18. A LOVE BOND WHICH LIVES ON.

 

The day after George died I had to go to Wandsworth Town Hall to register his death. Feeling depressed, I came out into the warm sunshine and whilst walking past the Town Hall I saw something which raised my spirits and actually made me laugh. George had once written a TV script about two bag ladies, one of whom carried her possessions in a Harrods' bag. It was this brand of humor which cheered me up as I saw a bag lady coming towards me muttering to herself. On top of her worldly possessions carried in her bags was an expensive looking fur coat, clearly displayed for everyone to see (it was not as though she needed it handy on such a warm day). I laughed to myself out loud after she had gone by, I was so sure George was trying to cheer me up and let me know he was now all right. I felt he had sent me a message less than 24 hours after passing over.

 

The next night my mother, who had come over on the evening of the day George died and was staying with me for a few days, felt George had also given her a message. George always hated people smoking, and on our last holiday breathing in other people’s smoke made him really ill, triggering off the severe symptoms of the pneumonia which killed him. When Mum first asked if she could smoke (after George had died) I said I would prefer she didn’t in view of George’s traumatic panics over smokers during his final illness in Jersey. However, realizing she felt she needed to smoke in order to calm her nerves in the current situation (George’s body was still on the premises, and she had helped me dress him), I relented. However I did remark on the Tuesday that she was smoking a lot, and that night George seemed to arrange a little ‘accident’ to warn her to cut down on cigarettes. She spilt a drink of milk by her bed, and although the floor was wet some way from her cigarettes the packet itself was dry. When she opened it, however, she found most of the cigarettes soggy and ruined. There was only about one she was able to smoke.

 

Two days later another message came from George to me via a friend, Ann Hawkins. It was a poem which had been read out at her cousin’s funeral. Ann and her mother, Rita, were two of the people George would be most likely to send a message through. Both used to go to Spiritualist meetings and they witnessed the Wills we made out to each other. The poem was, I am convinced, a message from George. It read:

 

‘Death is nothing at all.

I have only slipped away into the next room.

 I am I, and you are you whatever we were to each other, that we are still.

 Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.

Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.

Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.

 I am but waiting for you just around the corner.

All is well.’

 

I have since learned this is an abbreviated version of a quite well-known poem, but I had never heard of it before. The full version came to me from two other sources later, so I felt George sent me this message not once but three times. It is very significant to me that his first contact with me was to make me laugh at one of ‘the little jokes that we enjoyed together’, and three days later I received this poem through the post.

 

Later that day Rose arrived. He had known George for at least 30 years, and before we went to bed he had cheered both Mum and myself up with reminiscences of when he and George were ‘doing skippers’ (sleeping rough) and ‘on the game’. I felt George had also helped to arrange this to raise our spirits and make Mum understand what he went through in his early life.

 

Another touch of humor came when I had to go with Rose to a Spiritualist jumble sale to arrange details for his funeral. George would certainly have enjoyed the joke here, and the woman we met there who conducted the cremation service was exactly the sort of person George would have wanted - a cheerful cockney who also happened to be a lesbian. I gave her a piece about George to read out at the funeral, the poem sent by Ann and a tape of Edith Piaf’s ‘No Regrets’ for the final music. She gave me the full version of the poem ‘All Is Well’ which I pinned to the door of George’s collage room where his coffin lay before the funeral. Later, when I took the poem down, I found a use for the last collage cut-outs he had prepared but not stuck up. I put them on the door to cover up the thumb-tack holes, and give an impression of what to expect inside.

 

At the funeral the ‘All Is Well’ poem came to me from a third source, completely unsolicited. It was from a woman who had worked with George at the Ealing Green Oxfam shop, whom I had never even met before. It was as though George was determined to make me understand the poem was a message from him to me.

 

Another humorous touch came when my eyes fell on one of his movie adverts in the toilet collage. The film was entitled ‘Polly’, which was the name of the fierce-looking nurse who frightened George so in his last days. In the corner of the miniature poster was a horrendous-looking face with fierce, staring eyes not unlike Nurse Polly’s. I remembered Polly glaring at George and ordering him to drink his medicine, and it seemed even in his final terrors he was now seeing little jokes.

 

Two weeks after he died I started writing a regular correspondence with George, feeling sure he could read it. I wrote about things that had happened to me and the way I was feeling, and put a P.S. asking him to help me find some negatives of photos of George and myself which people wanted copies of, as I could not find them in the usual place among our other negatives. The next day something told me to look at the top of the food cupboard in the kitchen. As far as I knew all that was on that shelf was some old photographic/projector equipment and empty envelopes for sending away exposed films for developing, but when I looked there was also an envelope containing some negatives, and the ones I was searching for were about the first ones I looked at. George had read my letter and answered it the very next day.

 

Three weeks after George died there was a sale of books, records and furniture in Battersea District Library which George had marked on the calendar to go to. I felt I had to go, and a book about London caught my eye. When I opened it there was a photograph of the Biograph. This was the cinema, long since demolished, where I had met George 21 years previously. I bought the book, certain George had sent me the photo in the book as a souvenir of our life together - a sort of postcard to say he had moved on but still valued our partnership. (Never before or since have I seen a photograph of this particular cinema anywhere.)

 

Tibby, the cat George had chosen from the Blue Cross, was so affectionate, and without her it would have been much harder to cope with George’s death. Many times as I lay alone in our bed weeping, Tibby would come up and snuggle next to me. On one occasion she even licked my forehead, and I felt that George was telling her to give me a kiss from him, as I used to kiss him on his forehead. Tibby also seems to ‘see’ the spirit world on occasions. The first time it happened was as George lay ill in our living room, and both he and the cat were staring at something I couldn’t see, but which George tried to describe. It was something to do with ‘three’ I believe, maybe three of our cats or the three of us - George, Tibby and myself.

 

Just before he died, it seemed as if George was allowed to tie up some loose ends. A few weeks before he died he noticed that a newsagents shop belonging to the father of a friend of ours was empty. He wrote to the friend, and as a result this person contacted his father in an old people’s home in Southport. Father and son had not kept in close contact, but the last letter George wrote to Stan put him in touch with his father again. A last letter from George to another friend gave some reprimands and good advice about his relationship with his partner. The last letter he wrote to his sister, containing what became his own obituary and epitaph, is described in a previous chapter. Again, it was giving reprimands and advice to those he loved and cared for. I was myself called upon to show my loyalty to George on three separate occasions in the summer of 1991, and passed the test each time. I put him before my mother over the trip to Jersey, I defended him to his sister during their final argument, and I came out twice to two rock’n’roll acquaintances I’d known for about 20 years, telling one of them my partner was a he not a she.

 

Just a month before he died Channel 4 screened the Out episode which contained a small clip of George’s collage and us sitting on the sofa together - it was indeed our obituary as he predicted, and the unedited video including our screen kiss has become a moving souvenir of our relationship. Then we were given those last two weeks to say ‘goodbye’ to each other - the last holiday in Jersey where he made a supreme effort for my sake, and the week together at home when I did my best to fulfil his last wishes. It was as if some plan had all been worked out beforehand, and the date he died, September 29^th, had connexions with 3 people connected to one or both of us.

On October 29^th, one month exactly by date after George died, a friend called Eric rang. He was a member of a Spiritualist development circle and had been to it the night before. Eric had broken contact with us years before, but he got in touch with me after George’s death. It seems the week George was ill Eric had dreamt about him even though he had not seen him for so long.

 

At the development circle the evening before he rang me they were meditating and had to imagine climbing a ladder to a lovely garden. Eric felt he left his body and found himself in a field of flowers. There was a bandstand by a stream, and here he met George. They embraced and George told him he was glad Eric had gotten in touch with me. He also told Eric that he went over very quickly (two weeks is very short indeed for AIDS, and he went quite suddenly in the end). George said he could not stay long with Eric, but they left the bandstand, which also seemed to be a sort of temple, and walked among the flowers and then George moved on. Eric then met a man in a white suit with a beard, whom he described as looking a bit like Tchaikovsky, who gave Eric a glass of water and a crystal daffodil, whilst the real flowers in the field (bluebells, buttercups, etc.) were leaning forward toward Eric to be touched.

 

After getting this phone call I had a compulsion to switch on the radio, which was always tuned to Capital Gold at the time. It was as if George was saying to me: ‘I want to hear music in this house again.’ A record was halfway through as I switched on, but somehow I just knew the next record was the one George wanted me to hear. It was Picketty Witch singing ‘Like Some Sad Old Kind Of Movie’ about two lovers who are separated and can’t stop thinking about each other. Just when they think they have, some little thing reminds them of the way things were, but the lovers have to say ‘goodbye’ and go their separate ways, like in a sad old kind of movie, and they end with broken hearts. It was as if George was describing my feelings and emotions exactly. I went into the other room to write down what had happened, and as I returned to the kitchen they started playing ‘Terry’, the song about a motorcyclist who dies in a crash and his girlfriend asks Terry to ‘wait at the gates of Heaven for me’ and says how hard she prayed for him to live. From his writings I discovered post-humously that George apparently had a love affair with someone called Terry before he met me, and he had died. I felt George was saying he also lost someone whom he loved dearly, and just as Terry was waiting for George, so George will be waiting for me. A little while later they played ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’ which mentions many place names, all of which George and I visited together: California, Georgia (we changed planes at Atlanta twice), Nice, Monte Carlo, the isles of Greece. There was even a reference to doing some ‘subtle whoring’ which seemed appropriate considering George’s earlier lifestyle. The song also contains the line ‘I’ve been to paradise’, which of course was now true for George.

 

I then went into the bedroom, and was struck by the beauty of the tree outside the window. As the sun shone on it the leaves were all red and golden in their autumnal glory. These dead or dying leaves had a splendor they never knew in life when they were green. Only two weeks previously at the Spiritualist church they had read out a passage about taking time to study a tree or a flower or something in nature every day as it brings the spirit in tune with the universe. As I looked at this tree I thought of George in his post-life glory, and later realized it was also symbolic of the cycle of life and rebirth, as next Spring the tree would have green leaves again just as George (and myself) would probably have more Earthly incarnations before we are able to progress permanently to the Spiritual plane. I was so moved I got my camera and photographed the tree.

 

I later discovered that my mother, that very same morning, was sorting through some poems she had written and came across one starting: ‘There is no death, behold the trees dead and dry all winter long’ which described nature being born anew. So both my mother and myself were thinking of trees as a symbol of the cycle of rebirth that same morning (something I had never thought of before in my entire life.) Eric told me he felt he had met George the night before in a field of flowers, and George started the first of many messages to me through the lyrics of records. All this happened exactly one month after George died.

 

Early in November I watched the only film I had recorded from the TV on video since George died. It was ‘Madame Rosa’ starring Simone Signoret, one of his favorite actresses. I could not remember much about the film, but as I watched it I recalled seeing it with George on the TV a year or so back. It was about an ex-prostitute who becomes very ill and her foster child makes sure her last wish is fulfilled, that she be allowed to die at home and not have her life prolonged in hospital.  I then remembered when we watched the film together George had said he would want the same. Confirmation, if I needed it, that I did the right thing in not trying to persuade him to go into hospital.

 

Marlene, a friend of ours who was a bit psychic, told me when I saw her in November that some time after learning of George’s death she thought she heard his voice saying ‘give Tony my love’, though she cannot be sure she did not imagine it as she sometimes ‘hears’ the voice of her conscience too.

 

One of George’s most remarkable messages came on December 10^th. In my letter to him the night before I had asked him if I should keep writing to him in this way or if it was holding us both back when we should be moving on. As I was shaving, Rod Stewart’s song ‘The Killing of Georgie’ kept going round in my head (George sometimes played the song), so I went and played it.

 

I was not at all familiar with George’s record collection, so I then took another record from George’s collection at random and played some tracks without looking to see what they were. When I placed the stylus randomly on the record Dorothy Squires' voice immediately answered the question in my letter the night before (should I stop writing posthumous letters to him?) His reply came loud and clear thru the speakers: ‘Love letters straight from your heart keep us so near while apart’. This was absolutely remarkable as I had not even looked at the sleeve of the record, so had no idea what it was, who was singing or what tracks were on it till I heard the tune and those wonderful words.

 

This marvelous message again confirmed that he reads my letters and also that he feels they keep us close and that I should continue writing them. It was the most comforting message I’d had from him and helped me tremendously, knowing we could communicate in this way.

 

The next track was ‘The Way We Were’ which told me that although we remember the smiles we gave each other, ‘what’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget’. He was becoming more and more depressed before he died, mainly because of his long-term unemployment, and this was causing other problems. That was why he had to move on - he felt he was stuck in a rut here and could not progress. ‘Is That All There Is?’ followed, a semi-recital of memories, disappointments and tragedies in Dorothy Squires’ life, and I laughed at a little joke George used to tell me about one melodramatic incident described in the song. I felt he had made me laugh amongst my tears. The song also contains the words ‘is that all there is to dying?’ This reminded me that there is nothing to be afraid of, although George appeared scared immediately beforehand, when the actual moment came George slipped away suddenly and quietly without even crying out, before either of us knew what had happened.

 

A less appropriate track followed about one partner walking away from the other, and the jilted partner was asking herself would she do it all again. If George was asking me the same question the answer was definitely ‘yes’, though he did not walk away from me, he just had to go when his time came. The 21 years we shared together I would live over and over again, the pain as well as the happiness, because it helped me so much in so many ways. My life was so enriched by knowing George.

 

The same day as I played these records, I got a lovely Christmas/sympathy card (I had never seen one like it before) from my long-standing penfriend Dee in America. The words were so understanding of how I felt. On the envelope was a U.S. postage stamp depicting flowers with the one word ‘love’. This was the word George said to me over and over as he lay dying.

 

On December 22^nd and 23^rd I received two warnings to avoid a certain Spiritualist organization in central London which conducted demonstrations of clairvoyance, etc.. The first warning came from the Spiritualist who conducted George’s funeral. When I visited her church she told me this organization’s demonstrations and seances ‘were a bit of a rip off’. The very next day someone who used to work at the organization’s headquarters told me he overheard conversations which indicated not all the mediums there appeared to be genuine. The fact that this message came from two quite different sources on consecutive days - from a Spiritualist Church President and a skeptic - suggested to me George was trying to warn me off this organization. Since then I have visited various Spiritualist churches etc., but I have not been back to that particular organization’s London headquarters. (At least one ‘medium’ at this organization was definitely a rip-off. All she did, after we’d paid our fee, is ask us all to imagine we were flowers waving in the wind!)

 

The messages via George’s record collection continued into the New Year. One day, whilst trying to find the song he kept singing as he lay ill (about giving the ‘performance of my life’) I played a record at random and it was Shirley Bassey singing two songs about being alone and people going away or dying, ‘Alone Again Naturally’ and ‘Jesse’. The last song includes the phrase: ‘there’s a hole in my bed’ which is just how I felt sometimes. The next track was ‘I Won’t Last A Day Without You’, suggesting we still need each other, and finally ‘You Are The Sunshine Of My Life’ which states ‘I’ll always be around’. The first two tracks described my feelings of loneliness and despair, the third suggested I could not survive the ordeal without George’s help and his messages of reassurance from the other side, and the fourth track seemed to be George speaking directly to me and saying I am still the sunshine of his life, that we seem to be at the beginning though we have loved each other for millions of years (literally according to our belief in reincarnation), and that he will always be around.

 

The night before I had dreamed George had survived his illness (this was to be a recurring theme), and the previous night I had dreamed of George and remembered it clearly for the first time.  I also saw Eric around this time, and he too had dreamed of George. He appeared to be living in a Victorian house and told Eric he was not dead but had to get away from everything. All these things might mean little to other people, but to me they were a great comfort. The message was coming through loud and clear that George’s spirit was not dead, he was still very much around, but had to get away from the Earth plane and the rut he was in.

 

I had been wondering what to do with George’s classical records, which I knew I would never play, and whilst shaving I suddenly realized I already had the answer to this question which I had asked in one of my letters to George; whether I should give them away to friends. I remembered that one of his friends had asked me for some of George’s classical records just the day before, saying he would really be looking after them for George and they would have a good home and be appreciated. I then knew this was the answer I had sought some time before, so most of his classical records were shared out between four of our friends who would appreciate them more than I could. The rest of his classical collection I resolved to give to the Oxfam record and book shop in Ealing where George last did voluntary work.

 

Into February, and when I asked George for advice in my letters it seemed to be given through his records when I got the compulsion to pick one out at random and play it. Sometimes, however, the message was not clear cut and I got confused or misunderstood the message. One day I played a beautiful Moody Blues album, and the songs I heard all had a deep, mystical meaning. One lyric seemed to say I’d see George soon in a setting of fields and forests (I was reminded of Eric meeting George in a field of flowers). Of course ‘soon’ could mean at the end of my Earthly span maybe in 30 or 40 years time. This particular album made me at first think George was urging me to alter my lifestyle in order to make more progress to Spiritual things, but later I wondered if he really meant that we all progress at our own pace and should not be impatient and try to rush it. Certainly the message in the song was that it was up to me to decide what was right for me.

 

Later in February I started writing the account of the last few months of George’s life, concentrating on the last two weeks, and reading what I had written I felt so upset I had to play some of George’s records knowing there would be a message there for me. The records, picked blindly by me, were ‘Sleepless Nights’ (Emmylou Harris), ‘Le Diable de la Bastille’, ‘T’es L’homme Qu’il me Faut’, ‘C’est a Hambourg’ (Edith Piaf), ‘20^th Century Man’, ‘Where Have All The good Times gone?’ ‘Don’t Forget To Dance’ (The Kinks). They all conveyed a meaning to me.

 

‘Sleepless Nights’ described my tears for George’s loss, hidden during the day. Not all the lyrics seemed appropriate, but I understood I should not analyze each word too literally as George had to find songs which conveyed a general feeling of what he wanted to say, but could not necessarily make all the words fit my situation exactly. This might be why I was getting confused recently.

 

The three Edith Piaf songs seemed relevant, especially as we had played her ‘No Regrets’ at George’s funeral. The reference to the Place de la Bastille was significant as this was the area where George had a room when he lived in Paris for several months long before I met him. There may or may not be other hidden messages in the song about destiny. The next song seemed to be dedicated to me, but could also describe what George was to me ‘my love, my light, my life’. The last Piaf song is all about ‘girls, with hearts too big for one man, who wait for sailors’. This could be read as a reference to when George was on the game and the people he met (including women prostitutes), my lifestyle or the gay lifestyle generally, and also it describes aspects of Piaf’s own early life, which George closely identified with. (I don’t really speak French but there were English translations on the record sleeve).

 

The Kinks’ ‘20^th Century Man’ described why George could not stay any longer - the violence, the new technology (making him virtually unemployable), the civil servants (DHSS refusing to re-train him for a new career), the nuclear threat. ‘I’m a 20^th Century man but don’t want to be’ say the lyrics. ‘Where Have All The Good Times Gone’ was self-explanatory, but the most important song was saved till last. ‘Don’t Forget To Dance’ said that, although I was sad and lonely, I must forget things for a while and learn to live - to dance. ‘I would have the next one with you’ seems to mean we will dance together again one day, meanwhile I must be myself and not feel guilty, and dance with whoever I want to. It seems a lighthearted way of saying: ‘forget your troubles and live a little, don’t feel guilty - take life as it comes.’ I couldn’t make things happen, or be something I was not. It was perhaps the boost I needed to hear, as I seemed to have become too serious and was trying to achieve too much too fast.

 

Later that night I had a compulsion to open my 1991 diary, which contained very little apart from addresses, phone numbers and a bank account record. Nevertheless I opened it and found myself looking at a page with a phone number and an address (there was nothing else on that page). It meant nothing at first, and then I remembered it belonged to an Alcoholics Anonymous support group for partners, etc.. I rang them up once when I was worried about one of George’s bouts of heavy drinking, though I never actually went along to a meeting. It reminded me of how unhappy and depressed George was in the last few months of his life, and how this was affecting me. Hard as it was to face and accept, I realized that him ‘moving on’ may well have been the best for both of us, and perhaps the only way either of us could make progress.

 

A few days later I again got the impulse to play some of George’s records randomly, without looking what they were. This time some harsh realities seemed to be conveyed to me. The words said there were too many things we could not share, and I did hurt him sometimes. Now he had got to climb the ladder to see the sun, but he would reach down his hand and help me to follow and together we would see the promised land. Our lives were certainly complicated, with many things we could share and some (classical music, a physical side to our relationship, intellectual discussion of literature and the arts) which we could not. Perhaps living apart made progress possible for both of us and enabled us to escape from the rut we were in.

 

Early in March, before turning the radio on, I said a mental ‘prayer’ to George: ‘If ever you’ve got anything to say to me, you can always use the radio to play a record with a message.’ When I switched it on a song was played which said ‘crying never did anyone any good’, but laughing does, so keep laughing. Even though love does not always do people good (look how hurt and depressed I became because of my love for George after he died) he still loved me. This was definitely another message from him, and I knew he wanted me to try to laugh and not to cry.

 

In March I went up to Scotland and spent most of the time in Glasgow, staying with George’s sister Betty. On March 19^th I had a day trip to Edinburgh, and I asked George to help me find places we had been together - especially Dean Village river walk and a street with a walkway above shops (Victoria Street I believe.)  I managed to find Dean Village and the walk without any trouble, and had completely forgotten till I saw the name that the road at the start of the walk by the river shared his surname. I was feeling so unhappy, lonely and depressed thinking of old times with George on this favorite walk of his that I even wrote a note in his memory in biro on a seat by the river. As I was walking back to Princes’ Street I found myself outside ‘The Samaritans’. I didn’t go in, but I felt George had led me there and was telling me help was at hand if I ever needed it.

 

Walking towards the Castle, I went in the Camera Obscura shop and found and bought a hologram sticker (George knew I liked holograms). Then I started walking down the Royal Mile and a shop name on the other side of the street caught my eye - ‘Gobble And Go’. I knew this was one of George’s little jokes, pointing that out to me. It brought back memories of a place in Sydney, Australia we had frequented called ‘Eat’n’Run’. I went over and bought a cup of soup and a pasty to take away, and looking for a seat on which to eat it I found the row of houses with the walkway above I was hoping to find. I would never have found it if ‘Gobble And Go’ had not caught my eye as I would have continued straight on down the Royal Mile and missed it.  As it was I went down an alley and some steps and found a seat by a place called ‘Preservation Hall’ (which brought memories of the original jazz venue of that name we visited whilst in New Orleans). The seat faced the row of houses I had been looking for. The shop name which helped me find this street was both funny and appropriate in more ways than one. I could almost imagine George saying to me: ‘You just gobble and go’. He often said of certain people that they ‘grab the grub and go’. It could also, of course, have a sexual connotation.

 

I continued on down the Royal Mile and took a photo of an archway leading to a courtyard, which I later discovered was the very one I had photographed George standing in 21 years before. To end my day in Edinburgh I felt compelled to repeat our climb of Arthur’s Seat, a big unspoilt hill near the Royal Mile. We had only climbed this once, 21 years before. The whole day was very emotional, and I felt George was with me and guiding me.

 

At the end of February I was trying to write a letter to Dee, my American penfriend. I was feeling so depressed it was all coming out in the letter, so I had to scrap it and I went over to George’s records, although I had received no real message to play them. As usually happens if I play his records on my own initiative, I did not find any really relevant tracks. However, when I looked at a flap on the sleeve of the album cover I found just two verses of a song lyric which were absolutely right for me. No other lyrics were printed on the album cover, and even the title of the song (Conversation Love) was appropriate, because our love had been continued beyond the grave in conversation by letters, song lyrics, etc..

 

Before going over to the records, I had written down a list of my options. They included staying in the flat, moving away, committing suicide, meeting someone and have them move in with me, me move in with them, meeting someone but continuing to stay in the flat on my own. I considered these options one by one, and decided I could not move away from the flat under any circumstances, nor could I envisage anyone moving in with me. I had ruled out suicide as I believed it would solve nothing, I would still have to face the same problem in a future incarnation. George’s message told me to be patient and confirmed my decision to stay in the flat, with all its memories of our life together, was the correct one:

 

‘Conversation Love

Throw sad reflexions to the wind where they belong

Surprising things will rise to the top

And hand painted dreams will flow

All of the pain has to go and find its space

For love will come and take its place.

 

Full time illusions always hurt you in the end

And haunting ghosts can replay their part

To keep tender smiles down

Don’t let them turn you around

The answer’s clear, your peace has always been right here.’

 

The reference to ‘full time illusions’ I took to be the hope I had cherished that we would still be living together into old age, though George was always telling me he would never live to collect his pension.

 

About the middle of April the most wonderful thing happened: George ‘sent’ me a present. On the last day out we spent together on a sandy beach in Jersey he had been very concerned about the fine sand getting into my cassette player. He told me to make sure I got a cover for it when I came back to Jersey with Mum.

 

My mother and I were due to go to Jersey in May, and as the month approached I searched the shops and markets in vain for a cassette player cover. One day in April I was in the kitchen when suddenly something told me that I would find what I was looking for in a cupboard where we kept presents we bought/accumulated throughout the year for Christmas and birthdays. I kept telling myself: ‘Don’t be silly, there’s no cassette player cover in there.’ However I opened the cupboard and found a canvas cover which just fitted my cassette player. It even had a zip-up pouch for batteries, and a string to wear it around my neck (very useful on coach and train journeys). It was actually supposed to be a case for money and valuables. We had bought or been given it some time before but it never seemed very practical for that purpose and I had forgotten all about it. It seemed George had seen me try in vain to buy a cover, and managed to find the present he would have wanted to give me before he left. I think it is highly significant that the phrase which came into my head was that I would find ‘what you are looking for’ not that I would find a specifically designed ‘cassette player cover’ in the cupboard.

Also in April I had a private 15-minute sitting with a medium called Pat Anderson at the Battersea Spiritualist Church. Everything she told me seemed quite accurate, and I got some good advice. I had to sort out my priorities, not lose confidence. I was going through a difficult patch but should not be disappointed with myself. I was told a planned holiday out of the country soon (Jersey?) was a good idea. (I had wondered if returning to Jersey was wise, but as it turned out it did me good.) I was told of an anniversary in May (George’s birthday was May 27^th, my grandmother’s May 26^th). Between May and June I would get some incentive to pick up, but I must learn from past experience and must not be too hard on myself, I am the way I was meant to be. I should relax (George was always saying that to me near the end). I should uplift my spirits and not take life too seriously. All this meant so much to me. I had been taking things very seriously and worrying because I felt I was not making enough spiritual progress. I felt I needed a change in lifestyle, but did not know how to achieve it. I even tried vegetarianism till I got so ill I had to give it up.

 

The medium also told me that when younger I felt myself in competition (with my brother who always had to prove he was more daring than me, or others generally because of my physical handicaps? Either could be accurate.) I was also told I had felt restricted in the past. (Living with George, or any partner, meant all sorts of restrictions. What I could eat, what I could do and when. Now I was free to do more or less what I liked.) Finally, regarding relationships, the medium said I had been disappointed. (It is certainly hard for me to make relationships, and ones I had before George disappointed me. My relationship with George was disappointing in that it ended prematurely with his death.) At this point the sitting was interrupted by a knock on the door indicating our time was up.

 

These are the generalities the medium described, but there were more specific things and people she mentioned. A lady who had chest problems (Levy, a neighbor we were quite friendly with had one lung and had died a few years previously from chest trouble). A baby girl was mentioned (George’s nephew James and Marlene, his wife, had a stillborn baby boy, but named a baby girl born in October 1991 after George - Marlene Georgina. If it had been a boy they would have called it George). A man who enjoyed his drink was brought to me, just after talk of the May anniversary and needing to relax and be what I am. I feel it must have been George, who had bouts of heavy drinking in the year or so before he died, especially as this was followed by a reference to Australia associated with happiness. (Our holiday in Australia in 1990 was the highpoint of our travels, and George was happier in Sydney than many other places we had visited over the years. So much so we planned to return in1992 if we could afford it.) Then came a message from someone who was a carpenter or good at woodwork, which was undoubtedly George’s father (he used to make very good wooden toys as a hobby). He said do what you are good at, which seems to be writing among other things. Finally I got a message from a lady who had problems with her legs and ankles, which I later decided must be a family friend who was very concerned about me as a child because of my medical problems, and whom we called Auntie Laughlin (she had permanently very swollen and painful legs and ankles.)

 

Right near the end of the session I was told that I was aware of Spirit, and that it was not my imagination. (So all the little messages really were from George and the Spiritual plane.)

 

However, sometimes things were not so clear-cut. After seeing two TV programs on Tibetan Buddhism in one week, which contained a lot of evidence about reincarnation and emphasized the importance of meditation for spiritual development, I asked George in a letter for guidance on how to go about learning meditation. Four days later a leaflet came into my hands when I was in the library looking for a book on Jersey. It was about lectures and classes by the Theosophical Society, including one on meditation. I did go along to one of the general (free) classes about Theosophy and intended to go to one on meditation, but although the class I attended seemed quite interesting when I read a pamphlet I bought there about Theosophy I found their beliefs too dogmatic and way-out. As I had long been vaguely intrigued by Theosophy without knowing much about it, this served as a warning not to get too involved with this cult. Like the warning against that Spiritualist organization, I felt I was being guided in the right direction. No doubt meditation would be good for me, but I have no desire to learn it from people whose ideas are so confused and who dogmatically insist spiritualist medium’s messages come from empty astral shells of dead personalities whose real selves are asleep and know nothing of what happens on Earth. I know from experience that George is wide awake and knows everything that happens here. His own words came to me very strongly at this time, a phrase he often used: ‘I don’t miss a thing.’

 

Just before I went on holiday with my mother to Jersey, Rose sent George a card for his posthumous birthday depicting two kittens and the message ‘Friendship is a special kind of love’. Rose had written on the back: ‘Happy Birthday to George on 27^th. Love always. I have not forgotten our friendship.’

 

After getting this posthumous birthday card, I asked George if he had a message for Rose, and played two of his records at random. In reply to Rose’s message about not forgetting their (over 30 years’) friendship came a song called ‘Remember’ by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, including the words ‘Remember... he used to sing for his supper, he used to sing for his dinner.... come on back to me, make everybody happy as can be. Please remember.’ Both George and Rose used to metaphorically ‘sing for their supper’ when on the game, and George does come back to us in spirit and wants us to be happy.

 

The second song, by Barbra Streisand, begins: ‘I remember sitting on the front steps feeling the softness of a warm summer rain....’  George and Rose were often homeless and slept out in all weathers. One of Rose’s regular places was a coal cellar accessed by some steps at the front of the house, so I felt George must have often sat on those or other steps in the rain with Rose. The song contained references to sadness, pain, visions of yesterday, ‘my dreams have come and gone’, ‘.... kiss me in the rain, bring back all those memories, I don’t even mind if we get wet.’ (Rose greets everyone, man or woman, with a peck on the cheek and must have thus kissed George many times in the rain. This is also the way Rose says goodbye, so it is as if George is asking him to kiss him farewell in the rain as they did so many times in the past.)

 

The song then goes on to speak of drifting outside of myself (as in astral traveling, or when the spirit leaves the body permanently at death) ‘searching for the inner sense I’ve lost along the way. Come join me in my fantasy, step out of Space and Time.’ (George had felt he had achieved all he could here and was searching for something he could not find on Earth. He is outside of Space and Time in the Spiritual world, which seems like a fantasy to us, but Eric visited it, and Rose and myself will join George in that other reality some day.)

 

So George not only sends messages for me but also for his other friends who remember him. Strange how Rose wrote on the card about not forgetting their friendship, and both songs picked blindly at random are about remembering friendships, both containing that very word ‘remember’ which was also the title of the first song. Quite incredible. Could just be coincidence, but there comes a time when there are so many of these so-called ‘coincidences’ that ceases to be a plausible explanation – someone is definitely sending messages to us. This is the reason this chapter is so long. It is not the individual incidents, the messages, which are important. It is the endless communications, the endless series of so-called 'coincidences' which prove that George is alive and well in another dimension, whilst keeping in touch with us in this one.

 

On our Jersey holiday my mother and I both felt George was with us, especially on the last day when we managed to do our shopping and see all the places we wanted by bus, making maximum use of the sunshine. None of it went according to my pre-arranged plan, which was for us to go round on the buses and shop on the way back. Rain in the morning changed our plans so we shopped first, and I quickly re-arranged the timetable to enable us to see as many bays as possible plus the glass church which we had not yet visited. My calculations were an hour out (allowing less time) yet we still managed to see everything and be back in time for dinner. This was only possible because some buses were early and others late, enabling us to make connexions which were impossible according to the bus timetables. Was George working behind the scenes?

 

We were in Jersey on May 27^th, George’s birthday (he would have been 49). I went into a shop near our hotel to get him a birthday card, and a suitable one came to hand. The words were meant for George - about remembering the past, enjoying the present and looking forward to the future, but they could just as easily be a message from George to me. I put the card up in our hotel bedroom, and in our living room when I got home. We spent much of George’s birthday at Jersey Zoo, which George found so peaceful.

 

Everything about the holiday (the coach journey, Channel crossing, the terminals, embarkation point, hotel room, dining room table, hotel staff) were similar to when I went with George yet sufficiently different to prevent too painful memories being jogged. Our room had virtually the same non-view facing a blank wall as the one with George, but it was one floor above and one room nearer the stairs, which meant everything in the room was the other way round because the plumbing went down the dividing wall. Had we been in the next room the furniture would have been laid out just as in the room I shared with George and this would have been very traumatic, re-living my discovery of just how ill he was. I was thus saved the ordeal of imagining him sitting by the basin trying to shave, too weak to stand, because the basin looked quite different on the opposite wall.

 

In a military graveyard in a park near the hotel I saw an epitaph which summed up my feelings for George at the time: ‘There is someone who thinks of you always, and tries to be brave and content.’ My mother later wrote it out for me, substituting ‘often’ for ‘always’, and I put it on my bedroom wall for a time.

 

In early June in York Road near Waterloo station whilst on the way to work I saw another bag-lady with a good fur coat wheeling all her belongings on a railway or airport trolley. She and her bags were all very neat, but she had far too many to be someone just going on holiday. Like the day after George died it was sunny, yet this bag-lady was determined to wear her fur despite the weather.

 

Also in June I went to see a preview of the musical ‘Grand Hotel’, originally due to preview in London around the time George died. He had planned to go and included a publicity leaflet in his collage. It caught my eye as I was writing to Rose asking if he would like to come with me. In the event he could not make it, and neither of them missed much. The music and sets were terrible, and what is a musical without these? One thought did occur to me though near the end of this story of the lives of various characters who stay at the hotel: this Earth is a ‘Grand Hotel’ and we are all booked in at different times for various durations, but reality is outside. The revolving doors on the set seemed symbolic of the cycle of life and reincarnation - we exit and re-enter the Grand Hotel many times, but always it is an escape from reality - a vacation in a materialistic fantasy world where we meet and interact with all sorts of people.

 

In the middle of June I went for a drink after work with a lesbian colleague whose girlfriend had died in a cycling accident the month before. She too strongly felt her partner’s presence, though in a more direct way than I did with George. She also came across posthumous ‘gifts’ from her partner: A long-forgotten undeveloped reel of film which contained some lovely, happy pictures of them both, some unfinished poems about their love written by her partner. Although they lived in east London the partner died in the same hospital in Tooting where George was taken. Her funeral was held in the hospital chapel, and she was buried in the same cemetery across the road from the hospital where George was cremated and his ashes presumably scattered by crematorium staff, as we requested. Patterns or coincidences everywhere. (To add a note of flippancy, why are so many hospitals located next to cemeteries? It may be convenient for the hospital morgue, but it is hardly comforting for patients to see this view outside their windows.)

 

One day the same month our cat was kissing me as she often did, when she almost bit my nose (this had never happened before or since). I felt her mouth open and her teeth but she didn’t hurt me. I then remembered George used to sometimes playfully bite my nose (or my ear) and that did hurt. I’m sure this was another little prompt from George via Tibby to remind me he is still around, like the time she licked my forehead and the many times she came under the covers in our bed and snuggled next to me during the long winter of 1991/92 just at the times during the night when I was upset and missing George most.

 

At the 1992 Europride Festival I was handed a leaflet about befriending HIV+ prisoners on death row in the USA. It seemed George had arranged for that leaflet to come my way, as it was exactly the sort of thing I needed at the time to give my life a sense of purpose. I felt it was probably the only way I could then help someone as in my current state I was liable to break down if I actually had to talk to people in a traumatic situation, but writing was something I could do. I felt more positive about this type of voluntary work than any other I had considered, so I followed it up.

 

One morning in July I awoke from a nightmare in which I returned from holiday to find our flat ransacked - all my memories and mementoes of George gone or destroyed. That was my greatest fear now, and I woke up shouting: ‘No, No!’ I had been feeling very depressed as there seemed no purpose in my life whatsoever. Even my job was boring and seemed useless. I actually started crying that morning because I had woken up to another day and was still alive. I asked George to help me, and to play me some songs on the radio. Three came on in succession soon afterwards which seemed to have significance, saying happiness is all around and I’ll be shown where it is (‘The Pied Piper’). ‘The Carnival Is Over’ about our last goodbye was self-explanatory, and finally came Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man’, a favorite song of both of us which reminded me that we did share some music together, and of how we stood by each other through the years, despite all the difficulties. That night after work, still feeling depressed, I turned on the radio and heard Neil Sedaka singing: ‘this will be our last song together’ and that this was the only way to say goodbye as spoken words would make us cry. This was exactly what George did - he sang me songs like ‘Give Peace A Chance’ as his way of saying goodbye. The song on the radio said we must go our separate ways. It was obvious George was telling me to let go, but as Neil’s song said, echoing one of his earlier hits, ‘breaking-up is hard to do.’

 

Late that night before going to bed I watched an old episode of the classic series ‘The Twilight Zone’ on TV. This program was the clearest indication yet that George wanted me to let go of the past and move on. It told the story of an actor who was reminiscing about the past and his dead lover, and suddenly he is transported back 30 years and meets not only the woman he loved, but his best friend who had also died. But nothing is as he remembers it, they act strangely and even hostile towards him, so that he is glad when he is transported back to the present. He then finds something in his pocket - a script he’d angrily snatched from his dead lover’s hand in the dream as she was fanning herself with it instead of paying attention to him. As he read it, it became clear the whole episode had been acted out - a little scene to make him want to return to his own time. I too could not live in the past, which was not all honey and roses anyway. George and I were now in two different worlds and he wanted me to live my own life till the time came for us to meet again. That was the clear message he had been sending me over and over all day long.

 

That same month I took some annual leave and visited some friends of myself and George. Some of them lent me copies of letters from George, one written in November 1989 and one in January 1991. Both had passages about what would happen if either of us died. George wrote that he felt he would be able to cope better than I would, then seemed to contradict this by saying in one letter he could not contemplate life without me and in the second letter he actually says he would take an overdose once he had sorted out all the affairs after my funeral. Very perceptively he wrote about the difficulty of carrying on surrounded by photos, things we had bought and shared together, and memories to remind the one who was left of the one who had died.

 

In the second letter, written 8 months before he died, George tells Lena and his partner of the importance of making out Wills leaving everything to each other, and said he was enclosing two Will forms from the Gay Bereavement Project especially for gay partners. I asked them whether they had done this and they admitted they hadn’t, and they’d lost the forms. I then stressed the importance of doing this and said I would send them some more forms. I explained that relatives of the deceased partner could claim at least half the things in the flat if there was no Will and no receipts to prove they belonged to the surviving partner.

 

Later I received a note from Lena’s partner telling me that while I was talking to him in their flat he could see ‘George’s expression, eyes and face in your face at times’. He and Lena felt that meant that George was with me. (I think it did indicate that through me he was posthumously reminding them of the importance of making out Wills, since they had ignored his last plea and carelessly lost the forms. I think he has come very close and encouraged me to give advice to people at other times also). Lena’s partner then went on to describe a dream about their much loved cat, Mitzi, which died in 1989. In the dream he found her sitting on a lawn, picked her up and cuddled her, and she then merged into his body, like electricity. On the occasion described above it seems George’s spirit merged into my body, and at other times into that of our cat, Tibby.

 

That Spring Dirk and Paul came down for a weekend with their car, so I took the opportunity to take three bags of clothes and shoes (mainly George’s), plus the used stamps we had collected for years, to Oxfam. We were going to Kingston, but we did not find the Oxfam shop there so we went to the Kings Road Chelsea shop, and someone who used to work with George in that shop was there. It felt so right to hand George’s things over to his colleague Pat in the shop which he once managed. I kept his old suede overcoat at the time for purely sentimental reasons.

 

We then made our way to Marble Arch and parked in Notting Hill to take the Tube. We had tried to park at Holland Park Tube station unsuccessfully, then I thought of trying Linden Gardens where Roy used to live. As soon as we turned into the street we found free parking. I’m certain George made sure I took his clothes to the Oxfam shop in the Kings Road rather than Kingston, and at the right time to hand them to his former shop colleague, and that he also helped to find us that parking space right where I once waited whilst he visited Roy soon after George and I met.

 

The following week some very strange things happened which I think George had a hand in, yet probably no-one else would believe it. I just know they were typical of him and exactly the sort of things he would do.

 

I wanted to get a message to someone who lives near me, but I did not know his exact address. I wrote the letter anyway and put it in an envelope, and two days later I saw him outside his block of flats and was able to deliver the note. This was a very rare opportunity, and the message bore fruit. I believe George helped me because he knew it would be beneficial for me, and was exactly the kind of thing he would have done while alive, though other people might not have approved of the contents of the letter. (It was to a local rent boy, and it certainly helped me to move on with my life. For a long time he visited me regularly as a client.)

 

The following weekend, the first in August, I am sure George arranged a free trip to Hastings for me, which proved a very relaxing weekend with good weather and plenty of time on the beach. A very strange set of ‘coincidences’ made it impossible for me to buy a ticket on both the outward and return journeys, which was useful as I had quite heavy expenses and was likely to incur more in connexion with our friends in Hastings.

 

Whilst I was staying there with Rose, I watched a late night horror movie which seemed to have a relevant message at the very end. A character in the movie represents a form of ‘life after death’. There is even a direct link with ‘George’s’ tree outside our bedroom window which seems to be an analogy of his survival, when this character in the movie grows a new arm to replace one which has been severed, like a plant or tree might grow new shoots or branches. George has a new, healthy astral body to replace the sickly material one he had here on Earth seemed to be the message.

 

The most significant thing, however, was the message this movie character gives to another in the film: it is that they must part, but will be together again one day. Meanwhile the one left behind must ‘heal people and write our story’.  I have been told by Spiritualist mediums that I have healing powers, so perhaps this was confirmation I should try and develop them. Certainly I have said healing prayers which have been answered, though not in the case of George who wanted to move on and refused the recommended medication. Also I am writing this, our life story, and have begun to feel that perhaps this is indeed very important, and maybe even one of the things I have to complete before I can achieve my life purpose.

 

Later in August I was feeling depressed and decided to play one of George’s records to see if he had a message for me. Choosing an album and track blindly as usual, Bob Dylan started singing a depressing song called ‘Dirge’. In complete contrast this was followed by a love song, ‘You Angel You’. I switched the record off, thinking no clear message was coming through and it was not the right time. If George had a message, he would make sure it got through to me.

 

A few days later I was feeling very depressed again, and I really did feel I received a message to go and play one of George’s records. Out of all his LPs, I again blindly picked the very same Bob Dylan album and played the same side. The album had been put away properly, and was not protruding any more than a lot of others - in fact I had to dig my fingers in and pull it out from the rest. As I placed it on the turntable I still had no idea what the album was, and as I placed the stylus randomly on a track I hovered for a moment between the 2^nd and 3^rd, and something told me to go for the 3^rd track. ‘You Angel You’ came on, and I knew I had to listen to the end of the album. Two more love songs followed, ‘Never Say Goodbye’ and ‘Wedding Song’, and all three contained very comforting and meaningful words: ‘Never say "goodbye", because my dreams are made of iron and steel, with a big bouquet of roses hanging down from the heavens to the ground. The crazy waves roll over me, as I stand upon the sand and wait for you to come and grab hold of my hand.’ To me this meant he never really said goodbye, he was sending me some symbolic roses from heaven, and he waits there on the symbolic shores of the next world for me to come and join him hand in hand.

 

The last song also had some beautiful words, including the following: ‘the tune which is yours and mine to play upon this Earth, we’ll play it out the best we know whatever it is worth, for what’s lost is lost, we can’t regain what went down with the flood, but happiness is you to me and I love you more than blood... if there is eternity I’ll love you there again... you’re the other half of what I am, you’re the missing piece, and I love you more than ever with that love that doesn’t cease... just being next to you is the natural thing for me, and I could never let you go no matter what goes on, ’cos I love you more than ever now that the past has gone.’ This was all so comforting, and is completely self-explanatory. He was speaking directly to me through the song I was too impatient to listen to the first time he chose this album for me.

 

The other track I played that time, ‘Dirge’, could have been a mistake - perhaps I picked the wrong place to put the stylus down and that is why the same album came into my hand the next time but the third track was chosen as the correct starting point. On careful listening, however, it could be that the depressing ‘Dirge’ did have a message which was taken too personally by me. There are references to suicide and possibly S&M, plus the recurring phrase ‘I hate myself for loving you’. As is evident from even his earliest writings, George had a fascination with death, and even wrote to a friend that he was committing suicide slowly. I happened to re-read this letter the same day as I played the record a second time, enabling me to come to a possible interpretation I would not have thought of before: perhaps it was this death-wish and the more negative aspects of his lifestyle he hated himself for loving whilst on Earth. (He was, of course, also quite heavily into S&M.)

 

The day before our 22^nd anniversary of meeting I went into my usual newsagents knowing I would find a suitable anniversary card with George’s help. The very first card I looked at was an anniversary card with relevant words, so I knew it was from George to me as much as from me to him. For the past few days I had been longing for some chocolate with a coffee flavoring, but could find none. Card in hand I looked at the sweets in the shop and the walnut whips caught my eye because George liked them. Sure enough I was looking at a coffee flavored variety I had never seen before. I knew George was proving our relationship still lived by these tokens of love he had found for me. Even more amazing, in my last posthumous letter to George I had sent him my love and asked him to send me his, and on the card were the words ‘with all my love on our anniversary.’ Was this mere coincidence? Just try finding an anniversary card which doesn’t mention ‘husband’, ‘wife’ or ‘wedding’ and you’ll see just how great the odds are of finding a card with these words and no reference to heterosexual relationships, yet it was the first one I picked up. The odds against doing this are tremendous; if I'd had a £1 bet on it I could have lived well on the winnings for days!

 

A year after those dreadful last two weeks of George’s life there were so many anniversaries, and I often got very weepy and depressed when on my own with time to think. Very early in the morning of September 22^nd, the anniversary of that dreadful journey home from Jersey, I wrote a short, depressing letter to George asking him to comfort me and give me the strength and incentive to go on. I wanted, if possible, to be able to see and/or talk to him like our friend Eric had done in his development circle. In my case I hoped for a very vivid dream I would remember when I awoke and would know it was a real meeting between our astral bodies. That very same night, probably about an hour before I wrote the letter, my mother put her book down in bed to turn off the light and go to sleep, and had a momentary flash in her mind of George’s happy, smiling face looking so fit and well. Naturally she conveyed this ‘vision’ to me, and it did comfort me. But I did wonder why other people got these visions and I didn’t, but as my mother said I got other messages direct from George. It may have been that I was just not able to tune in on that wavelength, or perhaps I was too close and it would be too painful for me. Anyway, George did manage to convey the message through my mother that he was well, happy and near us all. Once again he had answered my letter the very next day - in actual fact he appeared to my mother before I even wrote it, knowing what was in my mind before I expressed it in writing.

 

The next morning I played one of his records at random. This time it was ‘When You Smile’ by Roberta Flack, a song he had already posthumously picked for me back in February. It was all about how much he loved me, especially when I smiled. This was the record with that wonderful song lyric printed on the sleeve (one lyric only) ‘Conversation Love’ beginning ‘throw sad reflexions to the wind... ‘. Once again George was telling me to smile, be happy, not to let ‘haunting ghosts’ ‘turn me round’ and ‘keep tender smiles down’.

 

Later, in the early hours of the next day, I was about to go to bed when I noticed a photo album had come out of the shelf - it was the first in a series recording our life together. I took it as a sign George wanted me to look at it, so I did, and the pictures were so happy I was cheered up thinking of our good times. Then I got a bit worried there might be a hidden message. George was so much happier in those early days, and he had told me much later that I had suppressed part of his care-free personality over the years. He said that due to my upbringing and consequent hang-ups, whenever he ‘camped it up’ or showed his rebelliousness against the heterosexual establishment in public, I was sometimes embarrassed and tried to suppress him, making him feel inhibited. He often quoted the Oscar Wilde line from ‘Ballad of Reading Jail’ - ‘each man kills the thing he loves’. Had I really killed his exuberant nature, adding to his depression? Looking at those early pictures there was a happy, care-free George whom I fell in love with and whom I seemed to have lost over the years, though we still had some happy times till the day he died. But surely it was not all my fault - time, age, unemployment, boredom, illness all played their part in making him depressed. After all, he had also told me that I was all that kept him going when he felt in this mood.

 

I played one of his records in the usual blind, random manner and the track I had chosen was very comforting. If I had helped to suppress part of his personality, this was not the main message he was trying to get over to me, though we had both to learn from our mistakes. I think the photo album was just a way of saying go back to the beginning and remember all the happy times in the 21 years we had together. The song said that this life is just one of many we have had and will spend together throughout eternity. I repeat the words below:

 

 

 

 

Old Souls

Our love is an old love baby, it’s older than all our years

I have seen in strange young eyes familiar tears

We’re old souls in a new life baby

They gave us a new life to live and learn

Some time to touch old friends and still return

 

Our paths have crossed and parted, this love affair was started long long ago

This love survives the ages, in its story lives are pages

Fill them up, may ours turn slow

 

Our love is a strong love baby, we give it all and still receive

And so with empty arms we must still believe

All souls last forever so we need never fear goodbye

A kiss when I must go... no tears... in time... we kiss hello.

 

Everything George believed about reincarnation was in these words.

 

A year after George died, and two years since we were last there together, I returned to Lloret de Mar where we spent so many holidays. It had changed significantly in the last two years, and our favorite bars and cafes had gone. I felt that it was time to move on and explore pastures new in future years. But George was definitely with me and our friend Rose who accompanied me on this trip.

 

On September 29^th, exactly a year after George passed over, we went to Barcelona and explored the Gaudi places that George and I used to visit. After walking up a bit of The Ramblas and making a detour to explore Placa Real and part of the old town, I doubled back across The Ramblas to catch a glimpse of the Guell Palace, and on checking the door discovered there was a tour of the building and roof at 11 a.m.. It was just 11 a.m., so I’m sure George helped arrange we were there at the right time. We had never managed to get inside this Gaudi building before, so it was exciting for me, especially the roof. George and I had been on the roof of another Gaudi building together (the Casa Milo) and this was similar though much smaller. I cried as I looked around all the wonderful sculptured chimney pots, etc. having no-one I could really share it with (Rose was apathetic about it all), yet I knew George was there with me in spirit.

 

Later, just before 5pm at the hour George passed over, I left a small artificial bouquet of flowers in the support columns of the Gaudi tunnel at Guell park, a place George and I loved so much.

 

On the day we left Rose and I visited Calella, a town George and I had often passed through on the way to Barcelona. We meant to visit it one day, but never got around to it. This day with Rose, however, George was with us. We wanted a strawberry flan, but were short of money and they were 200 pesetas each. I said wait and we will see them cheaper. Further along they were 175 pesetas, but around the corner on the way to the beach Rose pointed out a shop where they had pieces of flan on cardboard trays with a plastic spoon so you could take them away at the ridiculously low price (for Spain) of 125 pesetas. We sat and ate them, enjoying the lashings of cream which George knew we loved, and which was two or three times the quantity you usually get on such cakes. I know George helped us find this bargain.

 

On a more somber note, I passed down a street in Lloret near our hotel which George and I often walked down together, and I remembered with a chill what had happened exactly two years ago when we were there and George heard someone call his name, looked round and saw our dead neighbor Levy waving to him from outside the bar which had the word L’avi in its name. That vision had been a warning to George and myself that we only had one more year on this Earth together, and that this would be our last time in Lloret together.

 

Twice whilst in Spain, on September 28^th and 29^th, I was on the threshold of death and reunion with George.  The first time I nearly drowned in rough seas and strong currents and had to cry for help. A Red Cross lifeguard helped me get back to the shore. I thought afterwards that I would have been with George had I not cried for help, but I did not want to die by drowning or being dashed to pieces against rocks. The next day in Barcelona Rose pulled me from the path of a motorcycle when I looked the wrong way crossing a road. It seems George was reminding me it was not yet time for me to join him.

 

Towards the end of October, after coming home from a bereavement group meeting in which we talked about life after death and I shared some of George’s messages with the group, I started laughing and smiling to myself thinking: ‘I’m left to look after all the lame ducks.’ George had often said he was surrounded by lame ducks. He looked after them, now it was my turn. I played some of his records and wrote him a letter. I was getting confused messages. Two tracks from Dylan’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and 3 Kinks tracks were played at random. At the end of Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’ it mentions that the people in the song ‘are all quite lame’, a reference to my lame ducks, and then it says ‘don’t send me no letters no, not unless you mail them from Desolation Row’. Also ‘You ask me how I am, is this some kind of joke?’ The three Kinks tracks talked about being pressurized, life being mundane, repetitive and predictable, but said that our love still had some way to go and we should stay close. I was confused by all these messages, and thought perhaps I should cut down, or stop altogether, on the letters to George.

 

Then I suddenly realized it was all a big joke. I was laughing at being left to look after the lame ducks, and felt George was smiling too. Then he plays me two nonsensical, surrealist Dylan songs. Of course it is ‘some kind of joke’ asking George how he is when he is dead, yet the joke’s on us, the living, because he is more alive than we are. I should continue the letters because they are all mailed from Desolation Row, i.e. this Earth Plane which so depressed him, and I should include news about our lame ducks. We still need to stay close and my life may not suddenly change drastically, but the thing was not to take it too seriously, as the medium told me months previously. I must smile and enjoy life, treating some of its more tedious and annoying aspects as a joke. ‘You have to laugh or you’d cry’ was one of George’s sayings, and it’s far better to laugh.

 

In November 1992 I went to the Jerry Lee Lewis fan clubs’ (there were two in the country at the time) annual convention in Newport, Wales. I had a marvelous time, made some new friends (who were to be long-term and crucial in helping me move on after George’s death) and got to know old ones better. Jerry’s sister, Linda Gail Lewis, was there. George liked some of her Country recordings, so would have appreciated the ones she performed, and also Johnny Allen and the Bayou Alligator Band who played some Cajun music, which George also liked. I danced and felt he was with me in spirit. He surely brought me to this Convention, for in retrospect it was the turning point which gave me a new circle of my own friends, enabling me to avoid being monopolized by George’s lame ducks.

 

On the Saturday night I actually won a raffle for the first time in my life, and in such a way I just know George arranged it all. I picked up a book of postcard reproductions of 1950s rock’n’roll artwork (album covers, film posters, etc.), very similar to a book of postcards of 1950s trash films George had used early on when creating his film collage. I knew this book was exactly what I needed to enlarge his collages, or replace any of them if they became too tatty, but when I inquired they said it was not for sale but would be in the raffle. I bought one strip of raffle tickets, but the person in front of me was buying 5 strips and did not want the next consecutive 5 strips of numbers, choosing them instead at random throughout the book. I just had the next strip, and won top prize with ticket 67 (the numbers went at least into the 500s) which was a free weekend for two at the Convention next year.

 

Later in the evening the organizer of the Convention came along with a bonus prize, the postcard book I had looked at early on in the evening. There were many other prizes in the raffle, but I won the top prize worth about £180 or so, plus the very booklet George would have liked for his music room collage. I felt he was saying, yes go ahead and change or enlarge the collage if you like and come back next year and enjoy yourself. It was a good weekend with a good crowd of people and I felt George was encouraging me to do this sort of thing more often. I exchanged phone numbers with some fans and even got invited to a party in a few weeks time. After that my social life just took off like a rocket.

 

Also at the weekend were several reminders of the wonderful New Orleans holiday George and I had together in 1983, and the wonderful reunion we had at New Orleans bus station after I’d been touring Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana on my own. During the weekend they played a video about Mardi Gras which brought the holiday all back to me. On the way back to London in the train there were more reminders in the form of another fan’s photo albums which included many of the places I had seen on my trip, plus a photo of the theater below our hotel on Canal Street. I could not believe it when I saw that photo, for it was not the normal sort of thing anybody would take a picture of (I think some artist they liked was appearing at the theater, hence the photo).

 

During the weekend I also had a trip to Cardiff and retraced the steps George and I had taken there on a day trip in 1986. This brought some tears to my eyes, as did some of the songs I heard over the weekend. Chas ‘Dr Rock’ White gave a talk on the Saturday illustrated with taped music, and played The Drifters’ ‘Save The Last Dance For Me’ which he said was played at someone’s funeral. Immediately tears streamed from my eyes as I understood the words in a quite different light - they now said to be happy, dance, laugh, sing, have your fun with anyone, life’s to be enjoyed like sparkling wine, ‘but don’t forget who’s taking you home and in who’s arms you’re gonna be. Darling, save the last dance for me.’ I know George will ‘take me home’ and I’ll have the ‘last dance’ with him when my life is over. Linda also brought tears to my eyes with the ‘Tennessee Waltz’. The words are about someone losing their lover to a rival, but the beautiful tune had me crying when Linda played and sung so movingly about losing her ‘little darling’ during the Tennessee Waltz. Mostly, though, it was a happy weekend which made me forget my sadness and loneliness for a few days.

 

In January 1993 I was feeling depressed and again played some of George’s records at random. The message which came through this time, in some songs by Dana Gillespie and The Kinks, was that I must rely on my own judgment and not keep contacting George for advice. We both needed to be free to progress in our different worlds. I should not place George on an altar or pedestal, as his advice is not always right for me, though it might have been right for him.

 

At the same time the message came through that I have not always revealed my true feelings to George in my letters. I try to put on a show of being OK when I am not. I then sat down and wrote him a letter admitting that I was bored with this life, which had become a prison sentence. All I longed for was my release date when I could go home to George. That is how I really felt, and by accepting that perhaps I could get on with my life on those terms.

 

I realized that I may have to be content with mundane, routine day-to-day things now the summer of my life (my years with George) were over, and to use my own judgment on how to live out the rest of it. I resolved to try to do that, keeping in touch with George by letter but not seeking his advice all the time as he needed to be free from the cares of this world and I needed to make my own decisions.

 

I realized that I would be with George at the end of my life, but were I to end it prematurely it would upset the spiritual progress of both of us. I believed I might then have to come back and face the same situation in a future life till I learned to cope with it. By accepting the situation and making the best of it I would progress, so could George, and eventually we could move on together again.

 

In January Eric rang me to say he had been bothered by a lot of crashing noises and lights in his flat. A friend of his, who is a medium, came to his flat to investigate and asked if he knew a George. She told Eric that George spoke two languages, the other being French. She also said he had a love of Paris. She told Eric George wanted to wipe the slate clean (they had not contacted each other for several years before George’s death due to a misunderstanding) and that it was a pity they had wasted so many years.

 

According to this medium George was quite weak when he got over to the other side, and was still a bit weak, but was getting help and healing there. She talked about him having a skin complaint on the Earth plane and chest trouble, which she felt was quite unbearable.

 

George wanted to develop his healing powers, and channel his energy through someone on the Earth plane. She then spoke about Athens and a shoe with something wrong with the heel. Also a photo album with a photo of Eric, George and myself.

 

The medium used the phrase ‘second drawer’ apparently in reference to class. George said he had not forgotten his working class background and that he came from a poor area of Scotland. He believed in a classless society and did not like snobs. The medium said that George felt he was too kind to people on the Earth plane and people took advantage of him. She seemed to think one day Eric would see George in his flat, and Eric said he felt prepared for that and would be able to cope with it.

The medium said when George passed over he felt his time was up, and he wanted to go. She said he was quite young and it was a short life, but George corrected her and said it was not a short life, and he had done what he wanted.

 

The medium also spoke of there being bad feeling at his funeral. The crashes in Eric’s flat were apparently George’s desperate attempts to gain Eric’s attention and get him to call in the medium, who, it must be said, is a friend of Eric’s and a neighbor. Eric saw lights whilst the medium was talking and also after she had gone, and had a strong feeling he should visit Helsinki and place some flowers on the Sibelius monument. This was a composer close to the hearts of both George and Eric. I had already told Eric I would go on holiday with him if he liked, and Finland had been mentioned as a possibility.

 

Everything the medium said rang very true. George did speak French, having lived in Paris for quite a while. There had been a break in his friendship with Eric for many years before George’s death. He died with pains in his chest which he felt were unbearable, and which even morphine could not ease completely. He was suffering from pneumonia and also palpitations, and it is probable he actually died of heart failure brought on by the pneumonia. The skin complaint mentioned is more difficult to explain. He did complain of an itchy scalp and suffered greatly from mouth ulcers (oral thrush). I suppose the medium could have interpreted ‘thrush’ as a skin rash.

 

The shoe incident meant nothing to me but a great deal to Eric. Apparently when the three of us had been on holiday in Athens Eric had a shoe with a loose sole or heel and had ripped it off. Neither Eric not I could find an album with a photo of the three of us together, but there were two very similar photos in one of my albums of George and Eric and George and myself standing on exactly the same spot on a bridge in Gothenburg, Sweden.

 

The medium was correct when she said George did not like snobs and never forgot his working class background, and correctly placed it in Scotland even though George had lost his Glaswegian accent years ago. People certainly did take advantage of his kindness, and did not always repay it.

 

George always felt older than his years, and he had packed such a lot into his life, that he really did feel he had done everything he wanted by the time he died. He said this many times before he died, and even wrote it in a letter to his sister. The bad feelings at the funeral involved his sister Betty. After the row George had with her they were not on speaking terms when he died, and as I had taken his side this extended to me as well at the time. This bad feeling was increased because I felt she should have rushed down to make it up with George before he died when I passed the message to his relatives about how ill he was, but she made no attempt to do so, nor to come down immediately afterwards and help with the arrangements. The bad feeling increased still further when she threatened to come to the funeral with a mini-bus load of 17 relatives, most of whom had never bothered to visit George when he was alive, and they wanted me to put them all up on my floor in addition to several of George’s friends from England. My mother got on the phone and told Betty it was just not on, which raised the temperature to boiling point and at one stage Betty said they would have their own memorial service in Glasgow and none of them would come to the funeral. The first thing I’d done, when George died, was ring his relatives in Glasgow and asked if they had any special wishes regarding the funeral and if they wanted it up in Scotland or in London, and they had left it all up to me, expressing no special wishes. In the end a lot of them did come down (many returning the same night rather than pay for bed and breakfast), but the bad feeling continued till Betty died, when she was still not on speaking terms with my mother just because she said I couldn’t cope with over 20 people staying overnight in my flat on the night after the funeral.

 

So what the medium said was incredibly accurate. It would be the most convincing message yet via a medium from George were it not for the fact that a lot she said was known to Eric, and Jackie, the medium, was a friend and neighbor of his. I doubt, however, that he discussed George in great detail with her as she did not know George herself.

 

The phone call from Eric was a great comfort to me, bringing not only confirmation that George keeps in touch but giving some idea what he was doing and wanted to do in the future.