our heads are just simply full of shit. Chickenshit, bullshit, and elephantshit.
Any insane, learned, well-read man can bring all that shit out of his head.
Sorry about that!
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So I am caught between remembering when, and, conceiving the present and future, (present being the future), by that quote, yet I see where you are in this, rememberances, but not at the expense of tomorrow today.
I wish I was at liberty to tell of all my experiences of the paranormal, as you, Vincent, have done here, sometimes I wish to tell everything I know from living experiences, but must wait while I do what I am doing presently, seeing as how they are so directly connected. I am sure there would be interferences from doing it.
The military interest in 'distance viewing' is interesting, and I can tell a story about that…my firt wife, when very young (and I knew her then, as a child), had an auntie who liked to get with men, she tended to hang out at bars and get lots of one-night stands, you see? Well, my young lass had a sister who was in first year of college, and a mother who was drunk all the time. One evening, late, midnight or so, the phone rang and the college sister spoke to my young lass, told her she had just had a waking dream in which she witnessed the violent murder of the aunt, in such a such town, in such a such hotel (saw the sign), in such a such room (saw the number on the door), and she fully described the scene, the furnishings, the wallpaper and fixtures of the room, but not the perpetrator. Every word turned out to be the truth, very exact, verified by the police in that town. These same two young girls also dabbled in the ouija board and the like, and got very strange results.
Another wife dabbled, frequently, in witchcraft, seances, rituals in graveyards and dark church grounds during closed hours, potions and spell paraphanelia, later raised her paranormal manipulative practices to the level of wild and illicit sex carried out in the most normal and absurd places and by the most directly unsettling means as to acquiring partners out of normal society and daily life, I saw her work 'wonders', one of the reasons for parting ways with her, lol.
She had a business for the public of doing spells designed to cause legal proceedings to go in the favor of the guilty who were on trial, very strange stuff like having the one on trial wear certain odd things in his/her underwear or inside their socks, etc, during the trials.
Even tho that was my third wife, I was quite young in those days.
Many more things of extremes that I could tell, the rituals, the daringnesses, and strangely enough the success of much of it, way too often to be coincidence I think.
I once had a vision, won't describe it in detail, and was not asleep at the time, but meditating and in somewhat of a 'trance'…afterward, the phone rang, it was a man who was over a thousand miles away, he just had a visitation by an angel who told him of my vision and the content of it to some extent, he was right, no way he could have known but for that angel.
Well, enough, needless to say your post has set extremely well with me, I really enjoyed the writing and the stories and touches of my own soul and local memories, you really have much to say, I don't think I would even remember myself without your prodding, I appreciate it Vincent, your memoirs and your excellent writing of them! Thanks.
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In the first several years of my medical problems there were no medical findings except lots of taut bands in the muscles, leading to a misdiagnosis of Myofascial Pain Syndrome. Since most doctors aren't trained to palpate muscle and the etiology of MPS is unknown, many doctors put MPS in the category of psychological difficulties.
There seems to be a tendency to do this with any disease whose cause is unknown, especially in an absence of positive lab results. I think it's unfortunate that, in my experience, physicians with this tendency play amateur psychologist in a complete absence of psychological information and while making no effort to gather any.
And so I found myself, as someone with no history of psychological/social problems, quite often judged to have them -implicitly – it was never said to my face, but I’d obviously be dismissed. For example, early on, one doctor told me that he felt a little back pain sometimes too, but he’d be darned if that would stop him from skiing! No psychological testing done, no psychosocial history taken, no touching bases with family members, colleagues, friends.
Clearly unprofessional. If a doctor truly feels that he or she has grounds to suspect psychological problems, then he or she should refer the patient for counseling. If the doctor knows that he or she really lacks such grounds, then the judgment shouldn't be made. The percentage of actual hypochondriacs/people freely electing to spend their time and disposable income playing games in doctors’ offices is way too low to justify the assumption that the average undiagnosed patient citing physical symptoms is there for psychological reasons.
As I became emaciated, developed severe osteo and peripheral neuropathy, and skin lesions consistent with Sarcoidosis (even though I don't have Sarcoid), I was, uh, happily, kind of, at long last universally accepted by the medical community as someone with a physical illness.
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Certainly the mind/body is a whole; and certainly these two aspects can be distinguished. From the totality of the evidence that I'm aware of, the body to mind connection is generally much more powerful than the mind to body, although today the latter seems to be discussed more – I think because the former is so obvious.
If you get seriously injured in a car accident, infected, or catch a debilitating or deadly virus, you feel badly about it.
Yet the chief remedies for most major physical health problems that I'm aware of are physical interventions, not learning facts or beliefs about how the mind/body connection may operate and sometimes malfunction.
However, when approaches that address the body haven't worked or when one's reason or intuition lead one to suspect cognitive/emotional factors are at play in a particular physical health problem, then what you found helped you and that has no doubt helped others, is clearly worth trying – also meditation, acupuncture, and any number of alternative therapies. Almost all alternative approaches seem to help some number of people who try them, so I see them as worth trying.
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