Talkback Ghosts

Radio Clairvoyant: Mary Fry's Own Story (Grantham House, $14.95).

Reviewed by Denis Dutton (NZ Listener, April 9, 1988)

Little Mary Polascheck, the girl from Waimate, was, as she describes herself now, "a rather unusual child." She was the third of five children and the only girl in the family, and her childhood companions were mostly spirits, "the friends I could really relate to." They were "as solid and real to me as physical children. I saw them, I played with them, I talked with them."

Anyone who has had the normal experience of vivid imaginary childhood friends will understand what she describes, but these were no ordinary fantasies, says Mary, and she claims to have proof. After all, they taught her things "a child of five or six couldn't possibly make up," such as how to tell "'the difference between a toadstool and a mushroom," that she shouldn't be afraid of spiders and that sorrel relieves headaches. "As I grew into my teens my spirit friends were able to teach me that bees are necessary for pollination, especially of broad beans, which have always been my favourite food. So they used my natural likes to teach me in this case."

Readers inclined to accept such stories at face value will possibly enjoy Mary Fry's autobiography; others will find the book painfully naive. Take, for example, her account of how her father taught her to communicate telepathically with animals. Dad had a pet mouse in his shop, and the tea that Mary delivered to him every evening always included a bit of cheese. "He showed me how, just by sitting there quietly and holding the cheese—putting it either in his hand or on the floor—he could call the mouse through his mind ... I used to love to see the little mouse come out and talk to Dad; I could hear him talking." Her farther used similar powers in the garden: "He showed me how you talked with your plants, how ... you taught the bugs and the insects that they didn't have a place on the pieces of the vegetables that we ate." She adds that "'a bit of derris dust" also helped.

Fry idolised her father, "a very spiritual man," and it must have been a crushing blow to the young teenager when he died of influenza. Her grief was tempered by his appearance to her just after his death: "I knew it was my father there with me because he appeared just as my spirit friends did, as firm and as solid as when he was living." Yet, despite his posthumous guidance and her teachers' protestations, Fry quit school at 15 and became a mother the year after. Her marriage eventually broke down, leaving her with four children. Readers wanting to know more about these early, difficult years in Invercargill and Dunedin will find this far from a "candid" autobiography: Fry never names or discusses her first husband, nor does she choose to tell us much about her now grown-up children.

This is only one of the peculiar omissions from the book. Another concerns the important subject of Fry's spirit guides or helpers. She has often alluded to their existence, frequently "consulting" them for information in the course of her radio broadcasts, but in Radio Clairvoyant she is less forthcoming—indeed, except for one spirit guide, a Maori child who remains with her from childhood, she has nothing to say about them. This is surprising, for she once told a Listener interviewer that her personal spirit guides included a Chinese gentleman, a Tibetan monk and "a little French nun." Although she claimed to depend on this trio for important guidance, they don't rate a mention in her autobiography.

Nor are there reports on the esoteric knowledge Fry must have gained from the many deep and penetrating conversations she claims to have had with people on the "other side." It emerges, for example, that she believes in reincarnation, but she doesn't share with her readers answers to the obvious questions: what determines who is reincarnated as what? Do we keep on being reincarnated for ever? Did she ever try to contact someone's grandfather and find that he was already in his next life—human, crustacean or whatever? If the Tibetan or the nun had anything enlightening to say about reincarnation, we're not told it, though she does mention that a medium once told her that long ago she was a monk at Glastonbury Abbey. Fry knows this is true because when she had visited the abbey she had felt like a monk in the 10th century: "I could hear the prayer chants. I was in the kitchens, a monk myself, preparing a very basic meal in primitive conditions."

Throughout the book Fry tries to convey an air of profound spiritual knowledge, but her insights are exasperatingly vague. In this respect, the book resembles her radio talkback sessions. In the months I spent studying these in 1985, she did not impress me as ever having contacted the dead, though most callers were all too eager to believe it. There was a numbing banality and repetitiveness in her readings, especially apparent after many hours. The dead tended to identify themselves by enacting their deathbed symptoms through Fry: "I'm aware of a woman here, Lovee, and ... I feel very, very nauseated and tired ... OK? So you know her, don't you?" Something like "He had trouble breathing at the end, didn't he?" predictably brought agreement from the caller. Fry says in her book that such information is "good solid ... proof" for identifying a spirit.

Once dead, however, these talkback ghosts quickly returned to the pink of condition, and they sent their love. But that wasn't all, for they were also expected to deliver "guidance," as Fry insists it be called. They tended to tell young women they were gaining confidence and they would likely travel, advise working people that they could stand a break, tell young housewives that their husbands wanted more independence and might be up for a career change or promotion. Often a dead mum or nana presented herself to Fry with sleeves rolled up, working in the kitchen, and many displayed an irresistible impulse to give out baking tips. Fry admits in her book that sometimes "the information I gave out over the radio was very general," but the record shows that even the more specifically accurate "hits" were matched by embarrassing misses. It aroused in me the awkward suspicion that the spirits might just be guessing.

There is no doubt that some bereaved callers, frequently weeping into the telephone, received solace from all this, and Fry devotes three chapters to the rise of her radio programme and the controversy it provoked. On Fourth Estate, Brian Priestley attacked the ethics of using a medium on talkback radio; and while he had initially welcomed her on his programme, George Balani became disenchanted after replaying his tapes. What Fry does not discuss is the reasons for all the fuss. A significant number of callers were distressed people in need of personal help and, beyond the talkback calls, she reveals here that she got over 100 letters a week, many undoubtedly from desperate listeners who couldn't get through the jammed switchboard.

But the immense popularity of the programme was not due to the peculiarly sensitive or intelligent spiritual advice being offered by Fry herself. After all, she was acting only as a metaphysical messenger. It wasn't Fry telling an elderly woman to stop taking medications that "are not natural"—it was the woman's late husband. It wasn't Fry urging a young woman to go ahead with her plans "and not to compromise"—it was the woman's mother. What was the caller planning to do? Get married? Sell her house? Plunge her savings into the sharemarket? We were never told: the ground rules for Fry's programme did not allow discussion of the caller's specific situation.

Since the advice given had an immense significance for many vulnerable individuals, there was clear potential for harm to be done. Fry gives bland assurances in her book that her spirit guides wouldn't allow her to say anything which might harm a caller: "Our loved ones in spirit," she says, never give us "information that's detrimental." The Broadcasting Corporation board must have been unconvinced, for in 1985 it decided finally that Fry had to go.

Whether or not there's life after death, there has been a busy life after radio for Mary Fry. She tells us in Radio Clairvoyant that, besides dealing with the odd haunted house, she and her husband Warwick (who is also a medium) heal animals and provide counselling for victims of violent death. One night they found themselves helping "a large number of people who'd gone down in the Lusitania... Time had stood still for these poor victims since then and they needed help to understand what had happened so they could pick up and carry on their new lives." Fry says that work is also "constantly being done with those who lost their lives in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany ... We' ve often helped those who've died in wars throughout the centuries." If this is how mediums occupy themselves, there is, alas, probably an assured future in the trade.

To play angels' advocate and suppose for the moment that this isn't just imagination run riot, Mary's ghosts are still a disappointing lot. She reports that they give her delicious recipes, which she wishes she'd "written down," and there is a chapter describing how they can direct the Frys to a motorcar mechanic and a cheap hotel in rural Britain just when needed. When called upon to locate a missing plane by the desperate wife of the pilot, however, they can't seem to deliver. If they can show a lady the way to a lost ring, why can't they, say, put the finger on a child murderer at large in New Zealand? Even Fry herself is annoyed that she had to learn of her own sacking from the newspapers. Where are our spirit guides when we need them?

Fry boasts in her conclusion, "I can provide irrefutable evidence of spirit communication," but she steadfastly refuses to have her powers put to a systematic test. This is a shame, because there are ways to evaluate the claims of spirit mediums which are straightforward and fair and which don't require perfect clairvoyant accuracy. Such tests only make it impossible for the medium to succeed by "cold reading" techniques of generalised guessing based on hints inadvertently provided by the client. Instead, the "evidence" Mary Fry offers in Radio Clairvoyant is her lofty affirmations of spirituality, an endless stream of anecdotes and a chapter of testimonial letters from satisfied listeners.