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Life between Life – Dr Joel Whitton and Joe Fisher

The year is 1689, and London is a pitiless place to be for a single woman with a mentally retarded child. Everyone prevails upon Lucy Bowden to get rid of her three-year-old daughter because she is handicapped. 'It's a burden,' people tell her, 'nothing but a burden.' Most people think the retarded child should be either put to death or abandoned on the edge of town. But Lucy, twenty-one, loves and treasures her little girl more than anything in the world.

Largely supported by money from Lucy's family, they live together in a third-floor attic in Whitechapel. Lucy keeps the child hidden away, fearful that someone might, however well-meaningly, kidnap the girl and turn her loose. Always ensuring the child is locked in when leaving home, Lucy never stays away for very long. Well, almost never . . . One day, after shopping for provisions at the local market, Lucy calls at an alehouse to join a gathering of friends. They buy her ale and, not being a drinker, Lucy becomes light-headed and stays longer, much longer, than intended. Several hours pass before she realizes with alarm how much time has elapsed. Scooping up her groceries, she rushes back to the attic. As she tums the corner into her street she sees black smoke billowing from a house - her house. Beneath the pall, the building is furiously ablaze. Lucy pushes her way through a crowd of onlookers only to realize there's no hope of rescuing her little girl. No hope at all. Overpowered by despair, she chides herself ceaselessly: If only she had left for home earlier. If only . . .

Returning to normal consciousness, Jenny gasped with relief just to know she was no longer in Lucy’s body. She was beginning to appreciate why she was so afraid of motherhood. She was making sense, too of the underlying motivation that drove her to work diligently and selflessly on behalf of mentally handicapped children. The next session carried Jenny further in this English life . . .

Lucy is strapped to a horizontal wooden wheel which is being slowly rotated by two priests in the dank and musty confines of a church cellar. She is dressed in a. white smock. The priests, clenching handles attached to the side of the wheel, wander in and out of her swaying vision. There is chanting, prayer, incantation. Lucy has surrendered willingly to this ordeal in order to make the devil dizzy and thereby drive his possessing evil from her body. Yes, Lucy tells herself, surely the men of God are right. Surely it was the devil who made her stay so long in the alehouse, long enough for her child to perish, abandoned, in the fire. Stricken with grief and remorse, Lucy had visited her Anglican priest. He had listened to her tragic tale, proffered his condolences and told her that her extended absence from the attic was so out of character that it must have been the devil's work. And so he brought her to this place of exorcism. The walls revolve. Vertigo . . . nausea . . . forgiveness. . . redemption . . . nausea. Towards the end of the ceremony, a pitcher of lamb's blood, symbolizing the blood of Christ, is poured down a wall.

Another bloodstained wall. Once again, distant echoes were investing the present with a certain clarity. Therapeutically, however, there was still much work to be done involving yet another wall of blood. Dr Whitton guided Jenny into her immediate pastlife...