Jenny's Story

My name is Jenny Cocksey. I have had many thought-provoking experiences in my life and I have written the following brief article to give an indication of how I came to be involved with Brian in his Enigma research.

I was born and brought up in New Zealand which I now see is a place where you are taught not to question or be different. If you wish for acceptance, then you must conform.  I suppose I have always been different and that is probably why I was rarely happy in my youth.  I am fortunate that much of my life has been spent overseas

In 1968, at the age of 21, a year after marrying, I left New Zealand with my husband for the obligatory trip overseas to Britain. This was the only way the young of the country could experience anything other than the congenitally narrow view of a country so far distant from the rest of the world. We flew first to Hong Kong where the difference in culture was so overwhelming, and then on to Athens for some real ancient history. From there, we hitch-hiked right around the Mediterranean to visit an aunt working in Libya. This journey exposed me to so many different cultures, and we ended up staying in Egypt for a month, a large part of this time living with one of the Fayed family in the shadow of the Pyramids of Giza.

We finally reached England six months after leaving New Zealand and our first daughter, Nicki, was born just over a year later, on 11th June 1970, while we were living in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. We had a hobby of brass rubbing and, in fact, rubbed every brass in the Lincolnshire churches. As I painstakingly reproduced the image of a figure on the memorial brasses, I would wonder about the real person from a former age. Wandering in the little country churchyards and sitting in the silence of the old village churches, I could feel the spirits around me - and it was comforting, not spooky. There was a timeless feel.

We moved south and bought a cottage in Epsom, Surrey. This was a strange coincidence because, as a teenager, I had lived on the borders of Epsom in Auckland, New Zealand and gone to Epsom Girls' Grammar School for most of my secondary schooling. One of our favourite places to take visitors to our Surrey home was to the North Downs by Box Hill and Marjery Hill where the chalk escarpment dropped steeply down to the valley to Dorking and Reigate before rising up to the South Downs.  So often when I stood there looking out over the countryside, I would have the feeling "All this will be gone one day, covered by the sea."  This was not a particularly comfortable thought but it recurred many times over the years and I hesitatingly spoke of it to a couple of friends who were fascinated and asked me about it several times.

My husband' s job as a civil engineer took us to Algeria for three and a half years where my second daughter, Miranda, was born on 5th February 1974 in Annaba, the old Hippone of St. Augustine. I thought it strange that at the time she was born in Algeria (10 pm), it was already Waitangi Day in New Zealand, the national day. Curiously, we met another New Zealand couple at the other end of the country, in Oran, and they, too, had a daughter born in Algeria about the same time. There followed other overseas contracts in Togo, Egypt, The Gambia and in Guinea, interspersed with time back in our cottage in Epsom in Surrey.

When we left Togo, we wanted to take our Toyota Landcruiser back to England so we decided to drive across the Sahara desert. We had already experienced a month of this in a Renault 6 with a long foray down to the desert, to Tamanrasset, while we were working in Algeria so the desert held no fears for us. But we knew that commonsense precautions had to be taken.

I had a very strange experience on this Saharan journey. We were driving through the sand desert of the Téneré between Agadez and Libya. We had tried to do a circle north into Algeria but had been turned back by officials. Our vehicle was suffering somewhat because of dirty fuel taken on in the oasis of Bilma which is where the salt caravans ply their trade. This meant that we needed to keep the revs up and keep going steadily in the soft surface. Just as we passed the Arbre de Téneré, I was aware of a figure stepping out towards us. This is named because there used to be just one thorn tree growing in the midst of that vast desert, right beside the only water in several days' drive. However, it was reputedly knocked over by a truck driver and a reflective metallic ' tree ' was erected instead. There were various stories of a family returning to their oasis from a funeral and then their truck broke down. A year later, relatives went to visit the scattered graves of those who had tried to walk out, and the truck broke down again. Was it the spirit of one of these I had witnessed? To this day, I can still see it in my mind, and I regret that we did not stop. However, we were trailing our Italian companion vehicle and were in mechanical trouble ourselves. I am sure there was nobody physical, but that figure is so clear to me. From there, we went south to where dinosaur bones and remnants of ancient civilisations were just lying in the sand - querns, grinding stones, flints from thousands of years ago. We also celebrated Miranda ' s fifth birthday with a cake (with icing and candles!) made on an open fire. Not my best cake, but a birthday cake, nevertheless!

We had been back in England for 5 months when my brother, Peter, died in Portugal while on holiday. He was one of the many victims of badly maintained gas water heaters in Portuguese apartments. Over a year or so, more than 100 people were killed in the same manner but nothing was done about it until TV Eye did a programme. We had tried to draw it to the attention of the press to warn people -to no avail. Pete had been about to announce his engagement to a girl called Jenny. So, she would have borne my maiden name, Jenny Mackesy - another strange coincidence.

t angers me that people who die en masse in terrorist attacks or accidents are hailed as heroes, whereas if they just die in ones and twos, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, their life is considered as worthless.  People are so often ghoulish, when they are not being self-centred, and the media panders to that because it sells newspapers, magazines, etc.  They do their best to sensationalise everything.  In a way, it is easier if someone you love dies in some mass event because there are others who you can perhaps talk to who can relate to how you feel.  And you are not struggling in some futile legal action on your own against a careless and uncaring landlord, in this case.  My father gave up the unequal struggle.  However, this meant that the matter was not brought to media attention and so many more died in the same manner, each an individual.  Whenever there is a mass disaster, there are always flocks of vulture lawyers keen to 'help'.  My experience with Pete and seeing what happened over Lockerbie tended to make me rather bitter.

My husband was called back to Togo and we wanted to take the Landcruiser back. He had gone ahead by air and I was to follow with the vehicle. I kept having premonitions every time I looked at Miranda. I kept feeling "She won' t come back." These became stronger and stronger and I kept having a vision of what looked like a yellow snake biting her foot. This would be a perfectly possible scenario in the Sahara and one which could be fatal as there are no medical facilities within several days' drive. I worried and fretted, balancing my desire to drive through the Sahara again with this inconvenient 'warning' . Furthermore, I kept hearing the words of my dead brother coming into my mind " Don ' t do it, Jen."

The upshot was that, after seeking advice from a psychic friend, the general drift of which was that I was not to commit myself but that things would show me which way to go, I reached a decision not to drive. I felt my brother say " Thank God, Jen." And I had such a sense of relief. My sister and her partner drove the Landcruiser and the children and I flew back to Togo. While they were still en route but we were now happily back together as a family in Tabligbo, the bush town where my husband was overseeing the startup of a new cement factory, a strange thing happened.

We had rescued a baby ground squirrel whose mother had been shot by the gardener as it ate the oil palm nuts. It used to go under the fridge and the children used to pull out the drip tray to get to it. One day, at breakfast, I had sent Miranda to get a bottle of cold, filtered water from the fridge. There was a blood-curdling scream and my husband rushed naked from the shower and I shot up from the table into the kitchen. There was Miranda, attached to the fridge handle. And there, seemingly attached to her foot was what looked like a yellow snake - exactly as in my vision! It was the yellow live electric lead and it was burning into her foot and electrocuting her. I threw myself against her to detach her and then we all shook.

You might say that it was not exactly as I had thought. Errors of interpretation do occur. I had interpreted what I saw in the light of what I was intending to do and the most probable risk. I could not possibly have foreseen what actually did happen. The mind makes sense of what it sees. I will never know whether it would have been safe for us to have gone back across the Sahara like that. All I know is that I was being warned very strongly by the spirit of my brother not to do so. I desperately wanted to and I had to make a very hard decision. From that moment on, I have always tried to take note of warnings that come in to me. Maybe things do not work out exactly as my mind can interpret them. But there is certainly a greater scheme of things of which I only see a glimpse. And so, I find it better to be safe than sorry. I feel that the spirit of my brother most certainly helped save my daughter.

Again and again, Pete comes to me at odd times, sometimes just in comfort, sometimes for things more serious. That was just the start of my experiences of being spoken to from outside, rather than just sensing the presence of someone.

Eventually the stresses of being part expatriate wife, part mother back in England, part family all together overseas took its toll and my marriage broke up. While living in Egypt in 1982, I had become interested in the wonderful art of ancient Egypt. We had renewed the friendship with the Fayed family and I occasionally helped out at Ahmed Fayed' s tourist shop by the Sphinx. Ahmed helped me find a reputable supplier of high quality, authentic papyrus paintings to take back to England and I started a small business which I called Nile Egyptian Papyrus. I opened a gallery beside Hampton Court.  Incidentally, in a way it was another case of things coming full circle because it was where I had first lived when we came to England in 1969. And given the significance of the Tudors in our research now, it seems to have an even greater significance as time goes on.   Often, at weekends I took my paintings round many of the psychic fairs in England, trying to promote them to a wider audience. 

In February 1986, while I was setting up a stand at an exhibition in Wembley, Brian Cocksey visited my Hampton Court gallery and was sold two of my paintings by Manfred, a neighbouring stallholder. The next day, he came out to the Wembley exhibition to meet me. Manfred had told him where I was.

He stayed and helped me set up my exhibition and I was grateful for his help as everyone else had commercial stand fitters in. He was interested in Akhenaten and wanted paintings to do with this pharaoh. I knew little about this particular subject and was wary of saying anything to expose my ignorance. He offered to frame this  large, life-size painting of Tutankhamun's sarcophagus for me.

A huge upset in the family over the business saw me ending up staying with Brian in his Chelsea flat as he helped me with my paintings.  I became part of a life where you do not do the conventional, just because it is expected of you. I learnt to see how I was guided by coincidences and things outside. It was almost as if I was being tested. This caused a break in my family which saddened me. However, I was doing what I felt was right. It seemed to be my destiny.  Now I am certain of that.

Just shortly before I had met Brian, a visiting American friend had asked me what I felt was my role in life. Rather strangely, this was on the day following the Challenger Shuttle disaster and we had seen the original newsflash of it a couple of hours after he arrived in England. I had answered that I felt I was balancing a heavy ball in each hand and each one represented my children - that I was trying to support each one of them. I also said that this was only for the time being and that it would change. It certainly did. For a while I was estranged from my family while I concentrated on my new role, working ever more towards my destiny.

It was difficult, and Brian and I often argued since he would 'get' to do something and it didn' t seem logical to me. However, he usually turned out to be right - which galled me somewhat. I gradually learnt. Friends and family didn' t like the new me and they made all sorts of accusations. Life with Brian was very busy and fascinating. We left London, went to Scotland, but eventually ended up in North Wales where we rented a caravan for a while. It was peaceful to be away from London and the family upsets and in a beautiful rural environment. One day, however, as we walked on Penmaenmawr mountain behind Conwy, I suddenly felt I wanted to run away down the mountain after a row with Brian.

Later, in the caravan, I went to sleep upset, and apparently started talking, not as myself, but as another woman. Brian wrote down what 'she' said. Over the course of several days, it began to appear that the woman must be Mary Magdalen. She came and spoke over several weeks, both in North Wales and a while later when we were in the Scottish Highlands. I wondered "How can this be?  Could I be making this up?"  But how could I?  I didn' t know the story she was telling. No one did. I had no real memory of what was said until I read it as I typed it up. In fact, one long 'chapter' - 'The Covenant' - which had been given to us in Scotland was stolen as our car was broken into and the notebook was in the bag which was taken.  However, Mary gave that part of the story again a few weeks later in our Berwickshire farmhouse, almost verbatim from the first time, from what Brian could recall, but this time with a little more detail in a couple of places.

My 'Mary' experience began in April 1986.  In May, we moved back to Brian's Chelsea flat and in June 1986, another woman came to speak through me.  This time the woman was Ankhsoun-pa-Aten, daughter of the 'heretic' pharaoh, Akhenaten and wife of Tutankhamun.  I knew nothing of her life but when I had first met Brian in February 1986, he had gone around all my paintings putting her name on them where I had just written 'Tutankhamun and his wife'.  Brian was incensed that I had not given her a name. After he told me her name, I looked at the pictures and said "I think I would like to write her story."  Brian replied rather scathingly, "You' ll have a job. There is almost nothing known about her."  I had forgotten that incident completely.

Ankhsoun spoke through me at all sorts of time of day and night.  It was quite exhausting.  I didn' t remember much of the content but it tired me.  Brian was excited but also tired from being woken all the time to write the story down.  Ankhsoun gave her story but seemed to speak more and more often on everyday matters as well, almost as if she were with me in what I was doing.  This was somewhat disconcerting.  There were occasions where she seemed to 'take over' and then found herself in a situation beyond her ability to cope in this modern world, so far removed from her own.  Often her arrival would be triggered by some emotional upheaval or some sudden glimpse of something to do with Egypt.  This seemed to cause an excitement in her, as though she were recognising something from 'home' .

Gradually, over the years, Ankhsoun seems to have become a partner in my life. She is there in the background, chipping in from time to time with her own comments on what is going on.  She is totally independent of me, except in that she has to use my body and mind to express herself.  I liken it to being conjoined twins, each with her own mind, personality and soul but dependent on the other's cooperation. Ankhsoun can never make me do anything so, in this respect, she is unlike a 'possession' where the possessing spirit takes over the host.  Ours is more like a partnership.

Since Mary and Ankhsoun first came, I have been spoken to by many spirits but never at a time of my choosing and never at the behest of 'circles' or spiritualist churches.  It is as though some emotional need causes the link to be made so as to enable them to come. Often I feel them drawing close or I sense a presence round me.  Sometimes it is as though a voice has spoken into my mind.  It is a warming and comforting thing.  What they tell me can be harrowing as they appear to come to terms with things they see on earth, perhaps in part through my eyes and ears, and then they respond to unfolding events.

One of these spirits is that of Brian's father.  Several times, while I was painting round behind the boiler in our Scottish Borders farmhouse, I would feel him.  I did not really know him as I had only met him twice, some time after he had retired from work and before he died of cancer.  I asked Brian why I should always feel him there.  Brian said straight away, "Because Dad spent his life around boilers".  He had worked for nearly forty years at Boddington's Brewery in Manchester, maintaining the big Lancashire boilers.  He started as a fitter and eventually retired as deputy maintenance engineer. It was a kind of independent confirmation for Brian that the words I was speaking were those of his father.  The boiler connection meant nothing to me, but it meant a lot to Brian, the person for whom the words were intended.  Since then, Brian'  father has quite often come to us.  Just before Brian's mother's death, he was particularly sad and what he had to say was most significant.  Again, there were very strange coincidences to do with Boddington's Brewery, here in Auckland, as if to confirm the truth and validity of the communication.

Our 'forced travels' took us to three farmhouses in the Scottish Borders between August 1986 and July,1989.  But then we couldn't find anywhere else to rent so it was back down to the cottage in Epsom, which fortunately was empty and unsold, still part of a bitter divorce battle with my first husband.  One evening in November 1989, I was sitting on the couch and we were discussing Brian's time at Oxford. The Duke of Windsor had been at Magdalen College, the only one of the royals to go to Oxford as they mostly seemed to prefer Cambridge.  Suddenly I began to drift and started talking, but once again, it wasn't me.  This time it was the Duke of Windsor speaking, asking us to send birthday greetings to the current Prince of Wales, Charles, whose 41st birthday was now just two days away.  He spoke of the errors he had made as the previous Prince of Wales and warned Charles about going the same way.  As has become evident, Charles did not take the advice proferred.  As ever, he knew best.

In 1990 suddenly, my Decree Absolute papers arrived so Brian and I decided to formally marry. We had already made our vows to each other before God under the dome at St. Paul's Cathedral way back on 4th March 1986 and I had already taken the name of Cocksey by formal  Deed Poll in Scotland in 1986.  But, this formalised matters and we were duly married on 14th April 1990 in Epsom. We just about got a living from us both working, sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending on the jobs that came up. Then in August 1994, Brian hurt his back, ironically while helping me on my allotment down by the railway.  He could not work for a while so my parents suggested he might come out and look at New Zealand where he was offered a job that didn' t require much driving.  Lots of strange coincidences suggested that we were meant to come here, although with hindsight, other signs were certainly not promising about how satisfactory it would be or whether we would be happy.

We arrived here to live on 28th January 1995 and have struggled through eight years as 'foreigners' here, homesick for the depth and culture of Britain and Europe. I find it especially difficult because I now feel like an alien in my own country.  It is has proved hard to get work but, as ever, we  have always enough for what we need.  Most of what we get, we put back into our research and this can be expensive. And whenever time we feel it almost becomes too much, that we are being overwhelmed, or getting nowhere, then comes a series of the most mind-blowing coincidences just to show we are still on track.  We were very at our lowest in 1996, when Brian was out of work for a year.  Then we set up our own consulting company to do waste water treatment.  Brian did the work and wrote reports which I typed.  Things seemed to be picking up.  By Easter 1997, Brian had two big contracts.  But within a few months we were reminded of our real work when suddenly everything blew up with the Windsors.  The Duke of Windsor came again, with more messages and strong warnings. 

It was all leading up to the murder of Princess Diana, but we didn't know it.  One day, I had been tidying the piles of English newspapers beside our bed when I came across one talking of Diana going on yet another fancy holiday, this time in the Mediterranean on Mohamed Al Fayed's yacht.  Brian was very scathing about her then.  He thought she squandered money dreadfully and manipulated the press.  I was rather more sympathetic, as I had known what it was like to have a husband who didn't really care.  It was quite a few weeks later, some three weeks after her funeral, one Saturday.  Brian had been reading a book about the Queen Mother.  He liked the Queen Mother even less than he liked Diana and he shouted to me "There you are.  Diana and the Queen Mother were two of a kind."  I suppose this triggered some kind of link to my mind and it became the start of a whole series of experiences which were exactly parallel to those with Ankhsoun and Mary Magdalen.  Only this time, it was the spirit of a woman who had only very recently left this world, who somehow or other had chosen or been sent to link into my mind.  Anyway, I went and sat down beside Brian.   But it was Diana who spoke to him.  I suppose in a way it was a bit of a rebuke for him.  Almost her first words were "I know you don't like me."  Brian was really quite taken aback.  He probably felt quite embarrassed.  She spoke at length, probably for over an hour, trying to explain that what Brian didn't like wasn't exactly her but images of her which had elements of truth but which were not entirely fair.

We doubt, we question, we are sometimes overwhelmed. We lapse into depression at the futility of trying to convey these ideas to a world that does not want to know. But then, again and again, we are shown that what we are doing is right, that Something is trying to show us a pattern which is certainly not of our making.  And the more we take notice, the stronger it seems to become.   This is a phenomenon which has been noticed by other workers in this field, notably Colin Wilson and Arthur Koestler.

In July 2000, I was diagnosed with cervical cancer.  I was yet another failure to add to the growing list of failures in the New Zealand Cervical Cancer screening progamme.  But once again I was on my own.  Gisborne was the publicised case at the time and dozens of women were affected.   There was little mention of women elsewhere in New Zealand.  And of course the Health Authorities tried to make out that Gisborne was an isolated case.  Women could have confidence in the cervical screening programme in elsewhere.  My experience shows they cannot.  My abnormal smears  should have been picked up by routine smear testing especially as I had a history of abnormal smears in England.  But in many ways my cancer diagnosis has strengthened me.  I feel at last that I have been able to  take control of my own life.  And I have used the same principles as we have used to guide us in all the important decisions of our lives. I underwent relatively minor surgery, but when that did not eradicate all the cancer, I decided enough was enough. I was told that the only remaining option was major surgery.  Against medical advice,  I have opted for very conservative treatment and use alternative methods to try to control the cancer. But then the track record of most of the rest of medical professionals has not been good in my case either. Why should I trust their confident advice now.  They have let me down too often in the past.  I have put my trust in what has proved trustworthy for the past sixteen years of my life. For the signs and coincidences indicate that I should refuse major surgery because the outcome would not be as they so confidently predict. I feel I have been guided into my alternative treatment regime.  This is the best way for me and so far, although the cancer is still there, I am in better health than I have been for a long time. I just have to trust and follow the signs.