If you’ve ever been to Scotland and heard the bagpipes calling over the rolling hills, or racing the heart at a memorial ceremony at Edinburgh Castle, or simply raising the spirits around the tables in a pub, you may already know what I am talking about. It’s about Scottish intuition.
This story is about a Scottish woman who with her husband had been good neighbours of my husband’s parents for decades. After the death of her own husband and of Peter’s mother, Jane had become an important support to Peter’s father, Ernest. Peter and I had been living in Spain, at least 24 hours drive and a ferry crossing at the English Channel away. We tried to get Ernest to come live with us, but his promises always reverted to his inevitable refrain “I’m stopping here.”
We visited him in northern England for months at a time, occasionally as a planned journey, but most often it was a mad dash after late-night calls from Ernest telling us we’d better get there in a hurry or we’d find him “in his coffin.” By the time this had happened for the third time, we no longer took his announcements of imminent doom too seriously.
But we did finally close up our house in Spain and moved into the back bedroom of his house in England so we could look after him.
One evening we returned home from the supermarket to find Ernest lying in bed with Jane and another neighbour in tears at his bedside. As we came into the bedroom we heard him saying “The time comes to all of us. It came to Churchill.” (Long pause.) ”It came to Roosevelt” (Long pause). ”It came to King George.” (Ahem) ”And now it is coming to me.”
Peter and I burst out laughing, and suggested that he sit up to have supper. Jane was appalled and furious. ”How can you?!” she said aghast. ”He will be gone by tomorrow morning and you’re laughing.”
He won’t be gone by the morning, we assured her. ”I’m Scottish,” Jane returned, “and I know about these things. I’m sure he has less than 24 hours to live.”
I don’t have a lot of it myself, but I’m a great believer in intuition. And the Scots do tell some extraordinary stories which I tend to think often have a grain of truth.
But like every other kind of human knowledge, it’s not infallible. No matter how certain it feels.
Ernest died six months later.
