My Extraordinary Experience with a Fortune Teller

When my brother was killed in a road accident aged 20, it ripped our family apart.

I was 18 at the time, newly engaged and still buzzing from the big family bash we had held to celebrate. Aunties and uncles traveled from far and wide, friends and neighbors in the farming community joined us, and my brother was there too. It was a great party with lots of dancing, loud music, fun and laughter. Certainly, a night to remember.

He died five months later. We were completely devastated. Things like that happen to other people, not to us. It was too shocking and tragic to comprehend and take in. We laid him to rest in the quiet cemetery adjoining the tiny church where I was going to be married.

Working in an open-plan office, (not the Google-inspired spaces of today but a former bedroom in a creepy old manor house) back in the 1970s, I came to terms with my grief as best I could. The old house was home to the headquarters of the local Health Authority where I worked in the Administration Department with Delma, Belinda, Eirlys and Marian, who were great workmates and very supportive friends.

One day Marian, our mentor and supervisor, breezed into the light, airy room and said, “Girls! How do you fancy going to see a fortune teller?’ She had a broad grin on her immaculately made-up face and her eyes sparkled; she was the epitome of a Personal Assistant at the top of her game. PA to the Chairman and General Manager, she outshone us as mere shorthand typists at the behest of anybody who needed our services in the sprawling labyrinth of offices, consisting of Nursing, Medical, Dental, General Administration, the Ambulance Department (yes, it really was called that back then) and Planning.

Although sceptical, everybody was up for it, Marian having regaled tales of a friend of hers who had been and was told that some amazing things would happen to her. Whether or not they did, we never found out because Marian was too busy organizing the appointment for us to go and see Dilys, who lived in the back of beyond.

The remote Welsh mining village was about half an hour’s drive away from our office and so it was agreed that we would all go, although I was quite reluctant, the bonhomie of my friends won me over and an appointment was fixed for the following evening.

I was still living at home with my parents and younger brother and sister on the farm and Mum’s reaction when I told her about our office outing was, “Don’t believe anything those people tell you. It’s all a load of old nonsense.”

Dad was even more scathing. “Don’t waste your money.”

Needless to say, I met up with my pals in the car park of Starling Park House after work the next day and we all bundled into Marian’s swanky new Ford Capri, which she had persuaded her husband to let her take to work that day.

As it happens, the rest of us were all engaged to be married. I think it was Eirlys who suggested that we take off our rings to ‘test’ Dilys’s fortune-telling skills. Giggling like schoolgirls, we each removed our solitaire and sapphire and diamond rings and stashed them safely in our purses.

Marian drove like the clappers and we arrived bang on time. It was six o’clock in the evening when we pulled up outside the austere terrace of ex-miners’ houses and clambered out full of excitement and expectation.

Each appointment was to last for twenty minutes and so we would easily make it back to The Welsh Guardsman in Carmarthen for a debrief over scampi and chips washed down with half a lager.

Marian volunteered to go first while the rest of us waited nervously in the front room of the small house, seated on old-fashioned chairs covered in gaudy floral material that had seen better days. There was an old wooden clock on the mantle-piece above a real coal fire which had such a loud tick that we all commented and laughed, saying it was to make sure that Dilys didn’t overrun her time-slots.

Soon, Marian came out of a door leading off the room and said, “Oh, my God. She was spot on! She told me all about my Dad passing away last year and my Mum’s health problems.”

The next thing, a small gray-haired lady with beady eyes appeared at the doorway. She was wearing a tweed skirt and a bottle green twinset and pearls. She had a pair of tartan slippers with fur trim on her small, stockinged feet.

“Who’s next then?” she asked in her sing-song Welsh accent.

“Rosy, you go next” the others urged.

I followed Dilys through into the small, dark parlour and felt quite nervous.

“Don’t be nervous, love. Take a seat. What’s your name?”

“Rosy,” I managed to whisper as I lowered myself onto an old wooden chair placed in front of a small table covered with a lace tablecloth. Dilys was on the other side of the table laying out Tarot cards with a look of deep concentration on her bird-like face.

“I want you to pick four cards,” she said when she had finished.

I leaned forward and did as she told me, selecting four cards randomly from the rows lying face down on the table. Once I had made my selection, I handed them to her.

She turned the cards over and started talking.

“You work with those ladies out there, don’t you dear?”

I nodded, unimpressed.

“You all work in a place where men are in uniform. A dark uniform with a very smart hat. And you’re engaged to be married. Why did you take off your ring before you came in, dear?”

I felt myself blushing and thought that Marian must have tipped her off.

“There is somebody who wants to give you a rose, a red rose. Somebody very close to you; he wants to tell you he loves you.”

I was confused. My fiancé was very much in the land of the living. Who else loves me?

“If you turn around, you can see him. He’s here in the room. He wants to give you the rose.”

Frozen to my chair, I felt the blood freeze in my veins.

Dilys’s voice cut through the maelstrom of thoughts that were swirling around in my head.

“He is asking you to tell Mum not to fret and to tell her not worry. He is okay.”

Big, salty tears were running down my cheeks and I so desperately wanted to turn around and see my big brother who I missed so much, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it.

I rummaged for a handkerchief in my bag and mopped up my tears. Dilys’s voice was reassuring.

“Don’t be afraid, dear. He just wants to give you the rose.”

I was heartbroken and sobbing, the grief still so raw.

“Oh, dear. He didn’t mean to upset you, dear. It’s alright, he’s gone now.”

I thanked her and left.

The loud giggling and banter stopped dead as I opened the door and my friends saw my tear-stained face. They looked as though they had seen a ghost.

The rest of the evening passed in a blur but when we finally debriefed in the pub, it transpired that Dilys had castigated the others about taking their rings off too, (Marian assured us that she hadn’t breathed a word), and told them about the men in uniform who we all knew was the smartly turned out Chief Ambulance Officer, and his fellow officers, who regularly came to the headquarters for important meetings.

It was late by the time I drove home and the farmhouse was in darkness. I crept in, trying not to disturb Penny the sheepdog, and made my way up the creaky stairs. I stopped when I reached the top, flicked the landing light on and waited tentatively outside my parents’ bedroom. They always kept the door closed and the only time I ever went inside was to dust and polish every Saturday afternoon.

I listened at the door and knocked gently before turning the big brass knob and gingerly pushing the old, wooden door open.

“Mum” I whispered.

A bedside lamp flicked on in an instant and my mother sat up. She was wearing a turquoise sixties-style nightie with a flouncy lace trim. I think she was already awake.

“What’s up, Rosy? Are you okay? What’s happened?”

I sat on the edge of the bed next to her and looked at her. She was a broken woman.

“I have a message for you.”

I sensed her recoiling.

“Gary asked me to tell you not to fret and that he’s okay.”

I couldn’t carry on telling her the rest about the red rose or anything else because we were both crying our eyes out.

We never spoke about the fortune teller incident at home after that. We told Dad, obviously, and he seemed to want to believe it. Mum seemed a lot more at ease after that night when I woke her up to pass on a message from her dead son.

When I got married at the tiny village church some years later, I made sure that I had roses in my bouquet. I know my brother was there with me that day, in the church, just as he had been that night in Dilys’s parlour.

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This story was first published on Medium, where you can find more of my work. Why not get a weekly update from my village in England by signing up to Rosy's Ramblings?

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