And so I started work as a labourer. We were working on St Mary’s at Maitland and I was running the project, drilling holes into sandstone blocks, digging out the wrong mortar between the blocks, re-pointing with the correct mortar…
One of the tasks that I had to perform was injecting a damp proof barrier, and a few weird things happened while doing this, as I was a lot smaller than the other labourer (he was 6ft 7in). I had the task of having to squish in under the stairs to the clock tower to drill and inject. The machine itself was really noisy so you had to wear ear muffs, but every time I turned it on I could hear voices in the background and I would look around and there was no-one there. When I was doing the same thing inside the church I could see people walking past out of the corner of my eye, again when I turned around there was no-one there.
Freaky. But strangely I wasn’t scared.

You see, a few years before a friend had dragged me off to see a clairvoyant, who at the end of my reading told me that I was clairvoyant and that I would be greater than her. Now, while most folks would be thrilled at this, me, personally, well I was terrified. Because a clairvoyant was basically the devil (so I’d been taught) and I was still really struggling with the whole leaving the SDA church and trying to work out what I believed and what I didn’t, slowly but with great difficulty unravelling what I had been indoctrinated with to what the facts were.
It seriously wasn’t easy and something I really, really struggled with.

For those that have never been a part of a church, it’s like family, you belong, you socialize together, study together, not just the bible but schooling for me as well and to leave the church was leaving behind everything that I had ever known.
My comfort zone was shattered and I was wandering aimlessly trying to find out where I belonged. I had been effectively kicked out of the SDA church for leaving my first husband and that was shattering to me so who was I? Where did I fit? What the hell was I supposed to believe?

I had made a tentative start in attending the local spiritualist church and it was comforting to have somewhere to go, sing songs, chat and while I still wasn’t sure about the whole clairvoyant thing, I had finally decided that it was something that I needed to learn more about.
And so the beginning of my new journey began…