Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  ★

  A couple of years ago, within the space of a few months, I attended a relative’s funeral and then another relative’s wedding. The same clan was gathered at both events. As is ever the way, during such gatherings of humans at which public emotion is pitched feverishly, we turned to poetry and music to express what we, as a family, were failing to articulate.

  There was one poem that was, independently, selected by the children of the deceased for their funeral oration and, later, also chosen by the bride and groom for a reading at their nuptials.

  What poem could possibly have such resonance, such versatility?

  It was one they had all learned as children. The bereaved had it read to them by their late mother at bedtime. The bride and groom invited our children to perform it at their ceremony. The sing-song synchronicity of the piece made everyone cry (twice over).

  All thanks to a little, dreamy tale about two animals voyaging together into the moonlight . . .

  The Owl and the Pussycat

  by Edward Lear

  The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea

  In a beautiful pea-green boat,

  They took some honey, and plenty of money,

  Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

  The Owl looked up to the stars above,

  And sang to a small guitar,

  ‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,

  What a beautiful Pussy you are,

  You are,

  You are!

  What a beautiful Pussy you are!’

  II

  Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl!

  How charmingly sweet you sing!

  O let us be married! too long we have tarried:

  But what shall we do for a ring?’

  They sailed away, for a year and a day,

  To the land where the Bong-tree grows

  And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

  With a ring at the end of his nose,

  His nose,

  His nose,

  With a ring at the end of his nose.

  III

  ‘Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

  Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’

  So they took it away, and were married next day

  By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

  They dined on mince, and slices of quince,

  Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

  And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

  They danced by the light of the moon,

  The moon,

  The moon,

  They danced by the light of the moon.

  (1871)

  Sleep latency is the name given to the period between the point that you put down this book and turn off the light, and the moment of falling asleep. In other words, how long the journey is for a person to go to sleep. In principle, the shorter that time period, the better. Readiness is all. A bedtime story can help reduce the timespan. Soon that soporific siren-call, with its mantic entreaties, seduces. No longer latent, sleep itself is awake.

  The Sleep Gate then swings open, as our circadian rhythms combine with measures of melatonin. Perhaps for around 10–15 minutes, we will inhabit hypnagogic sleep, known in Italy as ‘sleep-waking’, during which we (literally sometimes) nod off. Our bodies are freed of any responsibility. Their temperature plunges. Physicality slipstreams away, drifting into inertia, manoeuvred by the currents of our minds.

  We enter a liminal state, suspended somewhere between conscience and consciousness, on the edges of the deepest cycle of sleep. We may experience fluttering, shorter dreams during this limbo.

  The preternatural imagery and discombobulated delights such dream-states bring were enough to push Edgar Allan Poe into jerking himself awake by sheer will amid such states, feverishly writing down what visions they had brought with them. This variety of hallucination, which can be prompted by opium, too, was a reservoir of inspiration for nineteenth-century Romantic writers – notably De Quincey but also Coleridge and Wordsworth.

  During these furtive first paddles into sleep, alpha waves crest our brain. We are on a cusp. As we pass the tide’s reach and wade into the eddies, a threshold swells and then bursts into a watershed (within our sleep cycle).

  Assuming we have not snapped back awake during those initial throes of somnolence, these currents are soon subsumed by much deeper theta and delta waves. These roll against the banks of our minds, crashing ever deeper, low in frequency but high in amplitude. As the waves carouse ashore, our eyes roll beneath their lids.

  Like sandy footprints during high tide, any impressions left behind by the day’s conscious state are washed away by this slow surge. The tideline retreats as those parts of our cortex that harbour emotional responses or social awareness are flooded. We cross the threshold of consciousness and are soon all at sea – freediving into the unknown – or, more simply, as an anaesthetist might say, we are ‘under’.

  Along the way, the sleep spindle will have pricked our brain’s electric charge. It spikes this state of mind; marking a new high-point in electro activity amid these phases, demarcating the peak of such initial cycles of shallow sleep. It lances only after our muscles have become comfortably numb. No wonder that the nomenclature in English for this transitional state of sleep oozes with a zoned-out, drowsy ease: ‘snooze’ and ‘doze’, ‘zizz’ and ‘zeez’.

  And so the brain continues waving – in every sense – while the body drowns.

  Extract from Speak, Memory

  by Vladimir Nabokov

  It was at night, however that the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens lived up to the magic of its name. From my bed under my brother’s bunk (Was he asleep? Was he there at all?), in the semidarkness of our compartment, I watched things, and parts of things, and shadows, and sections of shadows cautiously moving about and getting nowhere. The woodwork gently creaked and crackled. Near the door that led to the toilet, a dim garment on a peg and, higher up, the tassel of the blue, bivalved nightlight swung rhythmically. It was hard to correlate those halting approaches, that hooded stealth, with the headlong rush of the outside night, which I knew was rushing by, spark-streaked, illegible.

  I would put myself to sleep by the simple act of identifying myself with the engine driver. A sense of drowsy well-being invaded my veins as soon as I had everything nicely arranged – the carefree passengers in their rooms enjoying the ride I was giving them, smoking, exchanging knowing smiles, nodding, dozing; the waiters and cooks and train guards (whom I had to place somewhere) carousing in the diner; and myself, goggled and begrimed, peering out of the engine cab at the tapering track, at the ruby or emerald point in the black distance. And then, in my sleep, I would see something totally different – a glass marble rolling under a grand piano or a toy engine on its side with its wheels still working gamely.

  (1947)

  ★

  My wife, Salome, is half-Greek and, during summer, we vacate London and head for the Greek Islands. We have spent a lot of time in Hydra, an island a few hours’ ferry ride from Athens. Once there, we always head to our favourite restaurant, Xeri Elia – also known, to those in the know, as ‘Douskos’. We consider it ‘our place’, I suppose.

  The restaurant is not on the seafront. It takes a little finding, at first. You must walk the gleaming, brecciated limestone cobbles uphill from the harbour, through whitewashed narrow passageways, alongside donkeys humping hay bales (no motors are allowed in Hydra), under the beady gaze of street-corner alley cats, past the school-turned-open-air-cinema . . . and into a small square. There, tables radiate in a courtyard: spoked, like moonbeams, around an indomitable pine tree.

  The Douskos family has been serving food in this square for almost two hundred years. The fisherman’s catch, washed down with their homemade wine, is my recommendation. A ceiling of trellised wisteria provides welcome shade during lunchtime, but try to go when the moon begins to gleam, so that you can catch the loca
l musicians striking up.

  Of course, Douskos Taverna is not ‘our place’ any more than it was once local resident Leonard Cohen’s. Its charms, as timeless as a fixed star, are for everyone. Just like Cohen’s poetry and music.

  Dusko’s Taverna 1967

  by Leonard Cohen

  They are still singing down at Dusko’s,

  sitting under the ancient pine tree,

  in the deep night of fixed and falling stars.

  If you go to your window you can hear them.

  It is the end of someone’s wedding,

  or perhaps a boy is leaving on a boat in the morning.

  There is a place for you at the table,

  wine for you, and apples from the mainland,

  a space in the songs for your voice.

  Throw something on,

  and whoever it is you must tell

  that you are leaving,

  tell them, or take them, but hurry:

  they have sent for you—

  the call has come—

  they will not wait forever.

  They are not even waiting now.

  (2006)

  ★

  Harbour (from Running in the Family)

  by Michael Ondaatje

  I arrived in a plane but love the harbour. Dusk. And the turning on of electricity in ships, portholes of moon, the blue glide of a tug, the harbour road and its ship chandlers, soap makers, ice on bicycles, the hidden anonymous barber shops behind the pink dirt walls of Reclamation Street.

  One frail memory dragged up out of the past – going to the harbour to say goodbye to a sister or mother, dusk. For years I loved the song ‘Harbour Lights’, and later in my teens danced disgracefully with girls, humming ‘Sea of Heartbreak’.

  There is nothing wise about a harbour, but it is real life. It is as sincere as a Singapore cassette. Infinite waters cohabit with flotsam on this side of the breakwater and luxury liners and Maldive fishing vessels steam out to erase calm sea. Who was I saying goodbye to? Automatically as I travel on the tug with my brother-in-law, a pilot in the harbour, I sing, ‘The lights in the harbour don’t shine for me . . .’ but I love it here, skimming out into the night anonymous among the lazy commerce, my nieces dancing on the breakwater as they wait, the lovely swallowing of thick night as it carves around my brain, blunt, cleaning itself with nothing but this anonymity, with the magic word. Harbour. Lost ship. Chandler. Estuary.

  (1982)

  ★

  New Zealander Katherine Mansfield died aged just thirty-four.

  Told from the perspective of little Fenella, this tale of Mansfield’s shows life to be as transitory as sleep. We feel with and for Fenella. We cringe when she is embarrassed by her sad father. We look away too from Dad’s childish clinging to his mother, her grandma. Yet then it is our turn to cling on – to his lapels. We are not ready for him to go. For his part, her father hides his sadness and fumbles a goodbye, disappearing before we can know it, melding into a distant memory. The gangplank to familiarity is raised. The estuaries of Fenella’s young mind – wise yet immature – recede.

  This watershed journey is billeted as passage away from sadness. Yet life is but the briefest of dreams, over in a flash, like Fenella’s sleep (this apparent rapidity suggesting that the child, unsurprisingly under the circumstances, has accrued a severe sleep deficit amid her grief).

  Transit complete, the same gangplank is lowered through dawn mist, over a slumbering sea.

  ‘It’s land, Grandma.’

  The Voyage

  by Katherine Mansfield

  The Picton boat was due to leave at half past seven. It was a beautiful night, mild, starry, only when they got out of the cab and started to walk down the Old Wharf that jutted out into the harbour, a faint wind blowing off the water ruffled under Fenella’s hat, and she put up her hand to keep it on. It was dark on the Old Wharf, very dark; the wool sheds, the cattle trucks, the cranes standing up so high, the little squat railway engine, all seemed carved out of solid darkness. Here and there on a rounded wood-pile, that was like the stalk of a huge black mushroom, there hung a lantern, but it seemed afraid to unfurl its timid, quivering light in all that blackness; it burned softly, as if for itself.

  Fenella’s father pushed on with quick, nervous strides. Beside him her grandma bustled along in her crackling black ulster; they went so fast that she had now and again to give an undignified little skip to keep up with them. As well as her luggage strapped into a neat sausage, Fenella carried clasped to her grandma’s umbrella, and the handle, which was a swan’s head, kept giving her shoulder a sharp little peck as if it too wanted her to hurry . . . Men, their caps pulled down, their collars turned up, swung by; a few women all muffled scurried along; and one tiny boy, only his little black arms and legs showing out of a white woolly shawl, was jerked along angrily between his father and mother; he looked like a baby fly that had fallen into the cream.

  Then suddenly, so suddenly that Fenella and her grandma both leapt, there sounded from behind the largest wool shed, that had a trail of smoke hanging over it, Mia-oo-oo-O-O!

  ‘First whistle,’ said her father briefly, and at that moment they came in sight of the Picton boat. Lying beside the dark wharf, all strung, all beaded with round golden lights, the Picton boat looked as if she was more ready to sail among stars than out into the cold sea. People pressed along the gangway. First went her grandma, then her father, then Fenella. There was a high step down on to the deck, and an old sailor in a jersey standing by gave her his dry, hard hand. They were there; they stepped out of the way of the hurrying people, and standing under a little iron stairway that led to the upper deck they began to say good-bye.

  ‘There, Mother, there’s your luggage!’ said Fenella’s father, giving Grandma another strapped-up sausage.

  ‘Thank you, Frank.’

  ‘And you’ve got your cabin tickets safe?’

  ‘Yes, dear.’

  ‘And your other tickets?’

  Grandma felt for them inside her glove and showed him the tips.

  ‘That’s right.’

  He sounded stern, but Fenella, eagerly watching him, saw that he looked tired and sad. Mia-oo-oo-O-O! The second whistle blared just above their heads, and a voice like a cry shouted, ‘Any more for the gangway?’

  ‘You’ll give my love to Father,’ Fenella saw her father’s lips say. And her grandma, very agitated, answered, ‘Of course I will, dear. Go now. You’ll be left. Go now, Frank. Go now.’

  ‘It’s all right, Mother. I’ve got another three minutes.’ To her surprise Fenella saw her father take off his hat. He clasped Grandma in his arms and pressed her to him. ‘God bless you, Mother!’ she heard him say.

  And Grandma put her hand, with the black thread glove that was worn through on her ring finger, against his cheek, and she sobbed, ‘God bless you, my own brave son!’

  This was so awful that Fenella quickly turned her back on them, swallowed once, twice, and frowned terribly at a little green star on a mast head. But she had to turn round again; her father was going.

  ‘Good-bye, Fenella. Be a good girl.’ His cold wet moustache brushed her cheek. But Fenella caught the lapels of his coat.

  ‘How long am I going to stay?’ she whispered anxiously. He wouldn’t look at her. He shook her off gently, and gently said, ‘We’ll see about that. Here! Where’s your hand?’ He pressed something into her palm. ‘Here’s a shilling in case you should need it.’

  A shilling! She must be going away for ever! ‘Father!’ cried Fenella. But he was gone. He was the last off the ship. The sailors put their shoulders to the gangway. A huge coil of dark rope went flying through the air and fell ‘thump’ on the wharf. A bell rang; a whistle shrilled. Silently the dark wharf began to slip, to slide, to edge away from them. Fenella strained to see with all her might. ‘Was that Father turning round?’ – or waving? – or standing alone? – walking off by himself? The strip of water grew broader, darker. Now the Picton boat began
to swing round steady, pointing out to sea. It was no good looking any longer. There was nothing to be seen but a few lights, the face of the town clock hanging in the air, and more lights, little patches of them, on the dark hills.

  The freshening wind tugged at Fenella’s skirts; she went back to her grandma. To her relief Grandma seemed no longer sad. She had put the two sausages of luggage one on top of the other, and she was sitting on them, her hands folded, her head a little on one side. There was an intent, bright look on her face. Then Fenella saw that her lips were moving and guessed that she was praying. But the old woman gave her a bright nod as if to say that the prayer was nearly over. She unclasped her hands, sighed, clasped them again, bent forward, and at last gave herself a soft shake.

  ‘And now, child,’ she said, fingering the bow of her bonnet-strings, ‘I think we ought to see about our cabins. Keep close to me, and mind you don’t slip.’

  ‘Yes, Grandma!’

  ‘And be careful the umbrellas aren’t caught in the stair rail. I saw a beautiful umbrella broken in half like that on my way over.’

  ‘Yes, Grandma.’

  Dark figures of men lounged against the rails. In the glow of their pipes a nose shone out, or the peak of a cap, or a pair of surprised-looking eyebrows. Fenella glanced up. High in the air, a little figure, his hand thrust in his short jacket pockets, stood staring out to sea. The ship rocked ever so little, and she thought the stars rocked too. And now a pale steward in a linen coat, holding a tray high in the palm of his hand, stepped out of a lighted doorway and skimmed past them. They went through that doorway. Carefully over the high brass-bound step on to the rubber mat and then down such a terribly steep flight of stairs that Grandma had to put both feet on each step, and Fenella clutched the clammy brass rail and forgot all about the swan-necked umbrella.

  At the bottom Grandma stopped; Fenella was rather afraid she was going to pray again. But no, it was only to get out the cabin tickets. They were in the saloon. It was glaring bright and stifling; the air smelled of paint and burnt chop-bones and india-rubber. Fenella wished her grandma would go on, but the old woman was not to be hurried. An immense basket of ham sandwiches caught her eye. She went up to them and touched the top one delicately with her finger.