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Back in November, 2024, a friend with whom I'd just shared some extraordinary family anecdotes said to me: "You really should write these down so that they are recorded for posterity!"
Her words set me thinking and her advice suddenly seemed to suggest that immediate action was needed. So that same afternoon I went to my computer and these words came straight through me: 'I was born in October, 1940, just as a bomb dropped yards from the maternity ward of Farnborough Hospital. That's Farnborough, Kent, not Hampshire and thankfully the bomb failed to detonate. So I lived to tell my story, such as it is.'
Well, from then on there was no stopping the flow of words. Not just words, but memories long forgotten that returned so vividly it was as if I were re-living the years from birth to the age of twenty-one.
Names and faces from the past filled my days and many of my nights. I couldn't have escaped their impact even had I wanted to do that. I had an absolute certainty that relatives and friends, long dead, had assembled to assist me in my quest.
Perhaps the oddest thing is that I couldn't do it again. Once the last full stop had been put in its place those who had peopled my pages withdrew, leaving me with a manuscript that would bear my name but which I couldn't honestly claim to have written.
That I'd been the scribe rather than the source was, and still is, a very comforting thought. I know now, more even than I knew it before, that death doesn't separate our loved ones from us. They are not lost. Far from it. The love we once shared, we still share and will for eternity. It's our earth-bound sight that limits our vision along with our blinkered perception of 'heaven'.
We simply aren't meant to know all there is to know until we're equipped to understand things currently beyond our understanding.