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.

 

At the end of January, after writing George a letter and sending him all my love, I felt I had to play one of his records (randomly, as usual). Two tracks came on - Dusty Springfield’s ‘Going Back’ and ‘All I See Is You’. I found them both very meaningful and comforting. They told me to be content with day to day distractions, to help others, that George loves me and misses me but we’ll be together again one day. I got the impression that, although he can still see me and what I’m doing, it must be frustrating for him not to be able to communicate properly and make his presence known more clearly. It seemed he was saying he thinks of me all the time and is happiest when we share the same plane together. It occurred to me that he may be able to travel at will to my future/past and situations when we are together on the same plane, whilst I am trapped in my own time frame. The important thing was him sending his love and saying he thinks of me, which I found so comforting and reassuring.

 

After midnight one day in mid-February I was watching a video of the ill-fated soap opera ‘Eldorado’ recorded earlier in the day. It just got to a poignant bit where a gay character, who had already been bereaved when he lost a very long-term partner, is standing by the coffin of a subsequent lover. As the scene changed the phone rang, and it was Rose in Hastings ringing to say he had just been looking though old letters and cards from George. He had been thinking of him a lot lately, ever since an incident a few days before when walking through an alleyway near where he lived on the way home from work. He was not thinking of George at the time, but suddenly had a very strong feeling George was walking with him, just behind him. So strong was this impression Rose turned around and called out aloud: ‘George’. There was no-one there, but Rose knew it had been George and leant against the wall to recover from the shock.

 

It seems, one way or another, George was making his presence known to all of us, to reassure us he was all right and still near us. The fact that Rose rang up to tell me this just as I was watching that particular scene on video and thinking about when I stood by George’s coffin means it was a message for me too about George’s survival and proximity. All these ‘coincidences’ can be dismissed when taken individually, but together they amount to proof of survival. There comes a point when they can’t just all be coincidence.

 

A few days later I awoke from a vivid dream about George. It was a ‘levitation’ or ‘flying dream’. I was going past a place where holiday camp guests were having a winter reunion party, which seemed to be promoting next summer’s holidays. Instead of red coats the staff were wearing scout-type uniforms and were known as ‘marshals’ and ‘marshalesses’. Next to this holiday camp seemed to be a beach with white sand.

I now seemed to be flying along a few feet from the ground. By flapping down with one or two hands I could gradually levitate to a greater height. I have had similar such dreams many times before, but on this occasion I seemed to be going higher and faster than usual. I thought how easy it was, and wondered why I couldn’t always fly like this.

 

I seemed to be flying over a beach recently uncovered by demolishing old terraced, tenement-style buildings three or four stories high which had once stood there. As I flew over this beach parallel to the promenade, I became aware of someone, who seemed to be a stranger, walking along beneath me to my left on this promenade, talking to me. No matter how fast I flew they kept pace alongside. I remember seeing old-fashioned lamp-posts beneath me along the promenade. They were double lamps with two old-fashioned bulbs on each post.

 

I approached a dilapidated pier which seemed to stretch endlessly seaward. It was all boarded up with blue wood or metal sheeting, and I knew I would have to swerve off the beach over the promenade to get round this obstacle, or else go over it. I decided to swerve around it as I was not sure if I could get enough height to go over.

 

As I flew past the boarded-up entrance to the pier, I tried to fly higher and enter in at a sort of hole or gap in the boarding. Something was holding me down, preventing me getting high enough. It seemed that my companion on the promenade was holding on to my hand and saying something like:

 

‘You’re not ready to go that high yet’.

 

I broke away and next thing I was flying past a window of a little flat. George was in there wearing his red pullover, looking happy and well, and younger than when he died, like he used to be years ago. He was looking at me and smiling, and seemed very relaxed. I reached out towards him, first with one arm and then with two, crying out my pet name for him: ‘Snoozy, Snoozy!’

 

He smiled gently and said to me: ‘Not yet’, and he made a gesture by laying his head to one side on his clasped hands as if to say: ‘You’re asleep’, ‘Go to sleep’ or something similar.

 

As I was drawn away I seemed to float around a corner and I could see George through another window of his celestial flat, now wearing his old black framed spectacles he used for watching TV. He was no longer looking at me but was distracted by some sort of work. Shortly after floating further away I woke up and started crying with emotion. The dream was so real I knew I had actually met George.

 

I had many dreams featuring George before, and in all of them the message was that he did not really die. However, this was the first dream of him I had in association with a ‘levitation’ or ‘flying dream’. I have read that such dreams occur when the sleeping person is ‘astral traveling’. When the ‘astral body’ breaks free of the physical during sleep and floats above it, or even flies great distances, this gives rise to a sensation of flying or levitating in the dreams of the sleeper.

 

The experience I had was packed full of symbolism. I interpret it not so much as a visit to a real place, but as an astral visit to a little symbolic ‘play’ or piece of theater George had staged for me. I would like to get an expert interpretation, but this was how I saw it:

 

The holiday camp episode may or may not have been part of the experience. It does seem to me, however, that it could represent spirits preparing to reincarnate again on Earth, an environment away from their natural home where they would spend a relatively short time.

 

The demolished houses I see as people who had died, and the beach seemed to be symbolic of the beautiful boundary/gateway to the next world. The pier-like structure could almost be a bridge from this world to the next, stretching out endlessly over the sea.

 

The fact that George seemed to be living in a flat in or around the pier entrance seems to indicate he is waiting for me somewhere.  It seems significant that the pier structure, although dilapidated, was left standing whilst all the houses were completely demolished. It is as if the demolished houses represent the discarded astral bodies of those preparing to reincarnate on Earth again. The likeness of their physical bodies in their last Earth life was discarded in preparation for their new Earth life. George, however, still resided in his George blueprint astral body, and would do so until I joined him.

 

George’s relaxed manner and gentle smile gave such a feeling of reassurance, as though he was always near me and patiently waiting for me to join him. He looked in the best of health and several years younger than when he died, and the ‘sleeping’ gesture accompanied by the phrase ‘not yet’ is a clear indication to me that he was saying this time I was only sleeping, and it was not yet time for me to join him. The second sighting of him wearing glasses and engrossed in something indicates he has some sort of work to do, and that we must both get on with whatever we have to do till we can be together again.

 

After I awoke and wrote down notes of the details of the dream, I looked up and saw George’s photo and the ‘All Is Well’ verse he sent me via a friend just after he died. I always kept it by my bed at the time, and as I read it again I was astounded to realize it contained the phrases: ‘I have only slipped away into the next room... I am but waiting for you just round the corner. All is well.’ This was all in the dream - I was looking through the window at him in ‘the next room’, then I floated ‘round the corner’ and saw him again, and the whole message seemed to be he was waiting for me and that all was well. Also I had read some time before (and had recently repeated in a letter to a friend) that departed spirits see us in this world as through a window, an invisible barrier they can see and hear through but we cannot. For a few seconds that window seemed to become transparent for me as I caught two glimpses of George.

 

Of course, I knew the poem well so you could say the dream was prompted by the words of the poem. However, in that case I would have been much more likely to dream of me being in one room and George literally in the next, or him waiting around a street corner. Instead I did not realize the significance of what I had seen in my dream till I had written it down and then read the ‘All Is Well’ verse and noticed the strange and unexpected way the dream fulfilled the promise in the verse.

 

Coming so soon after the incident with Rose, it made me think George was busy reminding us all he was still around and was now in good health. It also occurred to me that I had not been feeling well lately and was experiencing stomach pains, which were worse at night. I now feel this ill-health may have been necessary to allow my astral body to detach itself from the physical and float far enough away for me to experience what I did. Certainly I had the impression I had floated higher and faster than ever before in such dreams, and the link between our physical and astral selves becomes weaker during ill-health.

 

Also, breaking away from the ‘stranger’ on the promenade in the dream was extremely significant. I realized after I awoke that this ‘stranger’ was none other than my physical self, and that when I tried to float higher and enter the gap in the boarded-up pier it was my physical body restraining me. I felt that the stranger was holding my hand, but in actual fact it would have been the umbilical-like silver cord which always connects astral travelers to their physical body, and is only severed at death, which I felt restraining me, which prevented me flying even higher or entering the next world, and which finally drew me back into my physical body.

 

The more I thought about it the more I realized how appropriate were George’s methods of getting in touch with me. First, through his records, which encouraged me to listen to and appreciate a wider range of music than just 1950s rock’n’roll and Country Music. In life, he had also tried to do this. Then with the above astral-traveling ‘flying’ dream which seemed to be a theatrical play full of symbolism. This was exactly the sort of theater George loved and helped me to appreciate. The fact that this dream seemed to be symbolic rather than realistic reinforces rather than weakens its message, as it is how George could be expected to deliver it.

 

He appears not only to have written, directed and performed a symbolic scenario for me, but to have helped me immediately understand the symbolism, for I was able to interpret it with little difficulty soon after awakening. However, one piece of symbolism only occurred to me days later.

 

I had described the dilapidated pier-like structure as being almost like a bridge to the next world stretching endlessly seaward. However, it was also remarkably like a tunnel because it was completely closed in. For its whole visible length it seemed to be boxed-in by sheets of blue wood or metal, forming a sort of rectangular tunnel.

 

When flying by the boarded-up entrance, the gap I spotted appeared black, like entering what would have been the darkness of a tunnel. Such a tunnel is featured early on in most out-of-the-body and near-death experiences as the astral body leaves the Earth plane. This tunnel seems to be the link between two dimensions or parallel universes, between two spiritual planes, between this world and the next. (Quantum physics recognizes these tunnels as wormholes linking parallel universes and distant parts of our own universe.)  Once through this tunnel/wormhole you are in a higher spiritual plane/parallel universe. I cannot say if I emerged from the other end of that tunnel, all I remember was approaching the entrance one moment and encountering George in his celestial flat the next. Although I have no recollection of traveling through the tunnel, it was certainly there in symbolic form but quite unrecognizable to me for days. It fits in with George’s symbolic scenario, but most decidedly does not fit in with my dreaming up something to fit in with what I had read and heard about the tunnel and astral projection. Like ‘the next room’ and ‘round the corner’ it was an obscure, cryptic message which took time (or prompting) to unravel.

 

Still later another element of symbolism emerged. I had been puzzled by the significance of the blue color of the boarding, which seemed to be of either wood or metal. I suddenly realized that the rectangular, blue boarded up pier was very similar to the exterior frontage of the now demolished Biograph cinema where I first met George. Looking at the black-and-white photograph of this cinema in the book I found in the library just after George died, I was able to confirm to myself that it did have a long, rectangular facade at first-floor level made up of a sort of corrugated metal, or possibly wood, which I remember was painted blue. To the extreme right, over the cinema entrance, were three windows. So maybe the windows of George’s flat were also located in this boarding. The rest of the first-floor facade of the cinema, extending over three shop fronts, had no windows and is featureless apart from the name of the cinema in large letters reading ‘Biograph’. This was an early name for a cinema, but add a ‘y’ and it becomes ‘biography’, the subject of this book and how George’s life interacted with mine. So this blue facade was where we first met, and where I met George again in the symbolic dream, after he died.

 

If the hole in the boarded-up pier was indeed the dark entrance leading to a fantastic world of light at the far end of the rectangular tunnel, then that is also analogous to this particular cinema the interior of which was completely rectangular with little ornamentation, rather like a long, dark tunnel. At the far end was the illuminated screen with its unreachable fantasy world, just as that bright other world lies at the end of the astral/wormhole tunnel.

 

George and I first met in that darkness, looking at that fantasy screen world where a film called ‘The Group’ was showing, and next time I meet him will be when traveling through the dark tunnel towards the brilliant light of the spiritual planes. Even the name of that first film we saw together could be significant, for spirits usually reincarnate in Earth as a group. Various family members, lovers, friends and even enemies meet up again and again in life after life in different relationships in order to help each other progress and work out their karma. George, myself and those around us in this life can fully expect to have had previous incarnations and will possibly have future ones as ‘The Group’.

 

Everything is a circle, or rather a spiral. We appear to end up back at the beginning, but if we are progressing we find ourselves higher up the spiral each time around.

 

I sent an account of the above experience to a number of friends, and one of them, Eric, told me that before receiving it some lines of the ‘All Is Well’ poem just came into his head, about ‘there is no death’ and being ‘in the next room’. He claimed never to have heard the poem before. In actual fact the line ‘there is no death’ came from a poem my mother wrote which Eric certainly never saw or heard.

 

A week or so later I awoke from another ‘flying’ dream, but this one was much more low-key. I was aware that I could barely rise to a height of five foot above the ground, whereas in the previous dream in which I met George I flew much higher - perhaps 10 to 15 feet initially, then 20, 30 or even 40 feet when I encountered George through the window. On the first occasion I had not been feeling at all well, but by the time of the second ‘flying’ dream I was feeling very well indeed, my stomach pains having completely disappeared, hence the inability for my astral body to separate more than a few feet from its healthy physical counterpart.

 

A few days later Rose was staying with me for the weekend and Andre came over to lunch. He told me later he felt George’s presence as soon as he entered the flat. In fact he said he was standing in the middle of the living-room near no-one when he felt George tug the back of his coat. This was yet another friend George had made his presence known to.

 

In March I was going to see two close friends of ours, Rita and Ann. They used to be very much into Spiritualism, and Ann was anxious for me to tell Rita about the vivid flying dream I had in which I met George. That morning I suddenly realized they were playing John and Yoko’s ‘Give Peace A Chance’ on the radio. This was one of the last songs George sang for me as he lay ill, and we ended up singing it together over and over. I then realized the record before was ‘Unchained Melody’ by the Righteous Brothers, which had become a big hit again shortly before George died. He liked it very much and could not get over the fact that Bobby Hatfield still looked so young in the new video they had recorded for the song. The words were appropriate (e.g. ‘I hunger for your touch’ and about Time being the great healer) since George and I were now apart. After ‘Give Peace A Chance’ came the Beatles’ ‘It Won’t Be Long’, again about lovers who are apart but are soon to be reunited. These records amounted to a message to be brave as it would not be long before we would be together again.

 

Just to make sure it was a real message and not just coincidence, before writing this down I pulled one of George’s record albums out at random and put on a track without looking. It was Mae West singing ‘All Of Me’, which described how I felt since George left. I had not used my arms to hug any lover since he left and took my heart with him. The next track, the last one on the album, was one of George’s favorite camp Mae West songs, ‘Sister Honky Tonk’. Ostensibly it is about a fairground artiste in the film from which the song comes, but essentially it is about a good-time girl or prostitute (‘all you need is the money, come on and pay’). I listened to this amused, remembering how George loved it, and then came Mae West’s immortal cliche right at the end of the song: ‘Come up and see me sometime’. That was a humorous way of summarizing George’s main message to me that morning, that one day soon I would indeed ‘come up and see’ him.

 

The next day I went to see a film of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’, about a character who lives for over 400 years without aging. Starting off as a male, the character later becomes female. I only went to see the film because Quentin Crisp had a small cameo role as Queen Elizabeth I at the beginning of the movie.

 

However, it seemed I was meant to see this film which could easily be interpreted as a story about reincarnation. Most of us have lived well over 400 years, maybe 4000, sometimes as males and sometimes as females. Reaching the present day, the character takes her huge autobiography to a publisher, and soon afterwards the message is voiced that once she has put the past behind her she will realize her life has just begun.

 

That seemed like a message to me. First I must get my massive book of our lives finished, then with the past out of the way my life would begin again. I wasn’t sure at the time if it meant this life, or another one on Earth or the Spiritual planes. On coming home I watched a program I had recorded featuring Jerry Lee Lewis, and at the end Sinaid O’Connor sings a beautiful song about peace and love overcoming hatred, which she had also sung at a peace demonstration in Dublin over the weekend. The words made me cry, and realize there was still something for me to do in this life, perhaps in the peace movement where I started off before meeting George. After all, as I was reminded the day before on the radio, one of the last songs George sang as he lay dying was ‘Give Peace A Chance’.

 

In May my next door neighbor asked where the flowers on the communal landing windowsill had gone. George had first arranged these, but I had removed them when the decorators were painting the landing. I was afraid to put them back in case they spoiled the new paintwork. The neighbor said how much they cheered up the landing, so I took this as a sign I should put them back, particularly as they were not doing so well in my flat. Next day workmen came to do something to my windows to stop condensation forming, and I had to move the plants anyway. This was a clear sign that George wanted the plants back on the landing windowsill, where they remained until they got decidedly tatty and a new neighbour complained. (They have now been replaced by an indoor tree which George and I brought home from an office where we both used to work when our employer moved. The tree had grown too big for my kitchen.)

 

Looking at an album of photos of our lives together the same morning I moved the plants back, I got upset and went into the kitchen where the radio was on. A song was playing about two people who had spent their lives together ‘in the sun’. There was a reference to one of them dying. It was followed by ‘In Thoughts Of You’ by Billy Fury. Both songs reminded me of George’s closeness,  that we spent happy times together and that we still thought of each other a lot of the time.

 

Later in May, Rose, Lena and myself went to the candlelit memorial ceremony for AIDS victims in Trafalgar Square and we each lit a candle for George. They read his name from the plinth, then we went to a non-denominational service in St Martins-in-the-Fields. This was made all the more poignant by the fact that George and Rose sometimes used to sleep in the pews of that very same church when they were homeless. We decided to make a panel for George to be added to the AIDS quilt. The London Lighthouse had a workshop every Thursday for making quilt panels, so I arranged with Lena to go the following Thursday and make a start.

 

The Lighthouse is very near where Lena lives, so after calling on him and his partner. Frank, we all walked round to the workshop and began his quilt panel. They supplied all the materials, and Lena is very artistic and cut out all the letters and some heart shapes with very little trouble. It was already looking quite good by the end of the session. The date was May 27^th, the day George would have been 50 years old. Another ‘coincidence’ since we hadn’t planned it that way, and an elderly lady at the workshop remarked what a nice birthday present the panel would be for George.

 

In July I finally heard from Islington Council (after much faxing and phoning) that George’s plaque and tree were ready for planting in New River Walk gardens. These were the beautiful gardens he once showed me, which he used to visit when he lived in Islington long before he met me. I felt it would be a nice focal point to take friends and relatives to on anniversaries, and also for myself to visit. It was quite near where I worked.

 

The council wanted a date for the planting, and after checking with friends it seemed Friday the 23^rd was the most suitable date. I went to mark it on my calendar, and there was already an asterisk against that date. Wondering what I had planned, I suddenly remembered why I had marked that date - on that day I would be 48 years, 125 days old - the same age as George when he died. I remarked on this ‘coincidence’ in a letter to two friends, and then started to type some more of my book. I had reached our holiday in East Germany together in 1976, and had already described our visit to Dresden. The next day we were driving east to the Koenigstein Fortress, and it was this I started to write about. Then I noticed the date of this visit - Friday July 23^rd, 1976. It was not only the same date, but the same day of the week I would be planting George’s tree. My choice of July 23^rd had therefore been confirmed twice. Circumstances had dictated I pick on a significant date entirely unaware, and as if to confirm this was not pure coincidence but George working behind the scenes, I was writing about the same day of the week and month 17 years previously. I believe this was George’s way of keeping in touch and saying ‘thank you’ for the tree and plaque, making it extra symbolic for me. I will always remember that George’s first memorial tree was planted the day I was on this Earth as long as George. I only hope I can grow and blossom like his tree in the extra time I am destined to live on this planet.

 

In the week or so before planting the tree, I dreamt about George nearly every night. On the night of July 19th/20th I told him in a dream about a TV documentary on Leni Riefenstahl and that I had written her a letter.  I said she was a great film director who had been used by the Nazis for propaganda, but that she was not really a Nazi herself (she never joined the Party.) She had made some good films before the 1936 Olympics film and ‘Triumph of the Will’. Although George always said women could not direct films, he replied in the dream that he always knew (i.e. suspected) Leni was not really a Nazi and was a good film director, although he had only seen one of her films. I told him she had not been allowed to make any film since the Second World War, and was still alive and scuba diving at the age of about 95. (Before she died she did make another documentary film I believe.)

 

The next night I was with George in my dreams and he looked well, having put on weight around his face. It seemed he had almost fully recovered from his pneumonia, though when I asked he said he still had slight pain or discomfort on one side. It seemed we had just been out with my mother, and he had been walking about full of life just like his old self. As I looked at him, I saw the love in his eyes like I used to, and I kissed him on the forehead. He told me to stop worrying about him, and that he was all right.

 

Although clearly dreams, and not true astral projections like the flying dream earlier, I believe George does come near me in these dreams, and that I may actually communicate with him. The message in all the dreams I have had about him since he passed over is that he survived his illness, did not really die and is still near me. In some of these dreams he seems to have just moved away from me for some reason, and I can’t understand why we split up, but of course this question has been answered many times. It was time for both of us to move on; we had achieved what we could in this life together.

 

On July 23^rd, the day I reached George’s exact age when he died, we planted his tree in the gardens. The council representative suggested the far side of the river, normally inaccessible to the general public, so the tree could be seen but not so easily vandalized. It all seemed so appropriate, as the far side of the river seemed symbolic of the divide between this world and the next. I was allowed across to take two close-up photos of the plaque, and later realized this was symbolic of my astral trip across the ‘river’ and the two brief snapshot glimpses I had of George through the windows of his celestial flat. More symbolism was to become apparent later.

 

Next day Rose and I went over to Lena and Frank’s flat. They were supposed to have been with us for the tree planting ceremony but could not make it at the last minute. Lena said at about 11.30, when we left home to go and plant the tree, their bathroom curtain rail fell down, as though George was telling them off either for not coming, or I think more likely, for not going downstairs to the public callbox outside and ringing us up to tell us they could not make it.

 

Lena said similar things had happened before. He had once told Frank he was going to move a picture of George from the mantelpiece to a shelf because it was reflecting in the television, and the picture later fell down of its own accord as though George was annoyed.

 

While we were sitting talking to him Lena suddenly asked me if I still had George’s dentures. It was a strange question to ask, but I told him I had because the undertakers forgot or declined to take them away with them when they removed George’s body from the flat, even though I had given them the dentures. Lena said the question had just come into his head at that moment, and strangely only a few days before I had mentioned about George’s dentures to a counselor at the hospital where he was diagnosed.

 

Also, a few days after the dream in which I was talking to George about Leni Riefenstahl and the letter I had written her 7 weeks before, a postcard reply acknowledging my letter came from Leni. After the dream in which George told me to stop worrying about him, my depression of the previous few weeks lifted and I stopped dreaming about him nightly.

 

The next week I took George’s old friend Marlene to see his tree, and as she was feeling hungry afterwards we were lucky find the cheapest and best fish and chip shop in London nearby. George was always very fond of fish and chips, so we felt he had led us there.

 

In early August I was watching the TV with Tibby, my cat, laying on top of me. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something come in the door, and move behind the chair in front of George’s quilt panel on the wall. I would have thought it was the cat if she had not been laying on me. Was it George looking at his quilt panel, which I had been working on earlier that day and which was now virtually finished? The TV program was repeats of Tommy Cooper’s sketches. George could not stand him, so if he came in the room whilst he was on it would have to be something very important, or to prove to me how much he liked his quilt panel, i.e. enough to ‘suffer’ Tommy Cooper.

 

We had begun George’s quilt panel at the London Lighthouse on what would have been his 50^th birthday. Our last session at the Lighthouse when we virtually finished it (apart from hemming and backing it, which my mother did on her machine) was on August 12^th, which would have been the 48^th birthday of my best schoolfriend, Michael, had he lived. I was 48 when we did the banner, and George was 48 when he died. Still more ‘coincidences’ - as we went into the Lighthouse that day a woman was passing and said to her little girl: ‘Your birthday is on September 29^th.’ This was of course the date George died, and the day he was 're-born' into his new environment. His new 'birthday'.

 

That evening I went to Hampstead Theatre to see two of our favorite actresses, Alison Steadman and Carmel McSharry in ‘Marvin’s Room’ written by Scott McPherson who died shortly afterwards from an AIDS-related illness. In the set was a globe light fitting consisting of metallic leaves, similar to ones George chose for our living room, and which disturbed him so much the night before he died. A line from the play struck a chord in my heart: ‘I am lucky to have loved so much’.

 

A gay play (actually a monolog) which I saw at the Battersea Arts Centre the following month was called ‘Sleeping With You’, and although not exactly my cup of tea it did have some poignant moments. A hustler dies of AIDS and his lover remembers him, and even seems to converse with his deceased partner, who tells him he has ‘got the message at last’ and that ‘I am still sleeping with you’. I felt George wanted me to see this little play just to get that very message across, that he is still around and sleeping with me and Tibby, our little cat who always shared our bed.

 

The next day was our 23^rd anniversary of meeting, and I had a full page article published in ‘Capital Gay’ on the problems of bereavement for the gay man. People who read it said it was very moving, and it included a brief description of our 21 year relationship and George’s death. The main purpose of the article was to reach other isolated, bereaved gays in order to help each other by setting up a group or club to do things together. I envisaged a sort of singles’ club for gays which would hopefully result in some long-term relationships, but would also provide companionship and friendship, and enable us to help and support each other by doing things together which we used to do with our partners. I was thinking of cinema and theater visits, holidays together, and so on.

 

I had not planned that this article should be published on our anniversary, this was just another of those remarkable ‘coincidences’ which I believe are nothing of the kind. They prove everything is guided and has a purpose, and that two years after George’s death I was starting to prepare my future life and move on. I was really enthusiastic about this idea of a gay singles’ club as it seemed to give my life new hope, purpose and meaning, helping others as well as myself.

 

In October I went on holiday by myself to Tunisia. At the end of the first week I had to change my room because the cistern was broken, and the new room next door had a large evergreen fir tree right outside the window and balcony. Trees have become symbolic of George in the afterlife, and I felt he was there, in the next space to my room, protecting me. Next day I met Kamel, a nice and seemingly honest and sincere guy from a very humble home and village. I felt I was meant to meet him at that time, and that we could help each other. I am sure George had a hand in our meeting, as before on this holiday I had only encountered money-grabbing Tunisians who gave little or nothing in return.

 

On a trip to the holy city of Kairouan I again felt George’s presence. In the Rabat Souk live chickens were being bought and taken in the back to be slaughtered Halal style, and later the coach apparently hit a dog on the road but did not stop. These two incidents upset me, but I had a mental picture of George stroking a dog and looking after it. It was as if he were welcoming the dog we hit to the other side and taking care of it, and telling me to accept death as a necessary part of life. Nothing to worry about.

 

At the next stop, Mahdia, there was not much to see. I even said a pun to George mentally as I walked along: ‘Not much in Mahdia, my dear’.

 

I realized it was on a peninsular, so walked to the sea the other side. I found a lovely little quiet bay with picturesque houses. I knew George had led me there. I was going back to the coach after taking a photo, but felt George was telling me to sit and stay a while, and he then told me a new chapter in my life was starting but that he would always be near. Here he was showing me ‘shnorky’ (picturesque) places (as he would have described them) hidden around corners just like those we discovered on our many holidays together, but he also pointed out the severe oil pollution in the bay reminding me of his concern for the environment.

 

I felt Kamel was part of this new chapter in my life and the moving on process, and that I must help him, and that he would help me with his friendship. Just having someone to care for and help is a tremendous boost when you have lost someone dear to you, and can give you a reason for living. The gay singles’ club I was planning was another part of the new chapter I felt was now starting, and that George was also helping me there.

 

Around the hotel were special places for feeding stray cats, and a ‘little snoozler’ (meaning a sweet young man - these expressions in quotes are private words George and I understood, part of our own language) explained how the Tunisian S.P.A. catches and spays stray females as well as arranging feeding places. I also found a family of five kittens and a mother cat in Monastir. I felt George was very close to me when feeding these stray cats, like we did together on our Lloret holidays.

 

There was a debacle over the waiters and tips, and George seemed close to me there as I tried to deal with one obnoxious waiter as I felt George would have done. It came unstuck later, but perhaps he learnt a lesson. Certainly I did - to be more careful with my money on holiday especially over tipping.

 

On the last night I struck up an acquaintance with a gay couple from Bournemouth, and I felt George was close again. It reminded me of how we met Dirk and Paul on holiday. This time it came too late to get as far as exchanging names and addresses, but it was nice just the same to be able to have a chat about the gay scene and the ‘peasants’ (straight working class holidaymakers’) in the hotel (‘Butlins by the Med’).

 

Finally, at Gatwick Airport on the way back whilst waiting for my luggage, I started laughing aloud to myself. George seemed to be telling me he had arranged all this business with Kamel, including finding us both a cheap hotel right on the beach in Monastir to spend the night together, mainly for my benefit and Kamel’s, but also so I could get one over on ‘Scandalmonger’ (Andre) who kept boasting of his lovers in Turkey. It seemed George also helped to find Kamel a new girlfriend, as he met Najet for the first time whilst with me in a louage (long-distance taxi).

 

It was a wonderful holiday which brought home to me that I was still traveling around the world with George beside me, but I was also meeting new people and starting a new life for myself.

 

One Sunday in November Rose was up from Hastings for the weekend. Whilst washing up in the kitchen he said he heard George’s voice behind him calling him by his camp nickname, and even grabbing hold of his arm:

 

‘Rose, Rose. What are you doing?’ said George’s voice, and Rose replied automatically: ‘Washing up’ as he turned round and just caught a glimpse of something behind him by the radio and the work-surface, before realizing there was no-one there. I was not in the flat at the time, Rose was alone with our cat.

 

This was the second such incident Rose had experienced since George’s death, and one of several which occurred with various people in my flat. The fact that Rose rarely washes up without prompting would perhaps explain the surprise George might have expressed at seeing him voluntarily doing such a chore.

 

Thinking of this incident with Rose, in the early hours one day later that month I wrote a letter to George and said in the last paragraph:

 

‘.... stay close when you can. Don’t be afraid to make your presence known. You won’t frighten me - how could I be afraid of my little Snoozy? I love you too much. If ever I saw you, I’d just be happy you were so near....’

 

Several times George has answered my letters within about 24 hours. Sure enough the next night I was watching two episodes of ‘The Twilight Zone’ on TV. The message of the first story was that there comes a time when a good friend ‘must vanish’ and the one left must learn the rules to make and sustain more ordinary friendships with other people.

 

This is very true - with a close relationship like mine and George’s we did not have to bother too much about rules and other friendships, but I have found since he died that I have to play by the rules in order to make and keep any friends. Things like buying rounds of drinks when it is your turn, eating out in more expensive places than you would otherwise do, perhaps even tolerating and accepting friends George and I would have considered a bit ‘piss-elegant’. If you are too judgmental and independent it is almost impossible to keep friends. The fact that the program used the word ‘vanish’ rather than ‘move on’ or ‘depart’ was very significant, indicating it would not be good for me if I saw George’s astral body in this world as it might interfere with the process of my moving on and making new friends.

 

The other episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’ was like a continuation of this theme, and was about two lovers who could not be together in this world. They had to first enter through a door to another world and leave their present bodies behind, and in the new world with new bodies they could be together forever.

 

In early December Eric rang to tell me what had happened during his recent holiday to Hawaii. Alone in his hotel room in Waikiki he saw a reflexion in the TV screen, and turned around to see George standing there. Prompted by my questioning as to what he looked like and what he was wearing, Eric said George looked younger than he remembered him (and Eric had not seen George for about 9 years before his death), and he thought he was wearing a white t-shirt and gray shorts. On checking photos of our holiday in Waikiki in 1980, I couldn’t find a photo of this outfit but had pictures of George wearing two different white t-shirts with writing on them, and he was also wearing a pair of navy shorts in one of the photos.

 

The apparition Eric saw was only momentary and George did not speak, but the vision was real enough for Eric to run straight to his friend’s room and tell her what he had just seen. She had to tell him to calm down. This was the same medium friend of Eric’s who had told him some months previously that he would see George in his flat. In actual fact he saw him in a Hawaiian hotel room.

 

Eric said he felt George near him during the holiday, especially in and around Waikiki. He even felt something gave him inspiration when writing some of his postcards. It seemed George was still traveling the world, since our friend Andre said he felt George near him on a holiday to Turkey, and I felt him near in Tunisia.

 

On the first working day of the new year, 1994, it seemed George was near me giving me signs that this would be a new start. First I came across a beautiful birthday card in a supermarket across the road. I was not looking for a birthday card, but this one caught my eye because it was so unusual: a shiny, silver card with a rainbow very prominent, and no words at all. Inside it said ‘Happy Birthday’.  The Rainbow Social Group for Bereaved Gay Men, which we were launching following my article in ‘Capital Gay’, was due to hold its first proper meeting in a few weeks, and I needed to produce a couple of notices to pin up in the pub advertising the meeting. I had been contemplating how I could draw a rainbow, and this card was ideal. They were cheap at 59 pence each, so I bought two of them.

 

I had to collect some surgical shoes which were being repaired at the Middlesex Hospital, and on the way bought two pairs of jeans in C&A’s in nearby Oxford Street for just £8.99 each.  I badly needed some new jeans and these were a bargain. I discovered my shoes had not only had the broken heel nailed back on, but had been completely re-soled and heeled free of charge. I was not sure if they still did this service free, and had recently spent £15 on shoe repairs to some other surgical shoes. The woman in the hospital said I should always bring them there to be done free of charge, so it was if George were telling me to take advantage of this facility.

 

Only a few days previously I had been telling my mother how I had let my film and theater-going lapse in the last few months. This was partly because I did not buy ‘Time Out’ and keep abreast of new films and plays, and which cinemas had cheap tickets certain nights. In Tottenham Court Road I passed an MGM cinema where a film I wanted to see was on, and discovered they had half-price tickets on Mondays. Since there were MGM cinemas all over the West End it meant I could easily go and see films again without paying a fortune or seeking out special cheap cinemas. I am sure George drew my attention to this to encourage me to see more films in the new year.

 

I then walked down the street and saw a notice about a Chinese restaurant round the corner offering an ‘as much as you can eat’ to take away for under £2. Since this was right by the bus stop I needed to get to work it was convenient any day. George knew I liked Chinese food, so it would be typical of him to draw my attention to where I could obtain it cheaply.

 

All in all it was a very satisfactory start to the new year, and as a bonus in the afternoon at work it was so quiet I was able to send out the press releases for the Rainbow Social Group. So I began the new year with the group well on its way, new clothes, a free shoe mending service, cheap cinema-going lined up for me and also an additional source of cheap lunches. I thanked George for all these encouragements as I went into 1994.

 

The urge for contact with George manifested itself at times in different ways. Sometimes I would sit and write him a letter, blindly play some of his records at random, and at other times I would go to a Spiritualist church and put up with the Christian dogma and pious atmosphere in the hope of a message. (I view Spiritualism as a scientific theory backed up by experiments, not a religion, and certainly as having no more connexion with Christianity than with any other religion.) In the very early hours one day in February I got the urge to open George’s dictionary randomly and see what words my finger pointed at. The first four words on various pages very accurately described the things which tended to occupy me most since George’s death when I am not either sleeping, working or watching TV. The words were: cart, eat, brood, fidget. ‘Carts’ is old gay slang for the male organ, so the message was that gay sex, eating, brooding and fidgeting were my main past-times when not otherwise occupied. The fifth word ‘fungus’ seemed to have no relevance, so I took it the message had ended with the word ‘fidget’. Following ‘fungus’ I got a blank space which confirmed the message had indeed ended, but persisting still I came up with ‘epilogue’ which definitely indicated the message was over.

 

It was certainly true that I tended to brood and get upset when I had nothing to do, or else to fidget, unable to relax. Sex and food were two highly pleasurable past-times for me, which stopped me either brooding or fidgeting with boredom. It seems someone understood me and how I coped. I resolved to try the dictionary experiment again next time I felt the urge to communicate with the spirit world.

 

A few days later I dreamt about George. It was a very strange dream which I hadn’t intended to record here since I have had many dreams about or including George since he died. However, I decided to mention this particular dream as its very strangeness contained an element of precognition.

 

I dreamt I was sitting in an armchair, I put my hand down the side and felt someone else’s hand. It felt so familiar I knew it belonged to George as I clasped it tight. He tried to pull away, but I held on and pulled and pulled. The scene shifted from the chair, and I now seemed to have pulled all his left arm through the wall of the room. I suppose this was inspired by the line in the poem he sent me which said: ‘I have only slipped away into the next room’. It seemed I was trying to pull him back through the wall into this room.

 

Eventually I managed to pull all of him through, and he stood there before me dressed in the dark gray jersey he often wore around the house. He looked very similar to how he did in his later years, though his face and forehead seemed a bit different, larger somehow. Could this symbolize that he now had more knowledge than when on Earth? He then looked round the room and made favorable comments about it. As so often in dreams, the room bore no resemblance whatsoever to any room in my flat, nor did the objects in it. However, in the dream it seemed as if George was admiring the way I had kept our flat, leaving many things the same but making little alterations. He seemed to be saying he approved of the changes I had made, and appreciated the fact I had not altered everything.

 

One thing in particular he seemed very pleased about and had pride of place, and I can only think it was an analogy meant to represent his AIDS quilt panel. In the dream it appeared as a pink greetings card with a rectangular mirror in the center. His quilt panel is pink or salmon colored and has a rectangular picture of George on it. The whole panel is like a greetings card in that it contains a message to George from many of his friends, like a leaving card given when someone ends employment at a place one has worked for years. It seemed George was also turning it around and sending greetings back to all his friends whose names are on the panel, for anyone looking at the greetings card featured in the dream would see their own face staring back at them. Once again George’s fondness for symbolism was evident in a dream.

 

I thought little more about this dream, though I did mention it to my mother over the phone. Then some days later I was watching TV and changed channels to see an armchair on the screen. It was an advert I had never seen before about an upcoming series or program featuring Terry Wogan, whom neither of us could stand. The advert ended with someone’s leg protruding from the side of the chair between the cushion and the arm. The advert seemed to be saying Wogan was so boring people would crawl into the inside of the chair to get away from him. Hardly a good advert for the program, but how weird I should have dreamt of George being inside an armchair just days previously, never having seen the advert before. This convinced me it had been more than just a dream and was a message from George that he is still only ‘in the next room’ or even nearer, that he likes the way I am keeping our flat especially his quilt panel, and confirming he still does not like Terry Wogan. When I was relating this dream to someone they pointed out that George’s reluctance to be pulled into the room indicated it was me who did not wish to let go. It could also mean he did not like coming back into this world in such a solid physical form.

 

As I was printing this out, I went into the kitchen and the next record to come on the radio was ‘Love Letters Straight From Your Heart’ (keep us so near while apart), the song which contained one of George’s first and strongest messages to me. It just confirmed that the dream was indeed a message from him and that his messages and my letters kept us both close and in touch with each other even though our life together here is over, as the next song on the radio clearly stated (Roy Orbison’s ‘It’s Over’). We still remembered the good times we had, and the next song was ‘Remember Then’. After that came ‘Pretend You’re Happy When You’re Blue’ which said things are ‘not as bad as they seem’, and if I wanted a love to share it’s there in my dreams, which indeed it is when I have contact with George through my dreams. It seemed I did not need to seek a new life partner because I already had George’s love to share, and we drew even closer in my dreams. It seemed to take me a long time to realize the message which was coming through in this and other messages from George, and in the end it was a friend who had to point it out to me.

 

One Friday, two and a half years after George died, I was talking to a gay friend whom I lost contact with in the mid-80s and who phoned me in September 1993 after reading my article in ‘Capital Gay’. He was a very good listener and a sort of unofficial counselor, and this Friday evening we talked and he questioned me for hours, probing deep into my beliefs and childhood memories.

 

At the beginning of the evening I had mentioned passing the site of the Biograph cinema in Wilton Road, Victoria where George and I met, and then walking on down to the house at 111 Belgrave Road, Pimlico where George was staying in a furnished room when we met. I had said how it upset me as I passed these places, and my friend said, rather impatiently, that it was time I moved on. By the end of the evening, however, he was giving me quite the opposite advice and telling me I should perhaps stop going to bereavement groups precisely because they were designed to help people to move on. He felt perhaps I should not move on. I had been seeking a new relationship almost since the day George died, and many of my efforts, including the setting up of a social group for bereaved gay men, were spurred by my desire to find a new partner. My friend pointed out that I did not need a new relationship at this time as I still had the one with George, albeit on a spiritual rather than a physical level. Because this spiritual relationship was so real to me perhaps it was inappropriate for me to move on.

 

This seemingly strange advice from a most unexpected quarter helped me enormously to come to terms with things for the first time since George died. I felt as if a great weight had been removed from my shoulders, and felt at peace and even happy. I no longer had to search for someone or something to fill the gap left by George because he was still with me spiritually. If someone came along to give me a more physical relationship that would be fine, but I was not going to search for it, and I did not really need it. I was not sure I even wanted it, or could ever live with anyone again after George. I did not want to get rid of many of the things in my life and in our flat which were the result of our lives together, and I did not feel I could cope with compromising and adapting to a new partner and changing my entire lifestyle after 21 years with George, although I knew I was making little, gradual changes whilst building on what George and I had achieved together.

 

I realized, in the week following this counseling session with my friend, that everything George had ever said in his many messages to me pointed out this obvious truth which I had overlooked. The ‘All Is Well’ poem he sent me said it: ‘Death is nothing at all. I have just slipped away into the next room... whatever we were to each other, that we are still... I am waiting for you around the corner... all is well’. The message he gave me in Tunisia: ‘a new chapter in your life is beginning, but I will always be with you.’ Most important, the first message he sent me through his records in answer my question as to whether I should stop writing him posthumous letters: ‘Love letters straight from your heart keep us so near while apart’. Still I did not see it, although George had answered so directly - we should stay close spiritually even though we were not physically together, and should not move on so far that we lost contact with each other.

 

It finally came to me that ‘we must continue to work together’ and in that very week things started moving for me. The Rainbow Social Group and a similar bereavement group set up by someone else started developing again, and moving towards a merger which would benefit both groups. A collection I was organizing at work for the defense fund of a Texas Death Row prisoner started to take off, and a fax came in originating from the prisoner himself which I felt would also help my collection, and I got some orders for his notelets made in prison. I knew George was working with me on this prisoner project because the logo of the prisoner’s ‘Fund For Life’ was a tree, which had become symbolic of George’s survival of death.

 

At the end of this remarkable week I felt that by deciding not to 'move on' in a certain direction, i.e. seeking a new relationship, I had in fact moved on considerably because I was now working with George again and had accepted he was still part of my life and always would be there in the background helping me. I could not force the pace, in other words - if a new relationship was meant for me it would come in time.

 

That same week a TV program about Spiritualism had included an interview with a religious minister who suggested contacting the dead interrupts the natural grieving process and prevents people moving on. I had actually discussed with my unofficial counselor the various stages of the grieving process as defined by professional counselors and said I felt these did not all apply in my case. I had never felt anger over George's death, for instance, and I objected to some young counselor in their 20s who knew nothing of life and had probably never lost someone close telling me I should accept George’s death and move on. I actually said ‘I’m damned if I’ll accept it and move on’, which is, of course, directing anger at the counselor rather than at George or the circumstances of his death. It was being told I must ‘move on’ which made me angry, not George’s actual death.

 

This was very significant: I felt no anger because I did not accept George had died, it was the bereavement counselors who were trying to convince me of this, and I was angry that they were trying to kill George off, because for me he was still very much alive. The religious minister on TV was quite right, Spiritualism did stop me moving on and accepting George’s death because it proves that there is no such thing as death, merely a transition from one state to another. George was more alive than ever, and we still had a loving working relationship. We had achieved all we could on Earth together (which was another reason I did not feel angry he had left the Earth plane) but now he was on the Spiritual plane and I was still on Earth we could achieve much more together with him helping and guiding me and my Earthbound projects.

 

I was spending a weekend in Norwich with our friends Dirk and Paul in May. During a visit to nearby Diss we were standing by a lake watching the ducks and geese. There was a big family of mother and ducklings, and I said to Paul I wished I had brought some bread to feed them. Spontaneously I said the sort of thing George would have said: ‘Please give me some bread, I’ve got sixteen mouths to feed.’

 

I had not counted the ducklings, but when I did I twice counted 15, then I saw another one which made 16. George must have told me how many there were before I even thought of counting them, proving once again he is always near me wherever I am.

 

Later in May, during a non-religious service in memory of AIDS victims in St Martins-in-the-Fields, they held a one minute’s silence. As I thought about George the words came into my head: ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m all right. Get on with your life.’

 

In late June there was a crucial weekend. My unofficial friend and ‘counselor’ had revealed another side of his nature recently, though to be honest I should have realized this callous, selfish side was there from years back. I had given him two chances already, and this particular weekend he finally blew it by ringing me up and announcing he was canceling an engagement to go the opera with myself, Dirk and Paul the next night. He offered no apology, his only explanation was that he didn’t want to go, and he didn’t even offer to pay for the ticket. He then said he’d phone me next week, and rang off with a cheery ‘Bi-i’ before I had hardly a chance to get a word in edgeways.

 

It was as if George had arranged this last straw to reveal my ‘friend’s’ true nature the very weekend Dirk and Paul were coming down in their car, because it gave me the opportunity to finally break with this person. He had dumped some things at my flat for storage, so we were able to take them back in their car that weekend and dump them on the doorstep of where he worked (we’d called at his home first but he was out). My ‘friend’ was flabbergasted when I rang the intercom and made him come down to collect his stuff. We shouted at each other and that was that. I had finally been assertive and only that weekend did I have the unique opportunity to make the final break in this way. It seemed George had engineered the whole thing, for this was the same person who had pointed out that my relationship with George lived on spiritually. Once George had gotten this vital message across to me it seemed the ‘friend’ who had spelt it out to me had to get out of my life because although he had certain counseling skills, basically he was a selfish person who was out to control and use me.

 

We went to see the opera that night, ‘La Boheme’. We couldn’t sell the spare ticket, but Dirk and Paul shared the cost, proving to me what real friends are, and taught me to differentiate between genuine friends and others just out to use me.

 

The opera was very moving as the aria at the end of Act I was the piece of music we heard twice on TV the week George died. It was featured as background music in an episode of the sitcom ‘Bread’ earlier that week, and the night before he died we watched a video recording of Pavarotti’s 30^th anniversary concert, and to George’s delight he included that aria.

 

When I saw the opera, in English by the ENO, I realized all the parallels between Mimi’s death and George’s. It was almost as if he were acting out the final drama of the opera, and indeed he had kept singing about being an actress playing her final performance in the song he kept singing that week, ‘Performance of my Life’.

 

Mimi at one point says she is better when she clearly wasn’t, so did George. Someone says she should drink a cupful of medicine, but she didn’t. George also drank very little of his medicine and on one occasion a nurse told him to drink it. He finally did drink a whole glass minutes before he died. Mimi turns left, half sitting in bed and faces the audience, just before George died he turned to his left and sat on the bed, as though facing his audience on the Other Side.  A moment later, as I helped him sit in a chair by the bed, his spirit slipped out of his body before I realized it. Mimi too passed over without her lover realizing it. The two lovers had reminisced about their good times together, just as George had prompted us to relive our old comedy sketches we’d done on video. As the two lovers clasped each other on Mimi’s deathbed, they played a piece of the aria from the first Act, which meant so much to George the week he died.

 

As we left the theater I told Dirk and Paul how much it meant to me, and that I felt George was saying to me: ‘I had to f*****g die to get you to appreciate opera.’ It was true, I wept through most of the final Act because of all these parallels with George’s death. He did indeed give the ‘performance of his life’, as he kept singing, just as the operatic actress singing Mimi’s part gave a performance, only George’s one was for real.

 

Having seen the opera, many of the things which happened in that final week made sense to me and were given new meaning. For instance, when he said he was better, like Mimi did in the opera, it was a lie to make me (and probably himself) feel better. (Not a complete lie as he was hovering between life and death, so in his spirit body he was indeed ‘better’). As I have never been able to find the song he kept singing the week before he died I wonder if he composed it himself. He seemed to be saying that the whole of life is a performance which we must act out till that final curtain.

 

In late Spring/early Summer George seemed to be working behind the scenes to help my life change direction for the better. Apart from the opportunity to finally break with the person who was using and controlling me described earlier, I wrote at just the right time to the gay press about the lack of any rock’n’roll/rockabilly venues on the gay scene, offering to supply the records if someone would provide the venue with the disco equipment. A gay pub contacted me and said they had been thinking of putting on just such a night but didn’t know anyone who had the records, but they had all the equipment. My friend Keith offered to help and so we were booked. I found a suitable design for the central part of a logo advertising the night, and everything just seemed to click into place. It certainly gave me a new enthusiasm and interest in life. (Years later a similar venture just seemed to click into place with hardly any effort).

 

Also around this time I had a chance meeting with a friend of a friend on the Tube which put me in touch with Sheila again, my colleague from the days when I worked at CND headquarters back in the 1960s. We had lost touch over the previous 10 years so I gave her a ring and we were able to catch up on the mostly bad things that had happened to both of us. I had lost George to AIDS, Sheila had cancer (which proved to be terminal) and her best friend Zosha was suffering from M.E.. Still, we were in touch again and I felt I needed to share things with friends past and present.

 

Whenever I feel low and am missing George badly, something usually comes along to take my mind off my loss and lift my spirits. In fact, distractions seem to have almost been arranged to keep me busy ever since George died. Often Tibby, our cat, comes up to me and comforts me, or the phone will ring just as I am feeling very down. On one occasion in August 1994 I was making up an audio cassette to take to Rose in Hastings. Side one was a compilation of Country songs containing the word ‘rose’ or ‘roses’ (George had made up a similar tape for Rose some years before.) Playing Country songs with their poignant lyrics about loneliness, lost love and even death and the after life often made me sad and brought tears to my eyes, yet somehow this seemed good for me and released the emotion pent up inside me. After I’d had a good cry and finished the tape, I looked at the titles I had written down on the tape index card and saw I had mistakenly written ‘Room Full of Rose’ instead of ‘Room Full of Roses’. This made me laugh and I was sure George had a hand in it because Rose was a big boy with an even bigger personality and he did seem to fill a room whenever he walked into it.

 

One of our friends, Andre, came round to see me one Sunday in August. It was the first time he had paid a more or less spontaneous visit since George died, and the first time he had come to my place when I was on my own. We had a meal then a walk to some gardens by the River where we sat and talked about George, Andre’s partner and related matters. It was quite a frank discussion. A few days later, in the early hours of August 25^th, Andre and I both had vivid dreams about George in which he looked the picture of health and much younger. Andre said it was the first time he had dreamed of George this way. He saw him smiling and looking very happy from the back of a bus, and this symbolic message Andre interpreted as ‘moving on’. Andre strongly felt that the dream was George responding to our meeting and talk earlier that week, and saying he was happy. I do not remember the details of my dream so clearly, except it seemed to be something about our past life together. The part which I did remember was George standing on the pavement outside some shops and I asked if I could hug him once again. The most vivid part of the dream was my hugging him tightly and feeling him in my arms again for the first time since he died. I felt complete and whole again for those few seconds. He felt so solid and real, just as in life. Andre said it was almost as if George was saying ‘goodbye’ to both of us for a while, as if he were going on a journey. I was sure George would always be somewhere near, but perhaps he would feel the need to keep in touch less often so we could both ‘move on’. I had a vague recollection of something to do with a bus in my dream, but could not recall the details.

 

It is highly significant, however, that buses tie in very well with the two images I retain of George and of how I expect him to greet me when we meet again. One image is the way he often climbed on to the top deck of a bus before me, sat down and as I came up the stairs turned around smiling and patted the seat for me to sit down next to him. I imagine him saving me a seat for our journey into the next world in just the same way. The other image is when I arrived by bus in New Orleans after a separation of a few days, and he was unexpectedly at the bus station waiting for me. That reunion was so happy, like the reunion ahead when my bus finally reaches that bus station in the next world where George will be waiting for me.

 

Two such vivid dreams by myself and Andre a few days after we’d met and had an in depth talk about George seem very significant, especially as they were not the next night when he might very well have still be in our minds from our discussion, but four nights later. Later I discovered that Rose, who knew George for about 30 years, also had a vivid dream about him that very same morning, all about our holidays in Paris and Amsterdam together, and the hard times they had before I knew them, hustling in the snow in Green park and Bayswater. It certainly seemed George came close to at least three of his old friends that morning.

 

I decided to make up an audio cassette for my mother’s 80^th birthday in September, and wanted it to be different from tapes George and I had both done for her before. After one failed attempt I decided to start with some old numbers from George’s record collection. I pulled out a Gracie Fields album and some by Edith Piaf and Marlene Dietrich. Also another album of the same era from my collection by The Andrews Sisters. I chose Gracie Fields’ ‘Sally’ to start with, but she only sang a few lines and then went into ‘Come Back To Sorrento’. So I left those two numbers on the tape and chose Edith Piaf’s ‘La Vie En Rose’ next, followed by Marlene Dietrich singing ‘Lili Marlene’. Since that was a German song, I thought I might as well choose ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schon’ from The Andrews Sisters’ album. I then looked at the titles and realized they represented the start of a world tour - England, Italy, France, Germany. George seemed to have chosen the theme for me, so I carried on till I had filled both sides of the tape with songs from or about different parts of the world, mainly from George’s record collection with a few of my own in between.

 

George nearly always made up a tape for my mum’s birthday, and I knew this tape was from both of us, since not only were they mainly George’s records but he seemed to have chosen the international theme. I had a quite different idea when I started the tape - a mixture of songs and styles from various decades in various styles, but as so often before when I played records from George’s collection, his invisible hand seemed to be choosing the titles. If ‘Sally’ hadn’t run into ‘Come Back To Sorrento’ I wouldn’t have realized George was trying to tell me what the theme of the tape should be. If he’d physically walked into the room and taken the stylus off ‘Sally’ and placed it on the ‘Sorrento’ track he couldn’t have made his choice any clearer. It made sense, as he always did enjoy foreign travel more than almost anything.

 

On September 15^th, the third anniversary of George falling ill, I visited his tree in Islington. There were two other anniversaries in September: The 10^th was our 24^th anniversary of meeting and the 29^th was the third anniversary of George passing over. I was visiting the tree to commemorate all three dates.

 

As I was approaching by the most direct route from the bus, I discovered new street nameplates had been erected since my last visit. I learnt, for the very first time, that the street leading up to the tree, and indeed virtually opposite it, was named ‘Jersey Road’. This name did not appear in my A-Z guide of London streets, so it must have been a fairly recent one.

 

The symbolism surrounding George’s tree was now quite astounding, and beyond the realms of mere coincidence: the tree was planted when I was the exact age (to the very day) George was when he died, and it was planted opposite Jersey Road (overlooked by a tower block called Jersey House I later discovered). I found out the name of the road three years to the day after George first fell really ill on the ferry to Jersey, just before we landed. None of this was planned by anyone on Earth.

 

In September 1994 I went on holiday to Tunisia for the second time. I was a bit apprehensive as I had not heard from my friend Kamel since July, so I was not sure I would see him on the holiday. As it turned out he was waiting for me at the airport. He had given up his job (and wages) for two weeks just to be with me, and he helped me have a marvelous holiday.

 

George made his presence known throughout the holiday in various ways. On about the second day I was leaving the beach to meet Kamel but halfway to the hotel something told me to look in my pocket, and I discovered the key to my hotel room was missing. I went back immediately to search for it in the sand, and a German woman sitting nearby told me she had just handed it in to a bar on the beach. Had I not gone back immediately I might never have found it. After that I left my key at Reception. I know it was George who told me to check my pocket because he knew I had dropped my key in the sand, I had no reason to look in my pocket myself.

 

On the third anniversary of the day George died I was with Kamel in the town of Sousse wondering how I could get a few minutes alone to remember George’s passing, and at the precise moment George died Kamel ‘just happened’ to leave me for a couple of minutes. This gave me just enough time for a few moments private thoughts about George at the exact minute of his death, and I found myself beside a palm tree, which I touched because it seemed to bring me nearer to George, trees being symbolic of his survival of death. That evening was one of the few that Kamel was not able to stay overnight at my hotel, so again I was able to have some private moments to reflect on George. In the evening I put on a t-shirt with George’s picture on and played a special tape of sad songs I had dedicated to George, whilst sitting outside my room looking at the sea. I then played a tape of rock’n’roll songs to lift my mood.

 

They were the last two tapes I was ever to play on that cassette player, the one I had with me on our last holiday in Jersey, and the one George was so concerned I should protect with a cassette cover, which he provided after his death. Next morning the cassette player would not work properly, emitting a high-pitched whistle. It expired exactly three years to the day after George, but I was allowed to play that special tape before the very old gadget finally gave out.

 

Kamel had already shown me that the cassette player cover George had ‘given’ me after his death was even more suitable than I had realized: not only could it be worn round the neck, but it could be hung on to a belt. Kamel wore it once all day this way. I decided when I bought a new cassette player I would look for one which fitted into George’s cover.

 

Also during this holiday the ring which I wore on my little finger broke. George and I both had these rings, each with our name engraved on them. We had bought them at the same time, but George’s broke years ago, long before he died. My ring breaking three years after George became terminally ill whilst I was in the company of Kamel in his hometown seemed to be yet another symbol of breaking with the past and moving on.

 

In the last few days of my holiday we decided to visit Hammamet, a town on the coast in the north of the country. As it turned out there were no direct louages (communal long-distance taxis) to Hammamet and we ended up going via Tunis the capital, which I had wanted to visit again anyway. We had a lovely day in Tunis, and Kamel found a jacket he liked in one of the stores there. We then went on to Hammamet where I discovered that the whole place, charming as it was, was not really worth more than about an hour’s visit. I know George arranged for us to be diverted via Tunis, since spending a whole day in Hammamet would have been a waste.

 

It seemed to me George was approving of my friendship with Kamel and helping us to communicate. We understood each other perfectly, and I was able to explain the most complex things to him although we spoke different languages. My knowledge of French was extremely limited, but George knew French very well. Quite often I found myself ‘guessing’ French vocabulary and finding Kamel understood what I meant. As Kamel remarked when I told him how George communicated with me, it was as though I were receiving telefaxes from George in my head.

 

One night in October I went to bed in my flat feeling I would get a message from George, and before I went to sleep I asked him to be near me that night. I dreamt of him, but the only bit I can remember clearly is being with some other people and going into a bedroom to see George. I knew he was ill and that I had to make an appointment for him to see the doctor. As I entered the room where he was soundly sleeping I got an overwhelming feeling of happiness with the knowledge that he would survive his illness, that he wouldn’t die and we’d be together right into my old age. I went over and woke him up and he told me not to worry about him, he had made the appointment, and not to disturb him again (he always hated being disturbed when taking a catnap during the day.) I kissed him and left the room.

 

Of course it could have just been a dream prompted by my thinking of George the night before. Or it could be he came very close to me in the dream, and I realized again he had survived and wasn’t really dead. He was now ‘resting’ and telling me not to worry, not to try to contact him but wait till he contacts me. The reference to the appointment could refer to the next time he will contact me, or possibly our big appointment when I pass over and we meet again.

 

Whilst in Great Yarmouth for a rock’n’roll weekender I bought a cassette by Daniel O’Donnell. Previously I had been moved to tears by his version of ‘Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain’ which I now had on another tape. On the new tape I discovered a song called ‘Noreen Bawn’ about an Irish girl who emigrated to the States, and returns to her widowed mother in Ireland to die of an unnamed disease contracted whilst in America. Although an over-the-top melodramatic weepie, I instantly compared it with George’s and my Stateside trips during one of which he probably contracted the then unknown AIDS virus. It was such an unusual lyric that I could only take it as George’s confirmation that he did indeed get infected in America. Of all the millions of tapes and records I could have bought there are very few which would contain a song warning of the dangers of contracting a fatal disease in America.

 

One night in November, whilst staying at a holiday camp for another rock’n’roll weekend, I dreamt of George. I cannot recall all the details, only that we were both in bed and he was talking to me. I replied with short one syllable answers, and my mother, who was in the room, told me later I had acted ‘very coldly’ towards George.

 

When I awoke it seemed the dream was a warning that if George had lived our relationship could have gone sour. I thought of the period just before he died when he was suffering from acute depression, because of his long-term unemployment, pressure from the DHSS, advancing age and, possibly, ill-health which he may well have been worried was a symptom of HIV infection.

 

I remembered how he had turned to the bottle at times to try to forget his troubles, and how depressed and worried this made me. My heart would sink if I came home from work and saw the gin bottle. He became more argumentative when he was drinking, and I recalled a friend whose relationship had gone sour because his partner was drinking very heavily. Although George and I loved each other very much, the strain could well have caused us to have more and more rows and led to us both being even more depressed with unknown consequences. Already I had been driven to desperation on one occasion during a heavy drinking session of his and I had rung Alcoholics Anonymous for help. It could well be that his time on Earth was up, and that he would never have found another job which he liked or managed to fulfil his ambition to earn a living as a published writer. He could have been depressed and perhaps become an alcoholic for the rest of his life, and who knows how that would have affected me or our relationship? As it is we loved each other right up to the moment of parting and beyond, and we are both free to move on and hopefully do things which help us progress spiritually, instead of being stuck in a rut.

 

One November morning in the early hours I dreamt for the first time in my life of Minneapolis, a place I had never even visited at that time. I saw a large North American city on a big, winding river with a smaller city on the other bank. I forgot all about this dream when I awoke, but it was brought back to me when at work that day I was introduced to an old friend of George’s who worked there when George did. He had kept in touch after they both left, and they used to exchange letters and Christmas cards. I even had a photo of her in one of our albums. As I was talking to her, I suddenly remembered my dream that morning. Sure enough, she was living in Minneapolis, or to be precise just outside the city. I told her about the dream, and she confirmed Minneapolis was indeed on a river with the city of St Paul on the other bank. I had no idea she was visiting England before I had the dream, it had to be George giving me a premonition that I would meet one of his friends at work that day. How could I have known that what looked like one city in the dream was actually two separate ones? Until George’s friend told me, I’d never even heard of St Paul, the twin city of Minneapolis.

 

In mid December I was at a difficult stage in a strange, budding relationship with someone I had known as an acquaintance on the rock’n’roll scene for many years. He had made sexual advances towards me then pulled back when I started to respond, and had brought up the subject of homosexuality in conversation. I knew he was repressing the gay side of his nature and also that he had suicidal tendencies. He was also very immature for his age (around 30 years old). Not knowing quite how to handle the situation I consulted George’s dictionary and it seemed my role was to support this guy, but that any sexual relationship which developed could become mutually destructive. Once again in a time of real need it proved possible to get guidance from the Spirit world.

 

It also seemed as if George guided me to find new ornaments for our flat. I found four in the space of a few weeks just before Christmas which I know he would have liked. In the weeks after Christmas I acquired a number of new items to improve our home and keep up with new technology - it seemed as if George was finding bargains for me.

 

As I was writing my regular ‘letter to George’ early in January, saying how much I missed him, I noticed a blank space on the wall of his collage. I found the missing picture and stuck it up again. It was the picture of an acquaintance of ours, and I wrote in my letter that she had fallen down but I’d stuck her up again. The words immediately came into my head that she ‘always was a stuck up bitch’. These sentiments were so witty and typical of George’s sense of humor I was sure they came from him to cheer me up. The word ‘bitch’ does not seem at all appropriate for the person whose picture fell down, but it is absolutely typical of the uncompromising language George would use for impact when making a joke. In fact, since he died I have acquired an instant wit I never had before. I know it comes direct from George, and it has helped me win admiration among old and new friends because I always cheer them up and give them a laugh. I could never do this before, but George used to have a similar quick wit. I was reminded of the new friends I had made since George died since one rang up as I was writing the same letter and said how much he valued me as a friend.

 

A few days later I bought a new ring for my little finger. It wasn’t till after I’d bought it I detected the words ‘St George’ in microscopic lettering beneath a design of St George and the dragon. I hadn’t chosen the ring for this design or connected the Saint on the coin in the ring with George till after I’d bought it - I just wanted a coin ring, and they all had St George on one side. The ring which it replaced had my name engraved on it, and George had had an identical one with his name on it. I felt the new ring, which was to indicate I was gay, was now like a promise from George that he would be my saint or guardian angel protecting me from harm. How great was our love that it could reach out beyond the grave. It seemed George was still looking after me and that our love had only grown since we’d been parted.

 

He helped me compile a tape on the new cd/hi-fi unit I had bought. I started off with some very poignant Daniel O’Donnel songs which brought home my loss of George, followed by George’s voice from another tape where he was joking and singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to a friend. He then announced ‘a camp cabaret number’ and I dubbed on Liza Minelli singing the title song from ‘Cabaret’. This refers to a good-time girl named Elsie who lived and died enjoying life, the message being to enjoy life whilst you can as ‘it isn’t so long a stay’. All this was a conscious compilation, but I then had a very strong compulsion to end this segment of the tape with one more song from George’s collection, ‘The Rose’ by Bette Midler. I couldn’t remember the words of this song, but I knew it had to go on the tape. The words said you had to take chances, dare to love even if heartbreak came later, but during the long night when you are lonely and others seem to have all the luck in love, remember beneath the cold winter snow the seed of the rose is waiting to bloom in the Spring. George was reminding me once again that our love would blossom again in the Spring of our reunion, and that our time apart was but the Winter and we have endured many Winters before in our eternity together over many incarnations.

 

I liked the tune and knew I had to put this song on the tape, but once I listened to the words I felt George wanted me to do this properly for the very first time. Once again he had reached out to me from beyond the grave and touched my very soul, telling me to be brave and that the nightmare of being apart would not last for ever. We had dared to love and nothing, not even death, could destroy our love or our relationship.

 

It seemed he helped me in all sorts of little ways - telling me how to fill a small gap in an audio tape for my 50^th birthday party with suitable material, and finding pictures for the collage which fitted in with what was already there. I had hung on to the weekly TV guide I usually threw away and was amusing myself writing humorous speech bubbles to some of the photos, the very thing we were doing on the boring boat journey to Jersey just before George fell ill. It was whilst doodling in the TV guide I spotted a small picture of Judy Garland in Oz which fitted in perfectly with two other pictures of her in his collage in which she was dressed as in the Oz film complete with plaits, blue dress and basket. In one picture she was in a gay bar and in the other in front of the modern San Franciso skyline. In the third picture I’d found she was actually in Oz. I am sure George knew that picture was in the magazine and wanted it in his collage, so made sure I saw it by using the very method we spent our last innocent happy hours together before we knew the end was coming soon. It seemed he had helped me complete my party tape, and I had helped him complete his collage.

 

In March there was a program about euthanasia on TV, focusing on a Dutch couple and the wish of the man with a terminal illness to die at a time and way of his own choosing when his suffering became unbearable. He hung on till his birthday, and it was a very moving program. So much of it reminded me of George and myself I wept uncontrollably throughout much of it. The couple had been together a similar amount of years, obviously loved each other very much and were very close. The man could not walk or speak, had increasing difficulty breathing and was in pain. Although George never actually lost the power of speech there were times during that last week when he had difficulty communicating, and before I called the doctor he wouldn’t speak at all that morning. A day or so before he died he was delirious and talking only nonsense, but mercifully, he came back to me and the last day or so was talking normally. George too was in pain at the end, and much as he hated medication, he called for his GP to administer an intravenous morphine drip which may well have hastened his death, especially as the doctor and nurse showed me how to increase the dose if he was suffering too much pain. I increased the dose several times without much effect on the pain apparently, but it may well have hastened his death.

 

The program seemed to confirm everything I needed to hear. It was as if George was speaking directly to me. The couple were going through this final ‘goodbye’ on Earth together as they had gone through so many happier times together, and yet the wife couldn’t go with him this time. He had to go on alone, but he said: ‘You know where to find me, in the Milky Way by The Big Dipper’. He left a final note saying how hard it was for them to leave each other, thanking her for making his life worthwhile, and whilst there were times of discord the good times far outweighed these. A very significant thing was that he wrote that they shared different musical tastes, yet created music together, and this is EXACTLY how George and I were. That convinced me that George was talking to me through the program. The man hoped the memory of their wonderful life together would help her in the lonely years ahead. It was as if George had finally sent me that message I’d been searching for ever since he died, the final ‘goodbye’ note I could never find because he never wrote it. At last, he had sent it through this program in the words of this other terminally ill man to his partner.

 

Although it was upsetting, the program was also immensely comforting to me, and reminded me that George and I went through so much together including death, even though I couldn’t go with him. The program said so much George and I left unsaid - that he knew I was sad, that he was just as unbearably sad but had to go nevertheless, that he recognized how lonely I would be in the years ahead without him, but that he had had a wonderful life with me and hoped the memory of it would help me in my loneliness. It even seemed he was saying I did the right thing by administering perhaps a fatal dose of morphine in those last few moments. Once again George had spoken words of comfort to me from beyond the grave, words that would help me carry on till we could be together again.

 

I was sleeping in late one day in April with my cat Tibby half under the bedclothes asleep in my arms. I dreamt George came in with a big cat in his arms, which I took to be Dixie, a cat we had 15 years before it got very ill and had to be put down. George said he was back and we had a cuddle, and he said he’d had problems. I said I would have been able to handle them, and he commented: ‘Would you?’

 

When I awoke I realized that the problems referred to his terminal illness which was producing symptoms three years before he died, and which must have worried him and alerted him to the fact that something serious was wrong. I didn’t want to know, and pushed any suspicions of HIV infection to the back of my mind. I think he did the same, either for himself, for me, or more likely for a combination of both these reasons. I am sure towards the end he was trying to protect me when he was so reluctant to discuss what was wrong with him or see a doctor, and then telling me the doctor had been mistaken in his diagnosis of AIDS. What he implied in his dream was right: I would not have been able to handle the thought of his impending death - I have had enough trouble coping with it since he has been gone. However, I suppose we’d both have dealt with it somehow if we’d known beforehand, like other people have had to. The cat he was holding in the dream seemed significant, as though he was saying we both had a baby to cuddle and he would look after Dixie whilst I looked after Tibby.

 

I had a party to celebrate my 50^th birthday, and Lena’s partner, who had an expensive camera and was a good photographer, took some photos of George’s quilt panel. I had wanted him to do this ever since we had made it nearly two years earlier, but he had never brought his camera with him on previous occasions. Of course it was George working behind the scenes again to make sure the banner was only photographed properly on a significant occasion. When the photos were developed above the banner were balloons with the words ‘50 today’ on them. This reminded me that we had begun the banner at the Lighthouse Project Quilt Workshop on May 27^th, 1993, which would have been George’s 50^th birthday. This was not planned by us, and the message on the balloons made me realize the banner was photographed professionally for the first time the day I celebrated my 50^th birthday, so the photos were like a present to me, just as the quilt panel were like a present to George. Once again dates had proved very significant.

 

One day in May, on the way to a friend in Wimbledon, I passed the cemetery and crematorium where George’s funeral took place. I stopped and looked through the railings at the Garden of Remembrance where George’s ashes must have been scattered. As I started to walk away, I glanced back for one last look at the rose bushes (not yet in bloom) and the words came into my head: ‘I helped those roses to grow’.

 

On the last day of May I was waking slowly from a deep sleep and a dream in which I was sitting in some kind of public vehicle being driven along the highway. Then it seemed as if I was back in George’s arms again, the way we often cuddled together. As I slept on my right side in bed I could feel him snuggled up behind me holding me tight as he slept. Instead of snoring as he sometimes did, as I gradually woke from my sleep I could hear him purring behind me. When I was fully awake I saw our cat Tibby was indeed on the bed as usual, but nowhere near where I heard the purr coming from. She was asleep further down the bed in front of me, and I could not hear her purring. In any case her purr is inaudible unless her nose is right in your ear.

 

I lay there for a second or two thinking how wonderful it had been to feel George’s body pressed so close to mine again, and how safe, snug and happy I had been in those few seconds before waking. Then, inevitably, I began to sob the wailing despairing tears of grief. Immediately, Tibby got up, came over and sat on top of me, looking at me. As I stroked her and thanked her for being a little treasure sent from heaven, the significance of the purr in the dream became apparent. It was confirmation of what I had always suspected, in times of despair and utter loneliness and grief not only does Tibby often come over to comfort me, but George’s spirit enters her little body and we all three are briefly together again. Perhaps that was also the message of the cat George carried in the other dream a few weeks before.

 

Just before he died George was trying to tell me something about our cat and three being one. He and Tibby were both looking towards the ceiling and could clearly see something. I took it to be the spirits of two or three of our previous cats, or perhaps George and Tibby were trying to tell me she was a reincarnation of two of our previous cats, making with herself number three. At any rate, when she sat on top of me that morning the figure three became significant again, for there seemed to be three of us there once again. Perhaps that was what George was saying - that he and Tibby could see the doorway to the other world through which George would soon enter, but we three would always be together - myself, George and Tibby, our little baby.

 

As I finished the original typing of the paragraph above and printed it out, Tibby came in from the other room and started begging for attention. I stroked her, and as I prepared to cut the continuous printout into pages with the ruler I noticed the picture in front of me on the desk was one of the last ever taken of the three of us - George, myself and Tibby. Significantly, it seemed, Tibby was on George’s lap in the photo and I was sitting next to them both tickling the cat under her chin. My eyes were focused on Tibby so when the photo was taken I couldn’t see George, but he was there with Tibby, and so it was to be after his death. Although I can see and feel Tibby, George is there too.

 

At a friend’s party word slipped out that George hadn’t wanted Andre, among other people, at his funeral. It was something I couldn’t avoid as Andre was asked if he went, and he guessed why he wasn’t invited. A few days later I was talking to Andre on the phone, and he could detect that the quick wit I was coming out with was George speaking through me, saying: ‘Oh, I can see George is alive and well tonight, darling’. I felt this was George’s way of telling Andre that they were still friends and there were no hard feelings. George often came close to me like this and I’d find myself speaking or acting like him, but by bringing Andre into the picture this time I felt I was conveying a message from George to Andre that they remained friends. For one evening, perhaps, it was almost as if George and Andre were holding one of their witty, cynical phone calls again, and I seemed to be the medium on this occasion. It is surely no coincidence either that Andre’s phone call was to tell me about something Georgina, a friend of his, had done. ‘Georgina’ also happened to be the name Andre often called George, being his camp drag name.

 

At a birthday party for Lena I was joking with him and Rose, and as a bit of high camp made up a funny story. To my amazement Rose confirmed it had actually happened. It was one of the occasions Rose had caused George to be thrown out of his lodgings, but not the occasion when he lived in Lisle Street which George had told me about. He had never related to me the details of this other incident, and Rose had completely forgotten about it till I ‘made it up’. It was as if George were showing his presence at Lena’s 60^th birthday party. Just before this incident I had drunk a toast to George, and I’d also included his name on my birthday card to Lena.

 

In all sorts of little ways I got the feeling George was working behind the scenes. On the day I was wearing a suit last worn by George, I received an internal e-mail at work from the computer department suggesting a name for a general electronic mailbox which myself and my colleague would use to handle incoming public e-mail. The name chosen, quite independently, was ‘George’. I had suggested ‘Internet’, but the IT person had made an anagram of the first three letters of two public e-mail networks we used at the time - GEOnet and GREennet.

 

It was particularly appropriate because George was telex operator at AI before I started there in 1985 in the same job. In the next ten years fax and e-mail had largely replaced telex, and here was George’s name being suggested for the latest technology to replace telex, and it was suggested on the 4^th anniversary of his last full day on Earth. Some years before an entire computer had been named after someone who used to work at AI as a volunteer, now this electronic mailbox was being given George’s name quite unintentionally, and it served to remind me how close George still was to me. It was also one in the eye for the International Secretariat of AI which had blacklisted George for whistleblowing on alleged mismanagement and waste of money. Now they were to have a mailbox bearing his name doing many of the functions George himself used to do with older technology 15 years earlier.

 

The next day, on the actual anniversary of his death, I went to a Spiritualist meeting (being a non-Christian I object to the terms ‘church’ and ‘service’.) Immediately before the clairvoyance session was a song I could sing with gusto, wholeheartedly believing in every word since it didn’t refer to ‘God’ (about which I was agnostic at best) or Christian concepts such as ‘salvation’, unlike some other ‘hymns’ sung at Spiritualist meetings. This song was about the progress of the spirit learning from its own mistakes and reaping what it sowed. It mentioned the futility of sacrifices to atone for our wrong doings, reflecting my own rejection of ‘salvation’ through the human/divine sacrifice of Christianity’s founder and the ‘deathbed’ repentances, absolutions and conversions which are supposed to enable people to escape reaping the consequences of their negative and sometimes downright wicked actions in life. Spiritualists believe there is no short cut to the karmic process worked out through many incarnations; at the very least one has to truly regret once past misdemeanors and try to put them right or compensate the victims. You can’t just say ‘I believe in Jesus, so everything’s OK’.

 

So after singing this very perceptive Spiritualist hymn, I was in a very good mood, and the medium, Marion Denny, was excellent. She went right round the room and made sure everyone got a message. All seemed to be very accurate judging from the replies.

 

All messages were quite short, just two or three minutes, but what she told me seemed very accurate. She spoke of an ‘aunt’ figure who could have just been a close friend of my mother, who sent fond love to me. The woman died relatively young, ‘though I don’t mean she was a teenager’ the medium said. This could have been one of several people, as two of my aunts had died before old age, both wives of my mother’s brothers. There was also ‘Auntie Dora’ and ‘Auntie Gretel’ who both died quite young, who were in fact just close friends of my mother. I think the message was probably from Gretel, a Jewish refugee who worked in my dad’s restaurant and who was very fond of me. She died of cancer in the late 1940s/early 1950s.

 

The medium then spoke of my Chinese guide, which I had not been told about before. It seemed he helped me when I was in danger of wallowing in depression, though the medium said I was not the type of person to do this as I always tried to lift myself out of it by doing things. This is absolutely true. If I didn’t keep busy and active all the time I would get very depressed, and would indeed end up ‘wallowing’ in it.

 

The medium then spoke of a man wearing ordinary spectacles who had a hearing problem, but didn’t wear a hearing aid. She remarked that if it was as useless as the one she was wearing no wonder he didn’t wear it. I rarely think of George as wearing glasses, but of course he wore them a lot. Like me he was shortsighted, and wore spectacles with large frames and lenses when out, but in the house he wore a pair of very ordinary looking spectacles with black frames. He suffered from a degree of deafness, especially towards the end of his life, and went to St Thomas’s Hospital Ear, Nose and Throat Department to have his ears syringed. They also gave him a hearing aid, which I believe he only ever wore on one occasion - a visit to the theater in Brighton. It whistled throughout the performance because he was not used to it and didn’t know how to make it work properly. The medium’s description is not how I would have thought of George - deaf and wearing spectacles, yet it is entirely accurate and indicates this image of him was not transmitted telepathically by myself to the medium but came from some other source. It was how other people might see George, not how I saw him myself.

 

The message immediately after this description of George, for it could be nobody else I can think of, was not to let other people get me all hot and bothered, but to close my front door and take life day by day. This was so perceptive and accurate, as that Summer especially I had gotten myself tied up with other people’s arrangements and had little time for myself. I tended to get committed for weeks in advance, trying to please everyone, and not having time to do things I wanted to do. Living life day by day was what I wanted to do, but I always seemed to get enmeshed in other people’s plans and perhaps regret it later.

 

So, on the fourth anniversary of his death, I felt George had come through to me telling me to be a bit more independent, and not get too involved with the ‘lame ducks’ he had bequeathed me, and other people who were making more and more demands of my time. The message was to strike a balance, leaving enough time for myself. Instead of making plans far ahead I should postpone a decision until nearer the time, so I could decide on a day to day basis what I wanted to do. It all made so much sense, yet I found it difficult to break the habit of tying myself down to commitments days or weeks ahead, which was my way of coping with my bereavement and keeping busy in the months and years after George’s death.

 

In January 1996 I had just written a letter to George. I was quite depressed and wrote about making Spiritual progress and that I might need to come back again to learn some more lessons. Immediately afterwards, via his dictionary, the following messages came to me. There was a reference to a ‘moving, endless track for enabling a vehicle to proceed over difficult ground’ (a definition for ‘caterpillar’), and which to me symbolized the indefinite succession of lives on the Earth plane enabling the spirit to make gradual progress by learning difficult lessons. The second reference my finger pointed to was: ‘a wheelless vehicle drawn by horses or reindeer for use on snow or ice’ (‘sleigh’). This seemed to represent a much faster, smoother and more pleasant way of moving on which suggested the higher planes and speedy Spiritual progress. The message was crystal clear to me - I needed the difficult seemingly endless caterpillar track of reincarnation to proceed over the difficult ground, but later I would whizz along in the blinding white light and easy ground (both represented by snow and ice) of the higher spiritual planes. The seasonal association even suggested Santa’s airborne sleigh, i.e. the spirit flying high and free from its Earthbound bodily prison. Once again George had replied instantly to my letter, giving me reassurance that spiritual progress was well worth the difficulties and would get easier in future. Yet another so-called ‘coincidence’ - when seeking guidance about Spiritual progress I got two messages referring to vehicles designed to make progress over different terrains at appropriate speeds.

 

Of course, taking the other definition of ‘caterpillar’, it was the preliminary stage of a beautiful butterfly, and one day my spirit would emerge and fly away, shedding my drab Earthly body like a butterfly sheds its caterpillar form. January 4^th is still within the 12 days of Christmas, so the ‘sleigh’ reference also suggested a load of presents or rewards for good behavior. This type of symbolism was so typical of George.

 

In February I went to see the play ‘The Woman In Black’, knowing only that it was a ghost story. The central character felt he had to write down and re-enact the whole tale, which culminates in the death of his wife and child, in order to exorcise it from his mind.

 

That very same day I had rung a publisher to advise in what format I should type up this manuscript. I had finished the first draft and was ready to edit and type up a copy for sending to possible publishers.

 

As in the play, I had written down the story of myself and George primarily as a therapeutic activity, to re-enact it and finally exorcise the trauma of his death from my mind. Now the first draft was finished did that mean I too was now free to move on? In retrospect, I think it did. In any event I felt I had to write down this story for both myself and posterity.

 

I read the message of the play as George saying I had finally exorcised the ‘curse of the woman in black’ symbolized by that figurine of a woman in black on my bedroom bookshelf, inches from the spot where George died, and which we bought together in Jersey as he was dying from PCP. Having written everything down, it seemed as if that whole period had been dealt with and a new one could begin. The message from the play and two films I’d seen recently were all the same - I had to tell the story of George and myself in order to move on, and this last message came as soon as the first draft of the book was finished.

 

But was my interpretation right? I decided to consult George’s dictionary by opening pages and pointing to definitions at random. The definitions were: curtsy: a woman’s salutation made by bending knees and ducking body; further: to advance; governess: private woman tutor; iconoclast: person who breaks icons; ingratiate: to get oneself in favor with.

 

To me the meaning was again crystal clear. It referred to ‘the woman in black’, the figurine which was an omen of George’s impending death and also the title of the play I saw. The message via George’s dictionary was that the woman was curtsying, bending her knees and bowing out of my life, allowing me to advance and move further away from the governing hold which this symbolic woman had held over my private world for the past four and a half years. She had been like a tutor, for the death of my partner had taught me a lot about life and put things into a totally new perspective. I had now symbolically broken this icon by writing down the whole story of our lives and had therefore ingratiated myself with George and my own life purpose because I was now free to move on.

 

Yet another ‘coincidence’ with dates: after completing the first draft of this book I thought up a title and wrote an introduction. I then had to re-type and edit the book. The day I finally found time to start doing this, I was typing the first chapter about how I met George and fell in love, and suddenly realized the date. I had inadvertently started typing and editing the final version of this love story on Valentine’s Day, February 14^th.

 

I met someone in January 1996 and it seemed we might form a relationship. We met on several subsequent occasions, and he stayed the night at my flat several times. However, he carried an awful lot of ‘baggage’ with him, not least an over-protective woman neighbor and ‘friend’ who drove him up from Hove when he visited me, promptly got lost, didn’t want Matthew traveling by public transport in case the IRA planted a bomb, and insisted I have a fire bucket filled with sand next to my front door because I worked for Amnesty International and some terrorist organization might put a bomb through my letter-box! She was also under the false impression that HIV tests were practically useless as they wouldn’t show up positive for 10 years after infection. (She was obviously getting confused with the average incubation period from infection to full-blown symptoms of AIDS). She took exception to a very good friend of mine, and suggested Matthew and I stay at her flat when I visited Hove so his other neighbors wouldn’t get suspicious of our relationship.

 

As I was laying in bed the night after I’d spent a weekend with Matthew, I was mentally talking to George’s spirit about how happy I was to have met Matthew, but that I was worried about Jane’s influence (she was also a member of a weird religious cult). At this very moment there was a clatter from the bathroom, and I discovered George’s tooth mug had fallen from the wall, along with its holder. I took this as a warning and opened George’s dictionary at random to get clarification. It came immediately, the definitions ‘bode - to portend, foretell, especially evil’, ‘important’ and ‘mother - female parent... to care for as a mother’ were the ones which my finger pointed at random. I then knew this was an important warning from George about this woman, who was trying to mother Matthew to the point of suffocation. George seemed to be saying she boded ill for our future, possibly even evil, which could have been a reference to her religious beliefs (she was apparently a

Druid). I took this at the time to mean I must gradually try to wean Matthew away from her undue influence and not get sucked in myself. She had offered me a spiritual reading over the phone and a special stone to wear, and I felt this is where the ‘evil’ could come in, quite possibly opening the way for less developed spirits from the lower planes (some would say dark demonic forces) to play tricks on me and lead me astray, or worse. His tooth mug falling from the wall just as I was communicating with George about Jane and Matthew was a clear warning. As it turned out I broke up with Matthew some weeks later because he was so disturbed, and also I kept making comparisons with George. I just wasn’t ready for a new relationship and wrote and told him so. I am happy to report I met him on a train years later; he had left Hove and broken contact with Jane. He agreed she had been a bad and very restricting influence over him.

 

In March I went on a week’s holiday to the Canary Islands with a friend of mine from the bereavement group, and Dirk and Paul were also there the same time but staying for two weeks. They stayed at my flat the weekend before we went to the Canaries, and I saw quite a bit of them on holiday and they saw us off when we left for home. They also rang me in London on my birthday from The Canaries. On a whim I decided to meet them at Gatwick on their return, and caught a Thameslink train from work. They were very surprised to see me, but Dirk confided to me before boarding their train to Norwich at Liverpool Street (they were not staying at my place overnight as they had to be at work next day) that he had a sudden thought before they left that I would meet them at Gatwick Airport, but dismissed the idea as silly. We had made no such arrangement, and I had never met them at the airport before. I know George inspired me to meet them, and told Dirk I would be there.

 

It is not every day that you find the composer Khachaturian’s name in the paper, yet the very day I printed out the final version of the chapter which mentions my dancing to the composer’s '   Saber Dance’ as a small child, his name did appear in a news item about a young musician’s award. As I read the piece, I realized I had spelt the name incorrectly. George was a great lover of classical music, and would be very unhappy to see a composer’s name spelt wrongly in the final draft of our book. He was making sure I corrected the spelling mistake, I am 100% sure of that. It is just too fantastic odds to be mere coincidence.

 

In June I was recording an audiotape for a friend, and Jerry Lee Lewis was singing the gospel hymn ‘I’ll Fly Away’ as I walked by a large photo of George in the passage. I looked at it and mentally said something like: ‘I’ll fly away one day and we’ll all be together again.’ Quick as a flash the words came into my head: ‘I flew away. I had to get away from you all.’ This cynical, yet comical, reply made me burst out laughing, for it was so typical of George. There was I trying to be serious about us meeting again someday, and he came back and jokingly suggested he was quite enjoying the break away from us all. I told Rose later that day over the phone, and he had exactly the same reaction as myself. He laughed and said: ‘How camp. Oh, that’s lovely,’ because he too knew it was so typical of George. Anyone who didn’t know him might have said it was a horrible thing to say, but George could always bring a cynical joke in when he felt things were getting too sentimental. There would be an element of truth in the remark, for we could all be a strain on him at times with our moans, groans and problems. No doubt he was glad of some space without these distractions, much as he wants to meet us all again in due course. In fact Rose has made several miraculous recoveries after being hospitalized due to serious complications caused by his diabetes, so it seems George may not be ready to face him yet on the Other Side and is using his full healing powers to keep him here a bit longer.

 

Later in June I wrote what I considered to be a very important letter, though I have no doubt whatsoever it was discarded only partly read. It was to a ‘Guardian’ journalist who was presenting a series of programs on BBC TV pouring scorn on all things paranormal. The long letter, which I sent to the journalist at the BBC with a copy to the newspaper, cited the overwhelming evidence for things such as UFOs, out-of-the-body-experiences, reincarnation, etc. spelt out in scientific terms, with cast-iron examples which amounted to scientific proof. I also included a theory to explain the meaning of life and the multi-universe without invoking God or religion, stating Spiritualist concepts in terms of quantum physics, and applying Darwin’s Theory of Evolution to everything, including matter, energy, the multi-universe and ‘God’ itself. (I think ‘God’ an inappropriate term since it implies a Creator. I prefer to refer to the Great Spirit or, in more scientific terms, the highly developed unified conscious energy field which I believe has evolved and continues to do so.)

 

After writing this letter I thought to myself: ‘What’s the point? No-one is going to read it or take any notice, and certainly no-one is going to publish it or probably anything else I write, including the book about our lives.’ I looked at George’s dictionary for any message of inspiration, and three words/definitions came to light in succession: ‘soldier - to struggle, esp. as soldier on’, ‘pneumonia’ and ‘cross - something difficult to bear’. The meaning was absolutely clear to me: I must struggle on with my writing and my life generally, even though I have the cross of my bereavement and other difficulties to bear. Proof the message came from George came from the single word ‘pneumonia’, the opportunist disease which took him away from me. I posted the letter to the journalist next day, probably dismissed as from a crank, but I had persevered as George encouraged me to.

 

The numerous incidents indicating George’s posthumous presence continue, and are now almost taken for granted. I don’t intend to record all of them from now on (five years after his death) unless something really amazing happens. I will therefore start rounding off now with the events surrounding the fifth anniversary of George’s passing. Because of two leap years intervening, September 29^th, 1996 was a Sunday, like September 29^th, 1991. In the morning I had breakfast with Rose, who was keeping me company that weekend. We had the radio tuned to Country 1035, a station I listened to regularly, and nearly all the songs they played that morning were very poignant and appropriate for the occasion. There were several about lovers who had parted or passed on and remained in the memory, and then the song which contains the line: ‘When I’m dead and gone, don’t want nobody to grieve, want to leave a happy memory living on...’. Once again it was as though George were choosing the songs for us on the radio to complement our mood and send us a message.

 

We got to his memorial tree just at the moment George had passed over five years earlier, and after we stood looking at it and the plaque for a few moments I noticed a black and white cat emerge from some bushes nearby. A yuppy-type spotted it also, and pointed it out to his wife or girlfriend. As the posh couple watched the cat, I noticed its tail was going up and down as it sat there, and I said to Rose: ‘It looks as if it’s having a crap.’ Indeed it was, for a moment later it got up, turned around and started scratching the ground. The posh couple pretended not to notice. This was just the sort of joke George would have appreciated, the ‘cartwheel for comic relief’ he seemed to have provided on so many sad occasions both before and after his death. It certainly lifted my spirits that moment exactly five years after he passed over.

 

A few days later I was listening to the radio again and there was an advertisement about sponsoring a child in Africa for £15 a month. I had heard this advert many times before without paying much attention, but this time I actually seriously thought about doing it. However, going about it was a bit complicated, and I wondered if I could afford it. Next post, a few hours later, included an appeal from Oxfam, the charity George worked for as a volunteer shop leader and assistant. I already paid them some money every month by covenant and so ignored most appeals from them for extra money, but this one had the slogan on the envelope: ‘Do you remember the day which changed your life?’  Inside was a letter which spelled it out further, mentioning the birth of a child or death of a loved one, after which nothing was ever the same again. There followed an appeal for me to increase my standing order by a few pounds a month to help Africans who had lost their loved ones or became split from their families due to the civil wars, etc.. This was like a message from George in response to my earlier bout of mental generosity. He was saying if you want to increase your regular donation to Oxfam in memory of me just do it by £3 a month (the suggested increase in the appeal), don’t go mad and commit yourself to another £15 a month. So I did just that, sent off the form for the extra £3 and wrote that the increase was in memory of George, Oxfam worker and shop leader. I also wrote that message on the envelope before posting it. It seemed a fitting way to remember George five years on, giving a little extra to a charity he devoted so much time and energy to.

 

In these little ways George continues to guide me and help me through difficult moments. He is always there for me and our close friends, and I now know he always will be there until we are reunited again in the spiritual realms. This final chapter of our book is now drawing to a close, and what follows are psychic events I consider of outstanding significance.

 

Some quite remarkable things did happen in 1997 around the time I revisited New Orleans for the first time since George and I were there in 1983.

 

A couple of weeks before I left I was laying in bed and I got the strong impression George was relaying a message to me. It concerned two people, our old friend Rose in Hastings, and my new boyfriend, Stan, who was married. The message which came into my head was then verified and strengthened by words and definitions I looked up randomly in George’s dictionary.

 

So strong was the message about Rose I relayed it to another old friend of ours, Andre, and told him to remember it, but I hoped it didn’t come true. It was a prediction that after my American trip something dreadful would happen to Rose. I assumed it meant he would pass over, either from a complication due to his often neglected diabetic condition (he was always eating things forbidden to him), or due to some clumsy accident. When I saw Rose a week before my American trip, I told him to be careful as George had warned me something might happen to him very soon.

 

The message about Stan was that our relationship would continue steadily, but would really take off once he got a divorce from his wife. Since he was not even contemplating a divorce but had said the marriage was often difficult and if it got too much or broke up he’d come and live with me, I took the word ‘divorce’ loosely to mean if ever Stan left his wife and moved in with me the relationship between us would really blossom.

 

In America we visited many towns, including Memphis and Ferriday which I also visited in 1983 whilst George stayed in New Orleans, one of his favorite cities. I felt George’s presence very strongly in New Orleans only, nowhere else. He seemed to be with me all the time to make sure I was always at the right place at the right time. Here are a few examples:

 

One of the first things I did on arrival was go and look at the hotel where George and I stayed on Canal Street on the edge of the French Quarter. I even went into the lobby to get their brochure, and then I took a photo from across the street. I got a little upset, but after a little cry I got it out of my system. From then on George seemed always to be with me in New Orleans.

 

Later that afternoon I tried to take a photo of a fountain, but a family were in the way and kept hanging around for no apparent reason, and as I waited for them to move a paddle-steamer left dock in the brilliant sunshine and started heading down the Mississippi. I rushed up the levee and got a photo of it, to find it was the last picture on the roll and I had no more on me. If I’d taken the fountain I’d have had no photo left for the paddle-steamer, and after that day the sun went and the weather was very wet. Another photo I took of a paddle-steamer was very dull because of the rain. The photo I took of the paddle-steamer in the sun wasn’t initially printed because it was only half a frame at the very end of the roll, but I had it developed anyway because George had taken so much trouble to get it for me, no doubt as a memento of when we took a paddle-steamer down this stretch of the Mississippi together.

 

Another day I discovered the Imax cinema where a 3-D film was showing. George and I had visited the National TV and Cinema Museum in Bradford, but didn’t have time to see the Imax cinema production there, to our great disappointment. George knew I was crazy about 3-D and holograms. I went to the 3pm show, and the 3-D effects were the most fantastic I’d ever witnessed. So much so it was a highlight of my holiday. When I came out it was obvious it had been raining very hard indeed. I learned later from my friends that there had been an absolute downpour at 3pm and they’d all got soaked. George had insured I was in the Imax cinema for that crucial half hour or so for the most exciting cinematic experience of my entire life, up to that time.

 

I was looking for some cheap film for my camera, but all I could find was very expensive Kodak film in the Woolworths where George and I used to have our breakfast in 1983. After breakfasting there myself, I went over and picked up this film thinking I’d have to pay even more than it cost back home in UK, but the woman on the till told me they had a special offer on Kodak film at the other end of the store. I went there and got 8 films for a fraction of the price. Again George was with me in one of his favorite stores in New Orleans to make sure I got a good deal.

 

George and I took the St Charles streetcar through the Garden District in 1983. I repeated the journey this time, but went a few stops further by mistake to the end of the line. Not recognizing the terminus, I got a tram back to where George and I had disembarked and had a drink there. That evening I found a note in my hotel room that the others had gone to Jimmy’s club. They suggested I join them and come by taxi, which would have cost at least 12 dollars. Both George and I had an aversion to wasting money on taxis unnecessarily, so I looked it up and commenced walking, only to realize before I’d got very far that the street where the club was, although within walking distance of my hotel, was very long and the club they’d gone to was on block 80. I started to walk back, but consulting the old map George and I had used in 1983 I realized the club was on the tram route I had taken that morning, so I got there for one dollar and only had to walk a few yards from the tram stop to the club. The block numbers were marked on the map, so I knew exactly where to get off. Had I not gone those extra few stops to the terminus in the morning I might not have realized the club as being on the route, since it was located in that stretch beyond where George and I had gotten off.

 

When I got back home from America, sure enough Rose was in hospital with septicemia, a complication of advanced diabetes which often leads to amputations and, frequently, death in a relatively short space of time. George’s warning had come true already. I went down to Hastings and visited Rose in hospital and helped his partner Neil at home. We both knew it was very serious, and one look at Rose told me he was not at all well. Speaking to him you knew he wasn’t his usual self, he didn’t even laugh at a saucy present I had brought him back from New Orleans, so that told me how near death he was. I recognized that near death look George had etched on his face in the weeks before he died, and didn’t expect Rose to survive. Thankfully he improved during the week and was allowed back home. The next weekend when I went down, although still ill and in pain, it was almost like old times with him and Neil arguing. The flat had seemed so empty and sad without Rose the weekend before. George wasn't ready to face his old friend Rose on the Other Side yet, so had obviously summoned up all his healing powers to help Rose make a miraculous recovery. Also, Neil was to need Rose in future years, after Neil had several strokes. It was clearly not yet time for Rose to depart this world.

 

Stan was overjoyed to see me, his eyes brimming and full of love. He couldn’t wait to hold my hand, and give me cuddles and kisses. The relationship has continued steadily since then, and he is now much more relaxed in my company and has come to terms with his gay side. It still remains to be seen if he ever leaves his wife or if she throws him out. A baby came along years later, and they moved to, of all places, Hastings, so I still saw him regularly when I visited Rose and Neil. Predictions from George that we will end up living together continued to come through strongly from time to time, as unlikely as this seems at the moment.

 

Before and during my American trip George had forcefully indicated his presence and continuing interest in the welfare of myself and his friends. I felt these events were too important not to be recorded here.

 

On May 27^th, George’s 54^th birthday anniversary, something truly remarkable again occurred. His sister and nephew from Glasgow were visiting London for the first time since the old plaque by George’s tree had gone missing nearly two years previously. Both myself and the gardeners had searched the bushes and the river for the plaque, but couldn’t find it, so a new one was made. However when we visited the tree on George’s birthday and asked the gardener to put some flowers at the base of the tree, he gave us the old plaque which the police had found when they dragged the river recently for a murder weapon. George’s sister, Betty, took it home to put in her garden with some flowers round it as a memorial to George in his home city. It seemed it was meant for her the way it turned up when she was visiting after being missing for two years. It was as if George was giving his sister a present on his birthday, and saying to her if you remember me with this plaque all is forgiven even though we parted on bad terms.

 

Some years later flying to Larnarca in Cyprus for my father’s funeral I felt he was communicating with me just as we came in to land. He’d met me at Larnarca airport the first time I visited Cyprus, and now he seemed to be doing the same, telling me I was right in one of my last letters to him - there was life after death and his life here on Earth had been a learning experience, so was not wasted as he’d felt in later years.

 

Sitting in his home in Kato Paphos a few days later with his second (common-law) wife, my brother and his wife, a picture of EOKA terrorist Grivas fell partly out of its frame. It had been there for years, and in his London flat for years before that, yet it fell just those few minutes we were all sitting there. I knew it was dad telling us he no longer approved of Grivas and the violent rightwing EOKA terrorist movement which wanted union of Cyprus with Greece.

 

I was convinced this was a personal message from my dad to me, because years earlier he had complained to my mother about the pictures of ‘murderers’ (Lenin and Stalin) on my bedroom wall, and I had retorted that he had pictures of a ‘murderer’ (Grivas) on his Hampstead flat mantelpiece. Now it was on his wall in Cyprus and he was removing it at just the moment I was there. My brother set about putting the picture back in its frame and was looking for some nails to do so. I felt like telling him not to bother as dad didn’t want it up anymore, but he wouldn’t have understood (both my brother and my dad disbelieved in life after death, though my dad was an important member of the Greek Orthodox church which is as much a political as religious organization in Cyprus). My dad had tried to remove his picture of a murderer from his wall in the few minutes I was sitting in his Cyprus home, just as I had eventually removed my pictures of murderers, which he had criticized all those years before. I then knew my dad had already learnt some important lessons from his latest life here on Earth.

 

Messages continued to come through from George, often referring to Stan and how we would eventually be living together. On what would have been his 55^th birthday I watched some old videos of George and myself. Immediately afterwards George informed me, via his dictionary, that there was ‘no more empty space’. I knew exactly what he meant. After he died watching our videos increased the yawning gap deep inside me caused by our separation. Although no-one could ever replace George, I now had someone (Stan) who loved me. This, and the fact I knew George was still around, meant I no longer had that huge empty feeling inside of me.

 

Later that very day at work they changed the name of the George Internet mailbox, because someone named George had come to work there and there was confusion between the two names. I didn’t mind too much as ‘George’ had been in use for some years. Once again it was very strange that entirely by accident if you believe in endless coincidences, and certainly not through conscious decision, they decided to change the name on George’s 55^th birthday anniversary. However, like a ghost, the old name of ‘George’ continued to linger on the system. It remained inexplicably in the e-mail letterhead above the new name for another two hours or so, and remained at the head of a frequently used draft text for years afterwards.

 

In August 1998 I’d watched a TV program decrying everything paranormal, and in particular Spiritualism and its modern founders, the Fox sisters. When I wrote my monthly ‘letter to George’ I mentioned the program and asked him to send me another convincing message to assure me he was OK and still around ‘like sending a postcard when you’re on holiday’.

 

Next day, sure enough, George’s answer came in the form of the tape I was playing up the mixed swimming pond at Hampstead Heath whilst sunbathing. I had selected this tape days before along with others, not remembering exactly what was on it. Many of the songs on the first side were like an answer from George to my request the night before. In particular three Dolly Parton songs recorded off an album George had borrowed from the local library. Significantly this was the album sleeve we were looking at on the sofa when Channel 4 filmed what became our ‘obituary’ video when we kissed and expressed our love for each other. The lyrics of the songs implored the listener to fondly remember a lost love when on their own, that once we ‘had a love beyond compare’ before saying ‘goodbye’, and that we’ll meet again in a place where there is no more separation. Another line explained how George was called away because his time on Earth was over and he couldn’t ‘feel at home in this world anymore’. Certainly that was how George felt in his last years, that it was time to move on to a better world. He’d done all he could here, but I know he hated leaving me behind.

 

So yet again, when I had written to George and asked him for a message, he replied with 24 hours expressing his love and an assurance we’d meet again.

 

There was a line in one song about a lover who had evidently grown cold emotionally but the way I heard it, it had a quite different interpretation - one who had literally grown cold, i.e. died. The most relevant phrase referred to his eyes turning into ‘a cold and distant stare’ and that was the moment I was 100% sure it was George speaking to me, for his cold, staring, empty, loveless eyes after death were an image I have never forgotten, much as I tried. In fact, they looked like that just before he drew his last breath, and that was how I knew his spirit had left him at least a full minute before he actually stopped breathing. His dead eyes, windows to the soul, said nobody was at home, George’s spirit had departed for a better home, and now George had drawn my  attention to this and promised he’d meet me on the other side. I was moved to tears then and there by the pond and later walking to my bus to take me to work in the afternoon.

 

George couldn’t have picked a more appropriate tape, and indeed a more appropriate place as I had mentioned in my letter to George this pond and all the characters who go there regularly, whom I’d given nicknames. I’d even asked: ‘Do you like my characters’ and wrote how they reminded me of other colorful characters with odd nicknames we’d known. On this very day I had actually photographed some of them, just before I realized George was sending me messages via the tape. It seemed he was telling me he was there and that he did like my characters. Despite my tears, I was so happy to have such convincing proof that George was still around nearly 7 years since he left the Earth plane.

 

In Spring 1999 I was sitting by the tree planted in George’s memory and a message came into my head which, for some reason, I thought was connected with his old friend Andre. The two seemingly nonsensical phrases were: ‘I’m watching the hutch’ and ‘I know about Danielle’. I mentioned the name Danielle to Andre, but it didn’t seem to ring any bells with him, apart from a song by Elton John.

 

Some days later I was with Stan, the married man who was very close to me emotionally. His wife had just given birth to their baby by Cesarian section. He happened to mention the baby’s name, Danielle. He had told me the name once before but I’d forgotten it because they had a whole list of names they were calling her, Danielle being the first one.

 

Suddenly George’s message as I sat near his tree became crystal clear. Nothing to do with Andre, it was about my lover Stan and his baby. Nearly a year before George had sent me another message as I sat near his tree predicting that Stan and I would be together as life-partners some day. The arrival of this baby and the way things were going, or rather not going since our relationship had no opportunity to develop, made me think Stan and I would never be life-partners. I still don’t know whether we will be, as it seems very unlikely at the moment, and I’m not sure that either of us want that. But here was George commenting on the latest development, and it seemed reassuring. What he was actually trying to say was, I believe: ‘I was watching the hatch. I know about Danielle.’

 

This would be very typical of George, to use a disrespectful, some might say cynical and offensive, term like ‘hatch’ to describe a woman giving birth by Cesarian section. There could be no doubt in my mind, George was saying have faith in what I told you before about you and Stan in the future, I know about the birth of baby Danielle, it doesn’t change my prediction. How exactly things would work out he did not reveal, and only time will tell.

 

I had thought George had said ‘hutch’ not ‘hatch’ so was thinking Danielle might be a pet rabbit or something. I didn’t connect it with the birth of a baby. The rabbit connexion with ‘hutch’ is also very apt. George in his cynical way seems to be comparing Stan’s wife, and possibly most heterosexual women, with broody hens hatching chicks and breeding like rabbits. It was absolutely typical of how George would talk privately to me when on Earth.