To Bed In Air Raids

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 109, 1 February 1941, Page 15

To Bed In Air Raids

Even if with increasing years I had not gradually come to realize the pleasure of going to bed, these noisy air-raid nights would have converted me. For the first time in my life I have slept on a mattress on a scullery floor, and, after that, getting into a real bed is like lying down on roseleaves. One begins to understand why those wise men, the poets, have written so many pretty things about sleep. But to be blissful, it must be sleep in a real bed —sleep on springs. There is a special sweetness in sleep after a raid is past. Life is for the moment all clear. One- sinks to rest like a tired child in a cradle. The touch of the sheets is more than silken as one drifts into the paradise of unconsciousness.

I enjoyed such a sleep one night during the weekend when the village in which I was staying was bomhed for some unknown reason. In such an innocent, part of the world the sound of the first bomb was scarcely credible. Yet the drone of an aeroplane circling in the sky overhead suggested that somebody was looking for something or other. I see that it is denied that aeroplanes ever move in circles, but the local searchlight men say that they had to turn their instrument round and round, like a Spanish mule plodding round and round a well in the dry country, in order to follow the movements of the bomber overhead. I opened the door to look for the plane, but was forced back by a deluge of rain. Almost at that moment an explosion shook the house. Then another and another. “They're probably two miles away,” I said self-deceivingly, for a member of the Home Guard had told me that the blast from an explosion could blow a man down at two miles distance.

For an hour or so, there were no more explosions. Toward midnight -I turned on the wireless which was recording a reading by Miss Edith Evans in the “And So To Bed” series. She had hardly begun when a bomb seemed to whistle over the roof and exploded somewhere unpleasantly near. Then came a deafening explosion—well, not quite deafening—that set the house rocking on its feet and put out the lights for a spasm. That, I thought, could not be more than a quarter of a mile away. From the wireless came Miss Evans’s voice, saying: “Here is a recipe that, I think, will make you laugh.” How sane it sounded after the insanity of that man-made thunderclap! The house settled on its foundations again. Night noises ceased. And

the calm voice of the midnight announcer took their place. I had a “hunch” that everything was over for the night, and the peace of the bed was so delicious after that brief reign of pandemonium that sleep seemed all the sweeter for what had gone before.

Most of the villagers, too. must have enjoyed sound post-raid sleep, for most of them were in good fettle in the morning, when luckily they found that scarcely any damage had been done. Those to whom the bombs fell nearest were almost boastful. I found to my surprise that the bomb that had rocked the cottage had fallen at the top of the garden on the other side of the hedge just 30 yards from the house. Plunging into heavy clay, it. burst a water-main and flung up great sods of earth, leaving a well in the crater, but it did not even break a window in the cottage. A neighbour told me that he had been sitting on a couch when the explosion took place, and that he and the sofa bad been lifted two feet into the air like a mystic in a state of levitation. An old labourer who keeps seven cats and buys bars of chocolate for them said that all seven cats had leaped on his chest at the sound of the explosion. The farmhouse opposite had its chimney stack damaged by blast, and a cageful of budgerigars was blown open without injury to the birds. (Two of his canaries, however, died of shock.) His dog kennel was blown 12 yards along the ground, but the dog was unharmed. I could not have believed, without, strong evidence, that so many bombs could fall on a village, several of them close to houses or caravans, without so much as hurting a human being's little finger or that ordinary men, women and children should wake up so cheerful into the next day’s sunshine after so nerve-racking an experience. The small evacuees were playing football on the common with gusto. No want, of sleep showed on their faces. Great is the resilience of childhood.

Still I think that, when all these night noises are things of the past, millions of those who survive will be conscious as never before of the pleasure of going to bed under peaceful stars. Parents will bring up their children to look on bed, not as a place to which duty calls, but as something more desirable than sweetmeats. To be kept, up late will be regarded as a bitter punishment, like being kept in after school. And the princess on her feather-bed will no longer be plaintive but will at last be ecstatically happy.— “Y.Y.,” in “The New Statesman and Nation.”