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The Children That Time Forgot

By: Peter Harrison, Mary Harrison
Narrated by: Sandra Garston
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Summary

The original idea came to co-author Mary Harrison when she observed her youngest son, Leon, trying to pick flowers from a floral pattern on her bed cover. The infant's actions seemed so quirky and amusing that Mary was prompted to write a letter to Woman's Own magazine which was subsequently published. Mary asked if other mothers had experiences similar "odd" moments with their little ones. The word "odd" was the keyword that triggered an amazing reaction, and Mary, whose address had been published with her letter, was overwhelmed with letters from parents reporting accounts of reincarnation. From this, the idea for the book The Children that Time Forgot was born.

Mary and Peter Harrison spent over a year thoroughly researching leads. The anecdotes and stories developed organically as they gathered new evidence and established facts. Amongst the 30 fascinating accounts they unearthed, one story features a young girl from the north of England, so young she had not travelled outside of England before and was too young to read, yet she recounted, with chilling accuracy, visiting her grandmother in Dundee on the fateful night in 1879 her train was swept away when the Tay Bridge collapsed. Cynics would of course be quick to question the validity of such a story, but when the girl's family recollections were checked out, eyewitness accounts of the family she described, events leading to it, and records matched up.

The book's primary aim is to present children's stories in a neutral, non-judgmental way and let the listener decide. All the stories are spontaneous and all contributors offered their stories voluntarily.

©1983, 1989, 2015 Philip R Harrison (P)2016 Philip R Harrison
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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Poorly Edited in One Chapter, OK Narration, Well Written

Every audiobook reader burps, yawns and stumbles during recordings. They expect the editors to edit it out - that’s their job; not the narrators. Chapter 5 appears to be unedited. This is a shame (although also quite funny).

For those who don’t like the accent, that’s understandable (it’s a female narrator reading with Received Pronunciation accent of the kind used for vintage BBC broadcasting) but subjective - the narration is clear and measured - nothing melodramatic.

The first chapter and the commentary at the end weren’t my cup of tea - they go a bit into woo-woo territory. Some of the contextual details are clumsily researched too. For example, in the chapter where the girl remembers being in the Tay Bridge Disaster, the passenger they call Mr Linton was actually called Mr Linskill. The quote is also misattributed and paraphrased.

There’s no evidence that Mr Linskill changed carriages on the doomed train in order to help a father with his crying child before getting in his horse and coach to St Andrew’s, or that he even saw the bridge collapse as described. In fact, he couldn’t have changed carriages without going outside - corridors between carriages didn’t come until much later in British railway history. It would also have been highly usual for a first class passenger to get into a third class carriage as described, in Victorian times when class strata were so strictly enforced, and besides, with no train corridor and a howling gale, there’s no way Mr Linskill would have heard a child crying in the next train compartment along.

However, I can forgive incidental factual inaccuracies in context-setting narratives when their aim is purely to set the scene. The fact is, there IS witness testimony that at St Ford station (the last station before the bridge), William Friend observed a single father with a single ticket to Dundee in a the third class compartment of the train, with a baby in his arms and his other sleepy children surrounding him. So the crucial detail is there. And the authors get all the circumstantial facts of the disaster itself (including the station names, names of train and station staff, details of Mr Linskill’s journey and coach connection themselves, and the name of the connecting boat from Edinburgh) all correct. So this is just one example of how the authors slightly muddy incidental facts but HAVE done research about crucial details that could make or break a case.

By and large, the book’s commentary itself is VERY dated and could be seen as offensive in places (it includes one outdated term for a person of colour, now considered deeply offensive; and at one point it also suggests that a person can induce a miscarriage just by being reluctant or ambivalent to parenthood during pregnancy). It is a book of its time in these respects.

But the cases themselves are told in a simple, unsensationalised and clear way, clearly admitting for alternative explanations while suggesting resolutions to possible discrepancies. There are none of the most famous more recent stock cases oft repeated in such fields (James Leineger, for example), since it was published before any of those happened. In fact, it’s one of the first, and remains one of the few, of its kind, despite new cases continuing to appear.

What makes it authentic is that the authors compiled them without pretending to be scientific, but instead just sent off to parents through a popular magazine, explaining that their child had been sharing seeming spontaneous past-life memories, and did any other parents out there have children behaving in the same way. This book compiles their wealth of responses. It really opened the gates for study of this phenomenon. So while it is not perfect and very dated, it is a landmark publication in being the starter of a conversation that is still going on today.

Overall a highly enjoyable read - one I keep coming back to - and a rare one of its kind.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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bad editing

The editing is terrible but it was funny listening to the lady yawn and burp lol I enjoyed the stories.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Badly narrated

Really did not like the person reading this. Her accent was hard to listen to pronouncing baby and ‘bay bay’ and burping loudly in ch5 and then stumbling over the words, yawning and repeatedly making mistakes throughout.

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