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66 CONVERSATION

fire, burned down the same side of his body. Tom had also tried using a Ouija board, had investigated spontaneous human combustion and had ‘a collection of books upstairs’ on similar phenomena.

I Je was qnite elear that there is no God, though he speculated that human beings might have souls. Apart from that, his metaphysical beliefs hardly went beyond the view that ‘everything’s got to be com-bined somewhere down the linę’. His spirituality was thoroughly pragmatic. He explained that he and his wife Sharon sometimes took on the practical role of‘shamans’ in their immediate circle, getting in touch with the beyond on behalf of their friends. Sharon was the seer, as Tom said in a matter-of-fact way:

Right, as far as premonitions concerned, I mean thats, thats defmitely Sharons field and whenever she has one, I listen.

Tom enjoyed leading ghost hunts in the local woods. As he described these jaunts, he moved from treating it all as a joke to taking it very seriously, as he spoke of witnessing things he could not explain rationally. This ambivalence was present throughout his con-versation. At times he was dismissive and laughed at his beliefs, in what felt like a defensive way. It seemed likely that Tom was reacting to the gendered cultural expectation that men have to be cynical and objective in these realms. It was only as he relaxed and got the feeling that he would not be listened to dismissively, that he was able to talk about what he really felt about his experiences.

Another example of Toms spiritual practicality was his much-appreciated ability to feel atmospheres in people’s houses. He explained that his friends sometimes asked him to go to their new homes to judge whether or not the place was friendly. So the spirit world truły is part of Tom’s everyday life. But agaiir; he was well aware of the cultural critiąue of such beliefs. When referring to the friends who ask him to check out their houses, he said:

And they, they wouldn’t come out directly and say, T want you to tell me if you sense anything in the house.’ They’11 say, ‘just come and have a quick look at my house for me.’ So theyre not so much admitting to themselves what they are doing as silting on the fence. They’d rather hide it and not say anything in public, 'cos they might be criticised for what they say.

Apart from his initial defensive ambivalence, Tom was perfectly

happy to talk about his psychic experiences, perhaps because he was brought up in a household where such events were considered the norm. Tom’s grandmother ‘used to delve into all this sort of stuff as well, bless her’, with her copy of Everybody’s Fate and Fortune. He also described how his sister fixes watches by staring at them. So, as Tom himself acknowledged, it was not something he had ever been far away from. His family thus gave him important social support for his beliefs.

Towards the end of the conversation there was a change in tonę as Tom began to talk about a very different kind of experience that he had eight years previously. His father had become seriously- ill and Tom had to take him to hospital in the middle of the night. He described the scene:

As we sat in the waiting room, you know, my mum was absolutely distraught, and I just sat there praying and praying. Not shouting to anybody, but just sort of ‘if anybody can hear me please help’. And it was really weird and I don’t know if it was in my own mind ... but I just suddenly felt really warm and it felt like somebody had just turned around and said ‘Don’t worry, it’s going to be OK.’

This episode has the hallmarks of very many hundreds of the accounts of religious experience collected by Alister Hardy in Oxford. The crux of such experience is not some kind of super-natural reassurance that the fraught situation ‘will be OK’ in the materiał sense. Quite often nothing changes materially, or things may even get worse, but the circumstances become bearable, and there is a sense of being placed in a larger, ultimately benign context.

When Tom introduced this episode rather shyly, he called it ‘another little incident in life’. Why did he choose to underplay what he obviously felt was a very dramatic moment? Perhaps we are back with the taboo about admitting to spiritual experience. It seems significant that he was most circumspect in mentioning the experi-ence. He told his mother and subsequently his wife, but no one else until the research conversation. He was elear that he would defmitely not have said anything about it at the focus group, "cos I don’t really admit it’. Why is that? What is the difference between giving accounts of ghost hunts and spontaneous human combustion, as Tom does