Elizabeth McCarthy Is A Story Teller

Back in the 1950s and 60s my motorcycle racing hero was Mike "The Bike" Hailwood. He was a twelve times winner at the Isle of Man and won 76 races on the Grand Prix circuits; wins that gave him world championships every year from 1961 to 1967.

Sadly, at the age of forty, he was driving his family to the local fish and chip shop when a truck made an illegal turn in front of his car. The vehicles collided and Mike and his daughter were killed. The truck driver was unhurt.

So I was searching the Internet for details of his racing career when I came across this:

Hailwood claimed to have been told by a fortune teller in South Africa that he wouldn't live to 40 and would be killed by a truck. The story was repeated by Elizabeth McCarthy in a 1981 memoir, while recounting her relationship with Hailwood, whom she had met at the Canadian Grand Prix in 1967. When he asked her hand in marriage, she replied that she was hesitant to marry someone who could die at any weekend race. He then told her his story and said; "...so you see, it won't happen on a track."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Hailwood#Death

Marvellous isn't it? The woman had known Mike Hailwood since 1967 but it wasn't until after he died in an accident with a truck that she suddenly starts telling everybody that a psychic had predicted he would die in an accident with a truck! Not much of a prediction when the first time anybody hears about it is after the event occurred.

So I did an Internet search for this Elizabeth McCarthy woman and discovered that twenty years later she was still telling the same story - but this time she also revealed some additional information about herself. She's a fucking ratbag!

I was in a terrible car accident - so terrible that I died, went to heaven and came back.

http://8w.forix.com/hailwood.html 

Bloody hell! She's doing even better than Jesus! She came back! Jesus didn't!

So I will quite happily dismiss her claim that a psychic told Mike Hailwood he would die in a crash with a truck. She seems to me like the sort of woman who casually adds supernatural crap to her stories just so she can kid herself that her own stories are more exciting than other people's stories.