Strange Powers by Colin Wilson Page B

was still receiving floods of correspondence about The Occult , which had appeared the previous autumn. Mrs Beattie's letter said that she hoped I wouldn't consider her a crank, but that she had been producing automatic writing that seemed to her to answer some basic questions about human purpose and destiny. I replied that I'd like to see some of it, and asked her if she would like to come and have lunch at the Westward TV studios next time I was there. I gave her the date.
    I'd forgotten about her when a message came to say that a lady wanted to see me at the desk. I went down, and found Mrs Beattie looking nervously out of the window, as if tempted to dash out into the street. I asked her to come into the canteen for lunch. As soon as we sat down, she handed me a manila folder full of manuscript. I opened it, and saw that the first page was headed with a quotation from one of Arthur Waley's translations of a Chinese poem. I read it with a certain amount of pleasure—an understandable reaction, I think, when one is faced with a great sheaf of original manuscript that may be totally unreadable. It is like finding an oasis in a desert. I asked her if she liked Chinese poetry. She looked blank; then, when I pointed to the Waley quotation, said she had no idea who Arthur Waley was. It had simply been 'dictated' to her. I glanced at the rest of the typescript, and saw mentions of Walt Whitman and Angelus Silesius. 'What about these? Have you read them?' 'No. Who is Walt Whitman?'
    As we ate, I looked at her curiously. She seemed shy, rather tense, as if trying to cut herself off from the sounds of the room. She was small, attractive, around sixty; a journalist might take the easy way out and describe her as motherly, but the rather smart hair style and the neat clothes reminded me that she had been a hospital sister—she had told me that in her letter. Very much the type children take to—as I discovered when she met my children. She didn't strike me as in any way a crank; or, for that matter, anything like my idea of a 'psychic' neither the professional spirit medium, nor the visionary peasant woman of the type described by Yeats. I found her very difficult to place.
    She came and watched the program being videotaped, sitting quietly in a corner of the studio without speaking to anybody. Afterwards I asked her if she'd found it interesting. 'Oh, yes. Fascinating.' But I had a feeling she wouldn't have said so unless I'd asked her.
    Clearly, I wasn't going to be able to assess her without seeing rather more of her. I asked her if she could come to my home that weekend. She looked anxious. 'Are you sure your wife won't object?' 'I don't think so.' 'Perhaps you'd better ask her first and let me know.'
    Before we left the studio, I asked her how she had come to write to me. I expected her to say that she'd read something about The Occult , or seen me on television. Again she surprised me. 'Your name came floating into my head one day. I'd no idea who you were. Then, a week later, I saw something about you in a newspaper. I had an odd feeling that I ought to get in touch with you.'
    When I told Joy I'd asked Mrs Beattie over for the weekend, she asked: 'What sort of a person is she?' and I had to admit I didn't know. I could only say she seemed a perfectly ordinary, normal person and I didn't think she'd be a difficult guest. Apart from Robert Leftwich, my acquaintance with 'psychics' had been small. In my early twenties, when I was working at United Dairies, Chiswick, I had met a woman called Grace who worked in the canteen (I have forgotten her other name), and I had been convinced that she possessed unusual powers. She seemed to be an ordinary, middle-aged cockney lady, of the kind you'd find behind almost any counter in any works canteen in the country; but Joy and I spent an evening with her, and I realized that she 'knew' a great deal—in the sense that Gurdjieff did; and the things she was able to tell me about myself