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Newspapers and Magazines written for include: The Observer |
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The following article was published in The Independent on Sunday Review. Jenny Cockell believes she is the reincarnation of an Irishwoman who died 62 years ago. Her determination to meet her 'children', who are old enough to be her parents, has reunited a shattered family. A few weeks ago a 41-year old Englishwoman, Jenny Cockell, was filmed by an American TV crew in the overgrown ruins of an Irish cottage. With her were the former inhabitants of the cottage, three brothers and two sisters, all old enough to be her parents. According to Jenny, however, it is they who are her children from her previous incarnation as an Irishwoman called Mary. Jenny’s account of her search for Mary’s children, Yesterday’s Children, sold respectably enough when it was published by Piatkus last year, but its impact has been much greater across the Atlantic. Titled Across Time and Death in the US (where it was published on Mother’s Day in May and seems destined for the bestseller’s list), Jenny’s story has been enthusiastically taken up by American TV and radio as an example of a mother’s love overcoming insuperable obstacles. Her account and the experience of Mary’s children, two of whom accompanied Jenny on her recent media tour of the US, have been claimed as proof of reincarnation by believers. It is also an extraordinary story in its own right. It was nearly four years, ago, but Sonny Sutton remembers the telephone conversation with the softy-spoken Englishwomen clearly. “I think I’ve been talking to a ghost”, the Leeds-based Irishman told his wife afterwards. “I’m sure I’ve just been talking to my mother.” Sonny’s bemusement was understandable. The woman who had just been describing his childhood, in the kind of detail no one but his mother could have known, was born 21 years after his mother’s death and in a different country. For Jenny Cockell, whom Sonny would come to accept as his mother reborn, the phone call was the culmination of an obsession that had dominated her life. It began with a recurring childhood dream of dying: “A white room, very bright with a multi-paned window, a feeling of being far from home. I remember a sense of physical pain and a difficulty in breathing. But that was nothing compared to the awful fear of separation, of being wrenched away from the children I was leaving behind.” A warm, articulate woman, Jenny now lives in Towcester, Northamptonshire, with her husband and two school-age children. As well as the dream, she says she has many “memories” from Mary’s life, mostly of a happier nature and largely concerning the children, of whom she believed there were eight. Even as a child, her feelings towards them were maternal. “ I remember in emotions first, then pictures,” she says. These include snatches of personality. “The eldest boy was straightforward, my little soldier; the eldest girl, patient and helpful; an energetic boy full of mischief; and a younger boy, a slightly nervous child I wanted to wrap my arms around but feared would be smothered by the affection; a tomboy, always out of the house; and a lovely blonde girl with blue eyes.” Jenny says that as a child she had a clear picture in her mind of Mary’s cottage and its surroundings and could draw rough maps of the nearby village. This “incomplete jigsaw” became a little clearer when she was at school studying a map of Ireland. Summoning concentration, she found herself repeatedly coming back to the village of Malahide, just north of Dublin. Such evidence might be inadequate to convince a sceptic. What makes this extraordinary story so compelling is not the truth or otherwise of Jenny’s claims but the effect that her unwavering belief had on a family shattered by the death of their mother over 60 years ago and scattered to various parts of Ireland. Sonny Sutton has a direct, open manner in keeping with Jenny’s description of Mary’s oldest child. Now an alert, humorous 75-year old, he lives in a small, comfortable council house in Leeds with his second wife, Ivy – a far cry from his impoverished upbringing in the tiny Malahide cottage (“the lodge we called it”) of his childhood. His mother’s protector, he blamed his father John, a scaffolder, for the harshness of their life. “He earned good money but if my mother wasn’t outside his work at one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, the money would be drunk and there’d be no housekeeping for the week. He’d come home up to the eyes, demanding his dinner and if it wasn’t on the table my mother would get a good hiding and I’d get a hiding if I tried to stop him.” To keep the family fed, Sonny and his brothers would try to snare rabbits or pheasants (“one a week if we were lucky”) and steal vegetables from the farms that surrounded the cottage. Most meals were meatless and usually eaten at night when it was safer to take vegetables. But, if he recalls his father as a cruel man, Sonny was devoted to his mother, “a warm, loving person.” Sonny was 13 when his mother died in childbirth and he blames his father for this. “She was too exhausted to fight her illness. She had 10 children in 13 years (two died as babies) and after the last baby died the doctor said to her: ‘Have any more and it will be you that dies.’” Sonny was shattered when this prediction came tragically true. His mother died in hospital, a few days after giving birth to her last child. “It was a terrible blow”, says Sonny, “my world was turned upside down." Within a matter of days, three of Sonny’s sisters were taken to a Dublin convent and a few weeks later his brothers left for an orphanage in Drogheda. Sonny, who hadn’t been allowed to visit his mother in hospital or attend her funeral, was left to look after his father and, for a few weeks, the baby his mother had died giving birth to. "I loved that baby”, Sonny remembers. “I did everything that a mother would do – washed, changed and fed her, things I had seen my mother doing. Then my father’s brother came down from Kildare, after about six weeks or so, and took her away. When my father came back I got a terrible hiding for letting her go, but what could I do? I wanted that baby more than he did. I think the children were a hindrance to him.” For four years Sonny stayed on as housekeeper for his father, as well as working from four in the morning to late at night at a nearby farm. Eventually, desperate to escape, he joined the Free State Army at 17. “Malahide was kaput to me,” he says. “There were just too many painful memories.” The compulsion to find Mary’s children remained with Jenny throughout adolescence and into her married life. Having her own children, she says, rekindled her maternal feelings for Mary’s. In 1988, Jim Alexander, a local hypnotist, investigating the phenomenon of “remembered” past lives, offered Jenny a free course in regressive hypnotherapy in return for help with his research. Under hypnosis Jenny was able to expand on many of the images she believed to be from her former life, details that would later help in her search for Mary’s children. Jenny then set off for Malahide. There her ‘memories’ were gratifyingly reinforced by reality. A jetty by which she recalled waiting was where she expected, though made of concrete not wood as she had imagined. The layout of the village also matched her memories, she says, with the butcher’s shop in the position she had given under hypnosis. The cottage itself remained elusive, though she felt sure of its approximate location. A letter written on her return to the owner of a farm she had seen in the vicinity was to bring her first break, however. The farmer believed Jenny’s description could only fit one family, that of John and Mary Sutton. From this lead, Jenny then wrote to all the orphanages in the Dublin area. A reply soon came from a priest at a Dublin boy’s home who had found the baptism records of six of Mary’s children: John (1923), Philomena (1925), Christopher (1926), Francis (1928), Bridget (1929) and Elizabeth (1932). Jenny was sure there were still two children missing from the list. Filled with trepidation about how to approach the children, Jenny put an advertisement in the Dublin Evening Press early in 1990. The first contact was to end in disappointment. John’s daughter rang Jenny and he spoke to her briefly himself, but was reluctant to continue communication. He did, however, supply phone numbers for Sonny and Francis. The brothers had been reunited in 1985, although the whereabouts of the sisters had remained unknown. This marked a significant breakthrough in Jenny’s life. Her search was no longer an isolated, subjective one, open to the criticism that her tenacity was the product of an over-active imagination. Other people were becoming intimately involved. "I didn’t know what to think,” Sonny says of Jenny’s phone call. “We are all Catholics and Catholics don’t believe in reincarnation. But when she came up and I saw her get out of the car, I could see my mother in her. There was a bond between us from the beginning." First, Sonny saw a physical resemblance. “Jenny has the same loving look, a way of looking at you and beyond you. The misty look they call it in Ireland.” To back this up, there were her memories. A few months previously, Jenny had contacted an authority on regressive hypnotherapy, Dr Stephenson, who in turn referred her story to a BBC team working on a series about the paranormal. The series researcher, Gitti Coats, had already extracted a lengthy and detailed list of memories from Jenny. She now did the same with Sonny before allowing the two to meet, “to avoid the evidence being contaminated.” She was impressed. “The two sets of memories tied together very well,” she says. “Nearly everything tallied.” Sonny was convinced. “Jenny remembered waiting at the jetty in Malahide but didn’t know why. I told her I used to caddy on the golf course over at the island on a Saturday and my mother would wait for me in her black shawl until the boat returned,” he says. There were also occasions when Jenny would surprise Sonny, reminding him, for example, of the time he had earned his mother’s anger by snaring a hare, with its coarse and undesirable meat, instead of a rabbit. Not everyone found these details so persuasive, but, nonetheless, the effect on Mary’s family was to be remarkable. Jenny wrote next to the other brothers, Christy (Christopher) and Frank (Francis), but neither responded at first. Then at the end of 1990, again through an ad in the Dublin Evening Press, Jenny heard from Betty (Elizabeth), the baby Mary had died giving birth to. Betty Keogh, now 62 with six children and 21 grandchildren, lives high in the Dublin Mountains. She was brought up by John Sutton’s brother, Michael, and his wife, Nancy, both now dead, in Kildare. Betty has in one respect been the most affected by Jenny’s search. “Until Jenny’s phone call I thought my uncle and aunt were my parents. For 60 years I didn’t even realise I had brothers and sisters.” Betty, who recalls a “lovely childhood”, was very close to the man she knew as her father, but always felt a barrier between her and her ‘mother.’ There was something standoffish about her; never the closeness there should be between mother and daughter. Brought up as an only child, she had her first inkling that something was not quite as straightforward as it appeared when she walked into a hurriedly terminated conversation between two aunts, discussing her brother. Now she believes that somewhere inside she always knew she had brothers and sisters. She describes it as a sense of incompleteness she carried from childhood until Jenny’s call. Sadly, she might have been re-united some 20 years before, when Sonny, who had always been searching for her, managed to track down the woman he called Aunt Nancy in Kildare. “She told him I had married and left home, which was true, and that she didn’t’ know where I was, which was a lie. My father and uncle must have agreed I was never to know who my real parents were.” Despite her joy at finding her brothers and sisters, Betty is angry with her father and adoptive parents for the “lifetime with my brothers and sisters I missed”. Thankful for “the gentle way” Jenny broke the news to her, Betty sees Jenny now as “a close friend, a part of the family. I can’t see her as our mother like Sonny, though I do think my dead mother is causing her to have these dreams. Some people might say she’s making these things up, but she’s proved they’re real. Sonny told me she knows things nobody else knows.” Sonny remembers his feelings when Jenny rang to say she had found Betty. “I could have cried. She was my baby. I was on the phone straight away. When I met her again we both cried bucketfuls.” The meeting took place at the B&I ferry terminal in Dublin. Though neither had descriptions to go on, both say they recognised each other instantly despite the crowds. Back at Betty’s house, she found she had to interrupt Sonny constantly as he filled in the lost history of the family. “Every few minutes I had to tell him to stop. There was just too much to take in at once.” By now Jenny had made more progress in her research, but not all of it ended so happily. A search document from the records office in Dublin revealed that Mary, the eldest daughter, had died in 1946. However, on Christmas Day 1991, she was delighted to get a phone call from Frank, the youngest of Mary’s sons and now a father of three, who had hitherto been more comfortable writing, “just to acclimatise really.” More good news followed from the meeting between Sonny and Betty, which had been covered by the Irish Independent. The eldest son of Phyllis (Philomena) saw the article and Phyllis got in touch with Betty. The two had been living just a mile apart for 30 years, even using the same shopping centre. Phyllis had been eight the day a woman in a black car came to take her, Mary (10) and three-year-old Bridey (Bridget) away to the Dublin convent. “We were told my mother had gone away and wasn’t coming back for a long time. The woman said we were going to a party and she gave us a bag of sweets each. I didn’t know my mummy was dead till I was 14 and the nuns were getting me ready for leaving. I remember crying my eyes out, it was a terrible shock. I thought she was still in hospital.” Phyllis kept in touch with Mary until her death from tuberculosis in 1946 and with Bridey until she left for Australia in 1953 while pregnant with her second child. On this basis an Australian radio programme put out a call for Bridey. Not long afterwards Phyllis received a letter from her husband to say that she had died 20 years before. The couple had four children. Phyllis had also kept in touch with their father, who had “never missed a visit to their convent, every fourth Sunday.” She had last seen him on her wedding day in 1950. Since then he had settled in Scotland and possibly remarried, and although she had written, her letters had not been answered. Her memories of her mother are as warm as Sonny’s. She has the only photograph of her mother and a copy now holds pride of place in each of the children’s homes. “She was a lovely, gentle person who was never cross. I remember her always doing mine and Bridey’s hair; we had lovely blonde hair in those days. I can still see her at the school railings dressed in a black shawl, bringing us a billycan of hot soup for our lunch”, she says. Jenny, it transpired, also recalled standing by railings waiting for the children. In February last year Jenny met Betty and Frank for the first time. Frank, apart from a spell in the army, has stayed in Cork since he and Christy were sent to a “harsh industrial school” as punishment for “breaking” (bunking) the Christian Brothers School that followed the orphanage. He remains the quiet, gentle soul Jenny says she remembers. Jenny, who says she is not surprised at how any of them have turned out, still feels protective of Frank, who she remembers being scared of smothering with affection. “ She remembers me as the shy little fellow,” Frank says. “I was that, until school hardened me up.” Jenny is delighted at their relationship – “the way he’s opened up” – and Frank feels “very at easy and happy with her”. Christy, the last to meet Jenny, lives 60 miles from Frank in Skibbereen. In his late sixties and the only one of Mary’s children not to marry, he retains the sense of fun Jenny claims to recall from his childhood. “I was always getting into mischief,” Christy told her when they met. “I’m glad you said that,” she replied. The ‘children’, in their different ways, are still adjusting to the transformation to their lives. Jenny has become a family friend to Betty, who obviously has no memories of Mary, a mother reborn to Sonny, and something in between to the other three. Frank’s belief that ‘she was appointed by our mother to re-unite us” closely mirrors that of Christy, a devout Catholic who accepts the explanation of his priest, believing, “my mother is working through Jenny.” But he now thinks of Jenny as a “second mother”. Phyllis feels that her mother’s soul has transferred to Jenny. “I feel I’m protected when Jenny is there,” she says. Jenny, who says that she has now turned her attention to other past lives, feels a huge burden of guilt and anxiety has dissipated since finding Mary’s children and is delighted that she has been accepted by them in whatever capacity they choose. She was recently filmed by NBC in the hospital room in which she believes Mary died, an experience she describes as “uncomfortable”. It is the extent and detail of Jenny’s memories that have convinced not just the children, but the third parties involved in her search. David Alpin, editor of LWT’s Strange but True which recorded the first meeting of the entire family, saw a “hard-bitten TV crew accepting the unbelievable through the children’s confirmation of her memories.” Jim Alexander, the highly experienced regressive hypnotist who worked with Jenny, believes there is enough evidence to convict even a court of law. For the family however, the point is quite different, as Betty says. “However it happened, I’m glad it happened. What matters is that we’re together at last.” |
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