In less than six months’ time it happened again. I received another unwanted forewarning and this time it was much clearer. We had been invited down to the south coast to the fiftieth birthday party of a family friend. We decided to stay overnight as it was a good five hours’ drive, and piled our luggage and two small daughters into the car. I closed the front door and walked towards the car. As John began to pull off the drive I had a blinding premonition.
‘Stop!’ I yelled.
Confusion passed over his face as he asked me what the matter was.
‘I think we’re going to be burgled,’ I yelled.
It was an extreme thing to say but he calmly asked me what I wanted to do. I decided to go back into the house. I checked that all of the windows were locked downstairs and then I rushed up to my bedroom where I had stored a considerable amount of gold and silver jewellery, much of which had been inherited. I often hid it out of sight if we went away, but today I hadn’t.
I searched through several jewellery boxes and picked out my favourite pair of earrings and put them on. Then I placed the gold sovereign necklace that my parents had given me for my eighteenth birthday around my neck. I poked through and found the ring which my husband had given me on our engagement and a couple of other rings, followed by three gold bracelets. It was all I could wear in one go and when I had finished I closed the lid and replaced the box on my dressing table. Why did I do this?
My husband was amazed that I hadn’t hidden all the jewellery away as I had on previous occasions, but today this felt the right thing to do. We talked in the car about what I had felt and why I had chosen to pick out certain pieces of jewellery. I felt sure that we were going to be broken into when we were away and nothing could convince me otherwise. The conversation continued once we arrived at our friends’ home and I told everyone how being burgled would probably leave me feeling unsafe and I would probably go out and buy a dog, and that it was a bad thing for us to do! It was almost as if I had some memory from a moment which had been preplanned as a lesson in my life. Had I ‘seen’ this happening as a life choice before I had been born? How did this work?
The next day we began the long drive home and as we pulled onto the front drive our neighbour rushed out to meet us.
‘I’m so sorry, you’ve been burgled,’ she said.
We sat in shock for just a moment. I initially stayed in the car with the girls so that John could quickly check the house was safe for the girls to enter. We had no idea what we might find. As soon as he nodded that the coast was clear I came in with the girls and put them to bed. They were too young to really understand but we just mentioned that it was okay as none of their toys had been taken. Then we began to look around at what had happened.
The burglars had climbed in through the kitchen window. Our home looked out onto open fields, and what had once attracted me to the house now became my biggest fear. We were open and exposed. The window catch had been broken and the glass had been smashed.
John boarded up the window and replaced the glass immediately the next day. I insisted he nail it shut, and we never opened that window again. The remaining glass had been dusted for finger prints by the police and the shiny dust was still on the window. I shuddered at the thought of what they might have found. Real people had entered our home. I remember feeling cross that no one had thought to secure the building before our return. It would have been easy for the burglars to have returned for more of our things.
The burglars had walked right to the master bedroom, stopping only to break the lock on a briefcase where they had taken the expensive gold pens John had received as gifts for his twenty-first birthday. In the bedroom they had opened every drawer and every jewellery box and tipped everything onto the bed. These burglars were only looking for specific things and they had picked out every single piece of gold jewellery, and left every single item of silver. I glanced down at my wrist and noticed the bracelets still on my arm. I still had ‘one body’s worth of jewellery’ left.
When the insurance company came to assess the burglary, I had already listed every item that was missing and found out the price of replacing each piece. Seeing the piles of empty jewellery boxes they didn’t query the claim and the cheque came a few weeks later. I had already decided that I wouldn’t replace any of the pieces but use the money to buy a car and learn to drive. I was determined that this negative experience would have a positive affect on my life. So passing my driving test later was a big healing experience for me. I was able to silently say, ‘Thanks for the car.’ I never did replace that gold jewellery.
The day after we arrived home, the police came to visit, and one of the things they suggested was that we buy a dog for security. With John’s working schedule I was often alone with the girls and it seemed the natural thing to do. I could still hear my words of the previous day: ‘We’ll probably buy a dog but we shouldn’t.’ The words echoed in my ear before disappearing into the distance. I’d heard and promptly ignored the warning from my inner guidance.
A couple of days later I bought a dog bowl and a packet of dog food and we made the trip to the local RSPCA dog home to purchase and ‘rescue’ a dog. With no planning at all we chose a beautiful Collie-cross puppy and after our home inspection from the charity we brought our puppy, ‘Shandy’, home.
I have never seen such an intelligent dog and he was a fast learner and picked up many tricks, but he was harder work than the children. He couldn’t be left for a minute and totally destroyed the kitchen and large parts of the house, as puppies do. He ate his way through the kitchen cupboards and the kitchen chairs. We decided to make him a kennel outside but he ate that too, and then he ate his way through the garden fence and later dug his way under. When he was a little bigger he jumped over the fence and escaped.
Why had I not listened to my own premonition about the dog? The guidance I had heard was clear enough but we’d bought the dog just the same. I was no longer able to cope and John began walking the dog on his own. Shandy regularly slipped his lead and would disappear for two hours or more with John walking for miles calling his name. One day he ate another large hole in the garden fence and followed a woman home on her bicycle, all the way to the next village. He escaped three times that week and twice we phoned the police to see if anyone had handed him in because we just did not know what else to do.
When John was working away the following week I remember trying to take Shandy for a walk in the pouring rain. I had to push the girls in a double buggy, and Shandy almost pulled us all into the road. I came home wet and tired and cried all the way home. Later when I fed Shandy, my eldest daughter Charlotte walked past him and he snapped at her. I just screamed hysterically and shut him in the kitchen.
He was a beautiful dog but the mistake in taking him on was ours. When you purchase a dog from the RSPCA, you agree to return it if there is a problem, so we took him back. On the day we handed him over I cried for several hours. I felt such a failure and I felt so ashamed. When they rang us a few days later to say that he had been taken home by a family who lived on a farm and wanted him as a working dog I cried some more. He was so intelligent he would love it. It was a difficult time and the guilt I felt was unbelievable.
Anthony had died, and so had my grandmother. We had been burgled and I had given up my dog and all this happened in a very short time. It was no wonder that I slipped into a deep depression but had no idea what was happening to me. I didn’t know anyone who’d suffered from depression and so I had no one to discuss it with. I was good at keeping up appearances and although the house was in a serious mess, inside and out I was good at hiding the worst of it when people came around.
I used to have an ironing cupboard and all the clean washing would get thrown in there. I was too ill to do more than look after the children each day and breathed a sigh of relief as I dropped the eldest off at playgroup twice a