Fifty Years a Medium – Chapter 13, 4/13 by Estelle Roberts

At this point Red Cloud intervened to enlist the help of the sitters, from which those present guessed that the next speaker would be making his first attempt at direct voice. There was a pause and then came the words: “Dick Stevens here. I want to speak to my wife.”

It was Flight-Lieutenant Stevens, D.S.O., D.F.C. and bar, better known as “Cat’s Eyes” and the subject of a notable painting in the National Gallery. The picture, entitled “Portrait of a Night Fighter,” is by Eric Kennington. For some time prior to this meeting, Mrs. Stevens had been coming to me privately for sittings in clairvoyance.

Her husband had earlier identified himself by recalling trivial incidents in their domestic lives and once surprised her with the promise that she would soon be paying a visit to Buckingham Palace – “Going to collect a medal for me,” he had told her. And he was proved right. Some days later she received an invitation to the Palace to be decorated with the D.S.O. her husband had won just before his plane crashed.

She had known nothing of the award until he had told her through my mediumship. It made me very happy when she admitted one day to a friend: “I think I should have gone mad had it not been for Spiritualism; I was in utter despair before I went to Mrs. Roberts. Now things are so very different.”

Now her husband Dick was speaking to her by direct voice for the first time. He spoke eagerly of their daughter, Frances, who at the age of two had been an indirect victim of an air raid. His wife mentioned their son, John, the twin of Frances. Stevens laughed: “He keeps pencilling on the walls, doesn’t he? he said. “You shouldn’t let him do it.”

“It’s just a passing phase,” she said. “He’ll grow out of it.”
“I dare say he will. You know, this is wonderful, talking like this. I’d like a word with the Air Chief Marshal. Do you remember me, sir?”

“Of course, I do?” Dowding replied, and they discussed service matters for a few moments before a new voice took possession of the trumpet.

“Lindsay here,” it said and the trumpet moved to an R.A.F. officer in uniform sitting in a circle. “It’s a long time since we read all those books together. Remember how we used to sit up until the early hours arguing about the philosophy of that gloomy pair Nietzsche and Schopenhauer? What a lot of nonsense we talked!

This is the true philosophy – the truth of survival. Death is not the end; it makes a man of you.”
The trumpet moved to Lord Dowding and the voice said: “You know, sir, I was one of the fools who thought that death was the end. I was a Communist, a follower of Karl Marx, if you please! It wasn’t until I ditched in the drink that I realized how blind I had been.”

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