Street Kid: One Child’s Desperate Fight for Survival. Judy Westwater

that evening, I used to go regularly with Dad and Freda to their seances. They wanted me there to help them act the perfect close-knit family–after the Cheshire circle had kicked him out, my father was determined not to botch things up in Hulme. Freda and I were both under his tyrannical scrutiny, and if I so much as creaked my chair whilst the spirit was coming through, or if Freda got a word wrong in her opening prayer, we’d be snarled at in the bus on the way home.

      My dad had been brought up to believe he had special gifts. His mother was a staunch Spiritualist and had doted on her youngest son to such an extent that he grew up thinking he really was the Messiah. Dad’s initials were J.C.R., and he often used to swagger about it, saying it stood for Jesus Christ Reigns. Occasionally, in an argument with Freda, he’d tower over her, bellowing, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’ Then I’d see the spittle on his beard and realise he really was mad.

      My father was an ambitious man. He wanted to be as famous as Harry Edwards, a well-known spiritualist in the 1950s, and to retire at 35, having made loads of money opening his own sanctuaries. Dad and Freda were always hatching plans, and squirrelled away every spare penny. And they made a fair bit from the gullible ladies who hung on his every word at the seances and healings. When a session was over, my father would never ask for money directly but would winkle it out of his clients with a manipulative phrase like, ‘We all help each other. What I do for you, you’ll do for me.’ And, as the blue-rinsed ladies eagerly lifted their handbags to retrieve their purses, I’d catch Dad casting a sly glance at Freda.

      Whilst it was obvious to me that Dad’s whole act was a complete fraud, it was strange that he somehow believed his own myth, as, even more oddly, did Freda, who delighted in playing his subservient handmaiden. She loved the whole spiritualist set up and, even though she was often the brunt of my father’s mean-spiritedness and towering rages, she was still enthralled by dad’s showy charisma. I found it hard to believe Freda could still find him attractive in any way. I’d seen the monstrous bully he was at home and couldn’t swallow the sudden switch to loving preacher-man. I simply hated him for it, and cringed when I heard him turn on his fake charm and smarmy, educated voice at the prayer meetings.

      ‘I’ve got somebody here called George … anyone know someone who’s departed this world called George?’ Silence. ‘Or a Geoff? … Yes, we have!’

      His sneaky tricks. and the way he’d turn it when he could see he wasn’t connecting with his audience, seemed so obvious to me; but the audience loved it, and hung on his every word. I used to watch the lonely old ladies, their mouths hanging open slightly as he performed, and detest my father for preying on their weakness.

      The first time I went with Dad and Freda to a psychic healing, I witnessed the most extraordinary piece of theatre. This time it was a one-to-one session at the house of an old lady who was in agony with an ulcer on her leg. Barely able to leave her chair, she was lonely and in pain – the perfect prey for my father to pounce on.

      ‘Come in, come in Mr Richardson,’ Mrs Hardy said, hobbling back to her chair. I looked at her swollen purple ankle below the bandages. ‘Hello, lovey,’ she said kindly to me, and I was ashamed when I realized she’d seen me staring at her leg.

      When my father went into a trance, he shuddered a little and his eyes seemed to be looking at a far distant place. His voice changed completely as he came under the control of the ‘spirit guide’. In time, I came to recognize all of the spirits that came through my father, each one from a different realm of the spirit world. This time, Mrs Hardy got ‘Dr X’, the lowest of the spirits.

      As Dad took on the persona of Dr X, who, he explained later to Mrs Hardy, was a surgeon from Matabeleland, he started speaking in a very posh voice. Even his gestures changed. He hunkered down in his chair (Dr X being a smaller man than my father) and began to mime the act of cleansing his mouth of tobacco bits, his tongue delicately slipping between his teeth as he removed imaginary strands between thumb and forefinger. Then he got down to work in earnest.

      Mrs Hardy watched the psychic surgeon perform his miraculous operation with intense belief. And my dad did put on an amazing show. He moved his hands around her leg as if he really was working with a scalpel. Every now and then, he’d pause to take another instrument from the invisible hand of his psychic nurse.