No different than anyone else

STANDING in Marks & Spencer, trying to decide what make-up to buy, Jane Hamilton-Parker didn't particularly want to be bothered by a two-year-old requesting to contact her 'mummy'.

"There was a lady there looking at make-up and she was about six months pregnant, and all of a sudden I saw a child appear in front of her and saw all these autumn leaves going towards this child," recalls Jane, who is more than used to being contacted by spirits at all times of the day and night - and in all sorts of places.

"I don't go looking for it, it just happens," says Jane.

"The child said 'can you tell my mummy it was not her fault, and I don't want mummy and daddy breaking up because I'm looking forward to my new baby brother that's coming?' So I said to the lady 'I hope you don't mind, but have you lost a child?' She said yes I have and I've come over from America to get over my bereavement.

"So I brought her back home and gave her a reading, and it turned out that her two-year-old daughter got killed in the autumn when she ran out into the road and got hit by a lorry."

While some may view Jane

as strange, or 'a charlatan',

everything about her appears starkly normal - and she's certainly not a Mystic Meg-type character.

She lives in a 'normal' detached house on a 'normal', suburban Hampshire estate.

She wears 'normal' clothes, her home is decorated in a 'normal' style with soft yellows and creams (the room where she does her readings is bright yellow - an "awareness colour" in the Chinese system of feng shui), and if you were to see her walking down Southampton high-street, she would give you no reason to think she was any different to everyone else.

But of course Jane isn't quite like everyone else - if she were to see you walking down the street, she may notice a little more than just the colour of your hair or clothes.

"As a child I used to see auras around people's heads. I had no idea I was different at that stage because when you see people's auras as a child, you just take it for granted that everybody can see them.

"An aura is the energy field that's round a person's physical body, but I don't see auras around everyone because it depends how emotional somebody is," explains Jane.

"If I see blue around somebody's aura I know they are very much in need of healing. If somebody has come for a reading and they've lost a child, you're going to see blues and also pink, which means they're in need of love."

Jane relaxes on the white sofa in the lounge of her Bishopstoke home, as she explains how she first realised she had been blessed - or cursed, depending on how you feel about constantly being contacted by 'the other side' - with a sixth sense.

"I had a wonderful grandmother and when I was 11 I actually saw somebody standing at the top of her stairs in her house, in an old nurse's uniform.

"I described the woman to my grandmother and she explained that it was her sister who got killed in the war. Then my grandmother said 'I will sit you down and explain that you are different from most people, but you must not tell anybody else because they might think you're strange and put you away'.

"She said 'you can actually see people in that world and you mustn't be frightened because they won't hurt you - it's only the living to be frightened of."

When she explains, in her soft, soothing voice, that her grandmother died when Jane was 13, she describes her as "passing into the spirit world".

Jane believes, as her grandmother - who was also a medium - told her, that everyone who dies simply passes from this life into 'another spiritual plane'.

The knowledge is a comfort to Jane - and to the other hundreds of people who have communicated with loved ones through her in the 35 years she has been a professional medium.

She trained to be a nurse, married, and brought up her three children and a step-daughter - one of whom (although she won't tell me which) has inherited her psychic powers - but throughout that time she continued to help bereaved parents contact their dead children. "When I was a nurse I noticed that just before somebody dies and crosses over, they can actually see their loved ones who come for them.

"People would sit up on their deathbed and say 'there's my father there', and I could actually see it, while none of the other nurses could. It was so beautiful.

"If everybody could see it they would not be afraid of death," says 50-year-old Jane, who went through a near-death experience herself during the birth of her 12-year-old daughter.

"I had a tumour on my fallopian tube and the doctors thought I would die. I crossed over and I actually saw my grandmother come for me. I didn't go down a tunnel of light, I saw my grandmother standing in the most beautiful garden, with beautiful colours and people standing there.

"It was so peaceful and there was a beautiful crystal stream. Then I heard my grandmother saying 'go back, go back, it's not your time'."

In 1994 Jane and her husband Craig, also a medium, were the resident psychics on Channel Four's The Big Breakfast, when they achieved an 85 per cent accuracy rate predicting the next week's news.

Their success and popularity led to other TV and radio work, but today Jane prefers to concentrate on helping bereaved people at her home, as well as doing readings for the odd celebrity - none of whom she wants to identify.

"I turn TV down now because I'm not a psychic monkey and you can't just click your fingers to the spirit world. That's not the most important thing to me - the most important thing is reaching people and joining the two worlds together.

"Before anybody comes to see me I meditate for half-an-hour to try to tune into the spirit world.

"As a medium I can't guarantee any particular contact, no more than a doctor can guarantee to save somebody, because I don't know until it happens. When people come to see me I'm acting like an instrument for linking the two worlds, and it's like having a two-way conversation on the telephone," explains Jane.

"It's wonderful when people come and their loved ones connect with them, especially people who have lost children because they are absolutely devastated. If children die they do grow up in the spirit world and they always find a way to reach their earth mothers and earth fathers - sometimes in a dream state.

"But I believe that, karmically, if somebody's meant to go and it's their time, they will go and nobody can stop that."

Lesley Wilcher, 57, was absolutely devastated when her 35-year-old son Billy died in May, five-and-a-half-weeks after being taken to hospital with mengingococcal septicaemia.

She saw an article about Jane in a national newspaper and, despite feeling a little unsure about the idea of seeing a medium, especially as a devout Christian, she felt desperate to contact Billy.

Lesley, of Kenwyn Close, West End, says: "When I first spoke to Jane on the phone she told me that the person I was desperate to communicate with, he had not passed over long enough, and I said how do you know it's a he? She just said it's your son isn't it?"

"I was so bereft because this son of mine meant so much to me and we were so close, mentally and spiritually, and I felt he was dragged away from me.

"I was dubious before I heard her voice, but Jane is very, very genuine. She doesn't go into a mystic trance or anything, she just closes her eyes and hears the voices. You don't tell her anything at all - she tells you.

"She just repeats what she's being told and she was so accurate."

As I sit with Lesley in the lounge of her home, she plays excerpts of a tape-recording Jane made of the reading.

I can hear Jane's gentle voice on the tape saying: "I've got somebody really excited here. I feel you must have been very, very close to him because he's saying my mother has sensed me.

"I do feel as if he did not want to go yet, because he felt he still had a lot to do on the earth plane still. He says he feels you can't get to sleep."

Lesley tells me that since Billy's death, except for the last couple of nights, she indeed hasn't been able to sleep, but there were more snippets of information during the reading that left her in no doubt Jane really was communicating with her son.

Lesley says: "Billy sustained brain damage while he was in hospital. I talked to him all the time and I always felt he understood everything I said, but the doctors said he couldn't.

"In the course of the reading it turned out he did hear what I was saying. He said he couldn't communicate with me but he did in the end - through Jane he said 'my mum knew I could understand her'."

Jane also told Lesley about the pyjamas Billy was dressed in after his death, and a joke her other son made at the hospital.

Lesley explains: "It's really quite amazing because when Billy died, I washed him and the nurse got some bright green pyjamas for me to dress him in, and my other son said when he goes there's no way he wants me to wash his bits and pieces and dress him in green pyjamas. Jane said Billy was really, really laughing at that!

"I've always been one for worrying about other people and Billy used to say 'you just worry about yourself mum', and he said those exact words through Jane. Another one of his expressions was 'for goodness sake mum, have a good clear-out', because I've got a house full of ornaments and all-sorts, and he said that too."

Lesley explains: "When Billy died I felt totally lost and I was saying to myself 'Billy where are you, where are you?' I felt he was here with me but I didn't know where he was, and Jane answered all that.

"She even said Billy told her 'my mum's been asking Billy where are you?' I feel I know where he is now."

She adds: "My mother came through as well and said she and my dad had come to get Billy, which was really comforting. Jane gave me lots and lots of hope. I went to the reading with a friend and we both came out feeling that it's all right, everything's all right, everything is as it should be - that I can't see him but he's here and he will be here as often as I need him to be here.

"It made me realise that love continues, love does not die - love goes on. If you love somebody, when they die you still love them - that doesn't stop and they don't stop loving you, it's a perpetual thing.

"I felt very, very peaceful afterwards - and I still do."

And Sheila Giles is another lady who feels comforted and calmed by the experience of visiting Jane, who contacted Sheila's mother Marjorie Grant.

Majorie, who lived in Locksheath Park Road, Locks Heath with husband Geoffrey, died in February last year, at the age of 70, after suffering a heart attack.

Sheila and Geoffrey were sceptical when they first went to see Jane, and although former policeman Geoffrey remains very unsure whether Jane really did contact his beloved wife, 48-year-old Sheila feels differently.

"I think Jane was right in a lot of things - it was quite startling the day we were there. I feel comforted by it because I was worried mum had died on her own and in pain, but Jane said she was happy," Sheila explains.

Again Sheila and Geoffrey admit they did not tell Jane anything about Marjorie before the reading

Sheila said: "Jane started on about mum's hair. She asked if I cut a piece of her hair and I said yes I did.

"She said mum was saying she was worried about her hair - there was something that wasn't right - and in the coffin they parted it on the wrong side.

"She said it was a shock for mum when she died, that mum wasn't expecting to go - and that was true.

"Jane said mum was a very fussy lady and liked her underwear. I dressed her for the coffin and mum was saying to Jane 'fancy putting me in there with no knickers on'."

Sheila added: "Jane asked who put the notes in mum's coffin and I said I did. She said you've said everything you wanted to say in those letters and she was pleased, and she's got them near her heart."

Geoffrey, 72, said: "There's so much coincidence. Jane asked why is she showing me the number 45? Well, our first police house was number 45 and the first house we bought was 45, and that would have been happy memories for Marjorie.

"She also said a very smart gentleman in a naval uniform had met her and was holding her hand, and that was my dad. He thought the sun shone out of her backside and she felt the same about him, so that was nice.

"But it was all little things - nothing startling - and there were names Jane mentioned that didn't mean a thing."

Sheila adds: "Before I went to see Jane I couldn't accept that mum had gone, but now I know she has. The real bad hurt has gone - it's a different feeling afterwards."

Whatever your beliefs about whether it's right or wrong to contact the spirits - and Jane answers her critics with the notion that "if it was wrong, then God wouldn't allow it to happen"- one thing is for certain, both Lesley and Sheila seem to be coping better than many other people I've spoken to after the deaths of loved ones.

Maybe that's simply because time is a great healer - or maybe it's because they've had the chance to say a proper goodbye, and to reassure themselves that their loved ones are content.

For more information, visit Jane's websites at www.psychics.co.uk and forget-me-not.org