Like most juniors, I was supposed to go to kindergarten from around 3 or 4 years of age – possibly one of the first times that I had been seriously separated from my mother. I recall being dropped off at quite an angular building akin to a church hall, probably about 500 metres from our home. I have no recollection of being excited or scared, but I do recall that once there, it was not the possibility of being abandoned that affected me, rather, it was the appearance of the phantoms again. I swear there were wispy apparitions swishing back and forth on the ceiling and maybe even down the walls. In the daylight these seemed even more petrifying than the ones on the bedroom ceiling at night. Were they real? I don’t know, it sure seemed so.
I think my mother had to be recalled from work to collect a screaming, traumatised child. This would, in hindsight, have made an impact on her plan for working and mothering if kindergarten was not going to pan out. A second attempt was made, but again the apparitions manifested – was the place haunted? Was I Psychic?
I learn later in life that my mother’s mother was an active psychic at the turn of the 20th century – being involved in ‘exorcisms’ but not as we know them in the Christian sense. Instead, it was more like a counselling session. Somebody would report that a room, house, or building seemed to exhibit unusual activity. Cups or furniture being moved – cold areas where none should have been etc. My grandmother and an accompanying psychic would attend the property in question to counsel a potentially lost spirit. My grandmother would enter into a trance state- the other psychic would instruct the ‘lost’ spirit to inhabit and talk through my grandmother so they could be informed of the situation. They would then be told they were ‘haunting’ a room or house because they didn’t know they were dead and were carrying on business as usual which was interfering in the ‘real’ world and that they should ‘go to the light’. Well, that’s how the story was told to me. So part of me wonders if some inherent psychic ability was allowing me to see into a dimension beyond what we now see when I was at the kindergarten?
As a result of the second traumatisation, the kindergarten project was never tried again – possibly a factor in my lack of developed social skills, though undiagnosed neurodiversity could also have been a factor.
As a consequence, my mother took me to work with her at the ‘Bush’ hotel in Wokingham where she worked as a cook. It might have been a part-time gig. But as there was no child friendly lounge area, I was placed in a second-floor room about 50 feet from the kitchen, on my own for probably 5 or 6 hour stretches being minded by the telly, where Bill and Ben the flowerpot men and Andy Pandy became my best friends.
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