18 • One
I drove alongside the dreary peat bogs that stretched to the barren spines of the Twelve Bens—haunting mountains when seen through mists sweeping the moors—a quiet came over the car. The hush came from knowing that we could be rooted in this austere landscape, that ours was the type of family to have risen from a place where the very bedrock poked through the ground. It wasn’t farming country, what we were used to, but to the soul it felt familiar. I don’t know how much ancestry plays a part in one’s spirituality or psychic sensibility, but it’s just as likely that early physical trauma or an early near-death experience is responsible. All I know is that with this sensitivity came the ability to perceive ghosts.