When my mother was in her 20s and living in London, she visited a psychic at his home in the suburbs. He had done some healing work for her friend Carla, a basketball player, who after an injury had had some success with Mr Trevor where traditional physio had failed. That was his name – Mr Trevor – and as my mother would tell me every time the story was wheeled out, he was a “retired postmaster” and a “very humble man”. In other words, not a charlatan. I recall looking through her address book after her death, and there he still was, under the Ts. He must have been long dead by then too.
It was the story of Mr Trevor that softened me up for a lifetime of susceptibility to woo-woo spiritual nonsense, something I can apparently disparage without ever quite letting go. The psychic world is 99% baloney, and approaching a medium the last resort of the desperate. These people exploit the grief-stricken and clog up police investigations with false leads. I know this, as all rational people do. Yet, while in my own 20s, I went recreationally with friends to a medium, and I can’t remember a thing about it save for how much we laughed afterwards. There is Mr Trevor, telling my mother she would have one child, a girl, with “long fingers, like a starfish”, then coming over all funny and croaking out a phrase her dead father used to say to her as a child. I have nowhere to put this, except under the heading Things I Know to Be True That I Know Not to Be True.
In his new book The Premonitions Bureau, the New Yorker writer Sam Knight unearths an extraordinary story of scientific engagement with psychic phenomena in mid-20th-century Britain. It relates to the career of John Barker, a psychiatrist who, after the Aberfan Welsh mining disaster in 1966, started collecting data from members of the public who claimed to have foreseen some shadow of the event. From there, he set up a small team in conjunction with the Evening Standard, to invite and log premonitions from the public. In among a lot of time-wasters, several credible people emerged, whose visions lined up, usually within a matter of weeks, with real-world events: plane crashes and other disasters.
As Barker himself understood, the irresolvable paradox here is that if premonitions are real and can be acted on to avert a disaster, then the disaster foretold will fail to occur, and won’t show up in advance as a premonition. I’m writing this as if any of it accords with the laws of physics; we are a spit and holler away from time travel here. And yet Barker’s insistence that “second sight” has a practical application was also, it seems to me, simply a pretext to justify the emotional interest. One suspects that, beneath the psychiatrist’s public interest defence of his wacky investigation, lay a deeper purpose. We want these things to be true because the alternative – no order, no recourse, no organisation beyond the entirely random, and nothing, nothing, after we’ve gone – is just too bleak to allow.
And we do love to tell these stories. It’s like relating your dreams, only worse. Most people have a Mr Trevor-type story. It’s not interesting but here’s mine: coming home on the train, seeing in my mind’s eye my mother falling down the stairs and thinking, with a jolt, I must remind her to be careful given how weak her legs are from chemo. Walking into my parents’ house 15 minutes later to find her in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for the ambulance after a fall that, my father said, had happened precisely 15 minutes earlier.
There’s no life after death, I tell my children when they ask. We’re not religious, I say, although they’re free to make up their own minds. And yet I can’t help it: the indoctrination has already begun. I speculate to them vaguely about “energies” – that, hard as it is to imagine being around after we die, it’s harder to imagine nothing remaining. I do this partly strategically, as a hedge against the possibility of my own death while they’re still young, in the event it may provide some comfort. (Also, to imbue them with a vague but unshakeable sense I’m still watching, so they needn’t think about going off the rails.)
Anyway, it’s all nonsense. Of course it is. Thrilling and entertaining and consoling, and the rest of it, but a fundamentally human weakness in the service of which evidence is distorted and bent. When I was a child, my mother used to tell me I was so brilliant I should have been a twin. “I wish you’d been twins, with auburn hair,” she would say. The fact that I have twins with auburn hair is, of course, coincidence, completely explainable by the fact that twins and red hair run in my family. Right? Fluke. Must be. What else could it possibly be.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist based in New York. She is the author of She Left Me the Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me
