[Joan and Blanche's family has been building a new home; construction's not quite done.]

The house started by being quite an ordinary size, with a dining-room, a morning-room, and a drawing-room facing the sea; and bedrooms, dressing-rooms and nurseries above them for Mother and Father, Nanny Walpole, and me. Stretching out behind were more bedrooms and bathrooms for Margery and Iris and visitors, over the servants' part of the house. At the end of what was going to be the garden Father had built a real tennis court and a billiard room.

One morning I was in the tennis court with Father watching the walls being covered with a special kind of cement. Thirty men were working up ladders and the man who had invented the cement, who was called Mr. Bickley, was there too. Suddenly Mother rushed in and shouted, 'Out, all of you! The roof is going to fall in!'

Everyone stared at her and then looked up at the roof--a glass roof with iron girders that had been put in by a firm which roofed railway stations. It looked perfectly solid, but Mother became so angry at not being obeyed that Father ordered the men to stop work; so they climbed down the ladders and filed out of the building.

For about five minutes they stood about, trying not to show that they thought Mother was being ridiculous. Mr. Bickley was saying to Father that if the walls cracked because the work had been interrupted he could not be held responsible. Mother was holding me by the arm in case I tried to run back into the court, which I had no intention of doing.

Suddenly there was a grinding noise and an enormous crash. Clouds of dust belched out of the openings where the side-gallery windows were going to be. 'My God, it has fallen! ' said Father. Mr. Bickley looked as though he was going to be sick. Some of the workmen swore under their breath, and I saw three of them take off their caps and cross themselves.

The only person quite unmoved was Mother, who said calmly, 'What did I tell you, Jack? You must admit there are advantages in being married to a witch.'

EDITOR'S NOTES

One advantage of being the child of both a scientist and a witch is a certain flexible pragmatism which served Joan well, given her own paranormal experiences. This wasn't Blanche's only lifesaving prediction; see Titanic and Lusitania. She was a very practical shaman protecting her tribe. So Joan grew up knowing for a fact that a sixth sense was real--and could save lives. She had the elbow room to be a sort of psychic quite unlike the swooning séance mediums of her age.

But she may have gotten more than mere permission. If musical and scientific talents can run in families, why not other talents? I too grew up in a family with scientific, skeptical beliefs yet multigenerational evidence of ESP. So I like to read of other families where ideology fights with experience.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Far Memory: the Autobiography of Joan Grant, 1956 (Ariel Press reprint, 1985), pp. 9-10.

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