Neville recounts that at the moment his mother died in Barbados -- wracked with pain and looking, at sixty-one, far older than her years -- she appeared to him in a vision as a young woman of about twenty. He immediately wrote to his sister Daphne describing the experience. Because wartime conditions meant no regular air travel to Barbados and all cables were censored, Daphne's reply describing their mother's actual death (which she confirmed, by the hour, matched his vision to within the one-hour time difference between New York and Barbados) took eight to ten days to reach him by ordinary mail.