Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

about what has happened during the day,

  then we have to go to sleep.

  It doesn’t matter what we dream about.

  (1994)

  ★

  Lights Out

  by Edward Thomas

  I have come to the borders of sleep,

  The unfathomable deep

  Forest where all must lose

  Their way, however straight,

  Or winding, soon or late;

  They cannot choose.

  Many a road and track

  That, since the dawn’s first crack,

  Up to the forest brink,

  Deceived the travellers,

  Suddenly now blurs,

  And in they sink.

  Here love ends,

  Despair, ambition ends;

  All pleasure and all trouble,

  Although most sweet or bitter,

  Here ends, in sleep that is sweeter

  Than tasks most noble.

  There is not any book

  Or face of dearest look

  That I would not turn from now

  To go into the unknown

  I must enter, and leave, alone,

  I know not how.

  The tall forest towers;

  Its cloudy foliage lowers

  Ahead, shelf above shelf;

  Its silence I hear and obey

  That I may lose my way

  And myself.

  (1916)

  ★

  In his lecture ‘On Fairytales’, J. R. R. Tolkien claimed, ‘The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval’.

  His own children’s bedtime-story routine would prove incredibly fruitful. While many of us may try to make up a simple tale for our offspring, forgetting the details soon after each little performance, the yarns that Tolkien spun for younger sons Michael and Christopher took on a ‘secondary life’ of their own. These bedtime stories would burgeon into one of the world’s most widely read books (and, later, most garlanded and viewed film series) ever.

  Biographer Humphrey Carpenter sets the scene: Tolkien has just left his close friend C. S. Lewis in the centre of Oxford, before bicycling home.

  From J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography

  by Humphrey Carpenter

  Edith has gone to bed and the house is in darkness when he gets home. He builds up the fire in the study stove and fills his pipe. He ought, he knows, to do some more work on his lecture notes for the next morning, but he cannot resist taking from a drawer the half-finished manuscript of a story that he is writing to amuse himself and his children. It is probably, he suspects, a waste of time; certainly if he is going to devote any attention to this sort of thing it ought to be to The Silmarillion. But something draws him back night after night to this amusing little tale – at least it seems to amuse the boys. He sits down at the desk, fits a new relief nib to his dip pen (which he prefers to a fountain pen), unscrews the ink bottle, takes a sheet of old examination paper (which still has a candidate’s essay on the Battle of Maldon on the back of it), and begin to write: ‘When Bilbo opened his eyes, he wondered if he had; for it was just as dark as with them shut. No one was anywhere near him. Just imagine his fright . . .’

  We will leave him now. He will be at his desk until half past one, or two o’clock, or perhaps even later, with only the scratching of his pen to disturb the silence, while around him Northmoor Road sleeps.

  (1977)

  ★

  In ‘The Word Shed’, Colum McCann recounts how his father would tell him stories back when he was a kid. The innocent shimmer of the child’s-eye view is evoked touchingly.

  It just so happens that my dad used to arrive home from a newspaper office and that my son, to whom I now read stories, is called Georgie and adores football.

  So while McCann’s story – although intensely personal – is, like all great tales, recognizable to us all, this particular tale is one for my boy. Perhaps you’ll like reading it when you’re all grown-up, son.

  The Word Shed

  by Colum McCann

  Every afternoon, when my father arrived home from his job as the features editor at a newspaper in Dublin, he disappeared into his writing shed. To get there, you had to squeeze your way past the coal bin, the lawnmower, cans of petrol and paint, ancient bicycle parts. The shed always smelled damp inside, as if the rain rose up out of the carpet. The bookshelves sagged. The low-slung roof had a murky skylight with a hat of gray Irish cloud.

  From the house, I could hear the tattoo of two-fingered typing. The ping of the bell. The slam of the carriage return. It all sounded like a faint form of applause. My father’s books – The World of Sean O’Casey, The Wit of Oscar Wilde, All the World’s Roses, The Fighting Irish – sat on the coffee table in what we called the D. & D. room: reserved for the dead and the dignified. The books didn’t mean much to me. I wanted to be what every other boy wanted to be: a professional soccer player.

  In his youth, my father had been a semi-professional goalkeeper. Nothing very glamorous. He played second string for Charlton Athletic, in London, and got paid ten shillings and sixpence a week. What he remembered most vividly was having to polish the boots of the first-team players, and sweeping the rat shit out of the canteen in the morning. He never played for the first team, but he didn’t see this as a failure so much as an adventure in limitations. He came back to Dublin, had a family, and began to write.

  One winter evening, when I was nine years old, he came into my bedroom, carrying under his arm a sheaf of papers, some of them two or three feet long. (Like Kerouac, he used large rolls of industrial paper in his Olivetti.) It was a carbon copy of what he had been writing for the previous few weeks: a book for kids titled Goals for Glory.

  ‘Read it for me, will you? Tell me if it’s awful or not.’

  I read it by flashlight. Georgie Goode was a sullen Gypsy boy, fifteen years old, with long black hair. He travelled around the fens of England in a battered caravan, with a father who was sometimes there, sometimes absent. Georgie had no money for soccer boots, so he slipped around in the muck in his plimsolls. It was the stuff of children’s myth – Georgie had an eye for the back of the net and a left foot like chain lightning – but it all seemed plausible.

  Years later, I would read James Joyce and mull over the idea that literature could ‘re-create life out of life’, but back then what stunned me was that another boy could emerge from my father’s ramshackle shed, as real to me as the dirt that caked on my own soccer boots. This was new territory: the imagined coming to life. My father’s typewriter sounded different to me now. More and more, I disappeared into books.

  When Goals for Glory was published, the following year, I took the hardcover to school. My teacher, Mr Kells, read a chapter aloud every Friday afternoon, that time of the school week when the world promises escape. We sat in our prefab classroom and waited for him to crack the spine.

  In the last chapter, Georgie’s team had to beat the rival team, Dale Rovers. Georgie had been given a new pair of soccer boots. The championship was at stake. I knew the ending already, but my classmates didn’t. They were latched to their desks. Of course, Georgie started the game off badly, and of course he got rid of his new boots, and of course his father arrived late to cheer him on, and of course doom loomed, as doom so often does in a good story.

  I will never forget Christopher Howlett, my red-headed desk mate, jumping around like a prayer in an air raid as Mr Kells reached the final page. Georgie scored the winning goal. The classroom erupted. The kid from my father’s shed – that tangle of hair that had somehow sprung up from behind a typewriter ribbon – was carried with us outside the school gates, down Mart Lane, through the swamp, and into the field at the back of Dunnes Stores, where, with a soggy leather ball at our feet, we all became Georgie, at least for a minute or two.

  Such euphoria seldom lasts, but the nostalgia for it remains. My world had changed enough for me to know that I would try to write a character into it one day – not a
Georgie, necessarily, but perhaps a father, or a son.

  A few years on, when I was a teen-ager, my father sat me in the shed and recited, from memory, Philip Larkin’s ‘This Be the Verse’: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.’ Fair enough, and I knew what he was trying to say, but I also knew that sometimes – just sometimes – the father you get is the father you want.

  (2014)

  ★

  I have always loved the word ‘moonshine’.

  Perhaps this is down to my mother, a musician. As a child, she adored the musical Annie Get Your Gun, written by Irving Berlin, and later fostered that affection for its show tunes onto her own kids.

  My favourite number was always ‘Moonshine Lullaby’, with its clandestine, candle-lit wonder. Annie Oakley sings her young siblings to sleep, by painting a picture of their dad’s night shift:

  Behind the hill, there’s a busy little still,

  Where your Pappy’s workin’ in the moonlight . . .

  That a ‘little still’ could, contrarily, be ‘busy’ seemed unreal and inviting to me. Annie goes on to explain that her dad’s job is, by the light of the moon, to fill up a jug with ‘moonshine’, with which he’ll be ‘very happy’. In such ways, the ditty, to my innocent little ears, over-frothed with mystery and gleamed with magic. Its gentle melody added another comforting glow.

  Of course, not being an expert in prohibition, I didn’t realize that ‘moonshine’ refers not to the moon’s radiance itself but to a barrel of hooch or white lightning; nor did I cotton on that the ‘still’ was a ‘distillery’, not a silvery clearing.

  That Annie Oakley should sing her siblings to sleep with a ditty about their absentee pop making illicit manoeuvres by cover of night could be regarded as irresponsible! Yet, remember, this is a musical and, instead, it’s a romantic irony; not to mention, a heroic rendering of the father figure – despite it all, and because of its downright loving tone.

  In this next story, written by Tobias Wolff, a narrator recollects a yuletide night he spent as a boy, with his father. It is apparent that their times together were infrequent, and so doubly precious to them both, as the dad in question – estranged from the boy’s mother – likes to push his luck (just like Annie’s Pappy).

  There is an elegiac tone in this recollection, adding to the mythical haze that swirls around this father figure. Wolff conjures filial love with a touch as deft as snowfall. He blizzards the reader. We slalom together, through a whiteout of longing and love.

  Powder

  by Tobias Wolff

  Just before Christmas my father took me skiing at Mount Baker. He’d had to fight for the privilege of my company, because my mother was still angry with him for sneaking me into a nightclub during his last visit, to see Thelonious Monk.

  He wouldn’t give up. He promised, hand on heart, to take good care of me and have me home for dinner on Christmas Eve, and she relented. But as we were checking out of the lodge that morning it began to snow, and in this snow he observed some rare quality that made it necessary for us to get in one last run. We got in several last runs. He was indifferent to my fretting. Snow whirled around us in bitter, blinding squalls, hissing like sand, and still we skied. As the lift bore us to the peak yet again, my father looked at his watch and said, ‘Criminy. This’ll have to be a fast one.’

  By now I couldn’t see the trail. There was no point in trying. I stuck close behind him and did what he did and somehow made it to the bottom without sailing off a cliff. We returned our skis and my father put chains on the Austin-Healey while I swayed from foot to foot, clapping my mittens and wishing I was home. I could see everything. The green table cloth, the plates with the holly pattern, the red candles waiting to be lit.

  We passed a diner on our way out. ‘You want some soup?’ my father asked. I shook my head. ‘Buck up,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you there. Right, doctor?’

  I was supposed to say, ‘Right, doctor,’ but I didn’t say anything.

  A state trooper waved us down outside the resort, where a pair of sawhorses blocked the road. He came up to our car and bent down to my father’s window, his face bleached by the cold, snowflakes clinging to his eyebrows and to the fur trim of his jacket and cap.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ my father said.

  The trooper told him. The road was closed. It might get cleared, it might not. Storm took everyone by surprise. Hard to get people moving. Christmas Eve. What can you do.

  My father said, ‘Look. We’re talking about five, six inches. I’ve taken this car through worse than that.’

  The trooper straightened up. His face was out of sight but I could hear him. ‘The road is closed.’

  My father sat with both hands on the wheel, rubbing the wood with his thumbs. He looked at the barricade for a long time. He seemed to be trying to master the idea of it. Then he thanked the trooper and with a weird, old-maidy show of caution turned the car around. ‘Your mother will never forgive me for this,’ he said.

  ‘We should’ve left this morning,’ I said. ‘Doctor.’

  He didn’t speak to me again until we were in a booth at the diner, waiting for our burgers. ‘She won’t forgive me,’ he said. ‘Do you understand? Never.’

  ‘I guess,’ I said, though no guesswork was required. She wouldn’t forgive him.

  ‘I can’t let that happen.’ He bent toward me. ‘I’ll tell you what I want. I want us all to be together again. Is that what you want?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He bumped my chin with his knuckles. ‘That’s all I needed to hear.’

  When we finished eating he went to the pay phone in the back of the diner, then joined me in the booth again. I figured he’d called my mother, but he didn’t give a report. He sipped at his coffee and stared out the window at the empty road. ‘Come on, come on,’ he said, though not to me. A little while later he said it again. When the trooper’s car went past, lights flashing, he got up and dropped some money on the check. ‘Okay. Vámonos.’

  The wind had died. The snow was falling straight down, less of it now and lighter. We drove away from the resort, right up to the barricade. ‘Move it,’ my father told me. When I looked at him, he said, ‘What are you waiting for?’ I got out and dragged one of the sawhorses aside, then put it back after he drove through. He pushed the door open for me. ‘Now you’re an accomplice,’ he said. ‘We go down together.’ He put the car into gear and gave me a look. ‘Joke, son.’

  Down the first long stretch I watched the road behind us, to see if the trooper was on our tail. The barricade vanished. Then there was nothing but snow: snow on the road, snow kicking up from the chains, snow on the trees, snow in the sky, and our trail in the snow. Then I faced forward and had a shock. There were no tracks ahead of us. My father was breaking virgin snow between tall treelines. He was humming ‘Stars Fell in Alabama’. I felt snow brush along the floorboards under my feet. To keep my hands from shaking I clamped them between my knees.

  My father grunted thoughtfully and said, ‘Don’t ever try this yourself.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘That’s what you say now, but someday you’ll get your license and then you’ll think you can do anything. Only you won’t be able to do this. You need, I don’t know – a certain instinct.’

  ‘Maybe I have it.’

  ‘You don’t. You have your strong points, sure, just not this. I only mention it because I don’t want you to get the idea this is something anybody can do. I’m a great driver. That’s not a virtue, okay? It’s just a fact, and one you should be aware of. There aren’t many cars I’d try this with. Listen!’

  I did listen. I heard the slap of the chains, the stiff, jerky rasp of the wipers, the purr of the engine. It really did purr. The old heap was almost new. My father couldn’t afford it, and kept promising to sell it, but here it was.

  I said, ‘Where do you think that policeman went to?’

  ‘Are you warm enough?’ He reached over and cran
ked up the blower. Then he turned off the wipers. We didn’t need them. The clouds had brightened. A few sparse, feathery flakes drifted into our slipstream and were swept away. We left the trees and entered a broad field of snow that ran level for a while and then tilted sharply downward. Orange stakes had been planted at intervals in two parallel lines and my father steered a course between them, though they were far enough apart to leave considerable doubt in my mind as to exactly where the road lay. He was humming again, doing little scat riffs around the melody.

  ‘Okay, then. What are my strong points?’

  ‘Don’t get me started,’ he said. ‘It’d take all day.’

  ‘Oh, right. Name one.’

  ‘Easy. You always think ahead.’

  True. I always thought ahead. I was a boy who kept his clothes on numbered hangers to ensure proper rotation. I bothered my teachers for homework assignments far ahead of their due dates so I could draw up schedules. I thought ahead, and that was why I knew there would be other troopers waiting for us at the end of our ride, if we even got there. What I didn’t know was that my father would wheedle and plead his way past them – he didn’t sing ‘O Tannenbaum’, but just about – and get me home for dinner, buying a little more time before my mother decided to make the split final. I knew we’d get caught; I was resigned to it. And maybe for this reason I stopped moping and began to enjoy myself.

  Why not? This was one for the books. Like being in a speedboat, only better. You can’t go downhill in a boat. And it was all ours. And it kept coming, the laden trees, the unbroken surface of snow, the sudden white vistas. Here and there I saw hints of the road, ditches, fences, stakes, though not so many that I could have found my own way. But then I didn’t have to. My father was driving. My father in his forty-eighth year, rumpled, kind, bankrupt of honor, flushed with certainty. He was a great driver. All persuasion, no coercion. Such subtlety at the wheel, such tactful pedalwork. I actually trusted him. And the best was yet to come – switchbacks and hairpins impossible to describe. Except maybe to say this: if you haven’t driven fresh powder, you haven’t driven.