Beds I Have Encountered.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 519, 30 July 1932, Page 17 (Supplement)

Beds I Have Encountered.

(Written tor the “Star” by RON A WHEELER.)

was once a bed that smote me to silence by its appearance while the coping with it smote me into extreme volubility till the dawn came, and I fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. It was up in the mountains north of Vienna near the Czechoslovakian border. Not one soul spoke English, and their German was of the mountain dialect type. I was wandering by myself complete with a German dictionary, a large map, and very little else. Ihe inn had* an old linden tree outside, and the walls of the courtyard were painted yellow. I convinced myself that the smell was merely a good healthy farm smell of pigs on one side, cows on the other, and fowls in the kitchen, so in I went to spend the night. The window of my room was long and thin, and had never been opened. There were double shutters inside and out, and nothing much else in the little dark room except the bed. And it was scarlet! It had been designed for somej body who was oft high and 6ft broad j and was practically square. On it were I | a lace pillow and one quilt—no more— | 'a flaming scarlet affair made of flahne; j jso neatly pieced together that cne j could hardly see the joining seams. ! The sheet underneath it was folded j | over the top, the sides and the bottom, j ! and buttoned on by large bone buttons, j

obviously deer-horn. And it was cut to fit the bed exactly, with not one spare inch to tuck in anywhere. My teeth chattered, large draught. l came in at the sides of the cheerful inadequacy, and I came to the con elusion that double shutters on win dows are sound schemes and should be encouraged. At intervals of one hour each I arose and tried to weigh down the quilt by means of various possessions, toweb or boots, other garments and safety pins. By morning I was almost fully dressed, and sneezing blindly. The back of my neck had parted with most of its skin on the frill of the lace pillow, and I had torn two of the buttonholes belonging to the large deer-horn buttons. Then I decided that the true reasor for the reputed German love of food is that he retires to bed in a hibernat ing spirit. He has to, otherwise his nightly unhappiness about his toes would cloud his entire life. There was another bed that con. pletely baffled me. It was in a jerrybuilt pension on the coast of Bel gium. I was shown up to my room by a completely rotund, amazinglv clean little Belgian whose nods and becks and wreathed smiles tried tc make up for the extreme paucity of our conversation. The bedstead was quite normal, with the usual type of fairly high wooden top, and not so high wooden foot—but there wasn’t any-thing to sleep under! jl felt that the bed had got bored with being a bed and decided to be a divan There was a most elegant mattress on it, a beautiful affair about Sin thick jand upholstered in bright blue with j drunken flowers embossed in a still brighter blue rioting about. Certainly they were buttoned down in the true mattress manner, but the design called for it. A large roly-poly bolster also done in blue lay across one end, but not a suggestion of bed clothes was tc be seen. Slowlv I undressed, eyeing the thing suspiciously. “ Perhaps you should go and asl> the woman,” suggested Reason. “ Don’t,’

“To Sleep—Perchance to Dream”

it said Tact, “ she can’t understand you, ic and will imagine an insult to her furniture.” And as I can think of nothing ts j worse than having an abusive fight in a il iforeign language with a Latin opponent n- I crawled into the lieu-of-bed and atn-! tempted to settle for the night under>e j neath the handsome blue embossed mattress. There was another mattress ■e j underneath, of the box variety, and v quite well sprung. I crept between the Is two. There were only three disadvany 'tages. It was in August, and during a y heat wave, and the mattress above me le was Sin thick. The second trouble was ;t the delightful and careless way the e thing balanced on me. Toes protruded, ie but what did it care as long as it went ;e up and down, up and down, gently in time with breathing. And the third n trial and tribulation was the extreme d precariousness of all well-balanced phenomena. A misguided twist on my part, or even an inadvertent yawn, sent the whole affair gently but none the less surely, thudding dully to the floor. It may have been the ninth time —and it may have been four in the morning. I found myself on the floor 1- with the mattress, and rising to apostron iphise it, a fold of white glimmered at v me in the half light from the foot of d the bed, tucked between the second o mattress and the wooden end. >f ! For aesthetic reasons, a bed is not a bed during the day. 1 felt it a h j little hard that the cult of beauty n !should be carried into the night as well, it | Thank Heaven for English beds! The ! I covers are turned down by invisible h j hands, the hot water bottles are always i !in exactly the right place, the shaded n lamp shines dully on the sheen of the. k eiderdown, and my hostess stores her h sheets in lavender. 11 There is nothing quite so lovely as y waking early in the coolness of an e English morning when the thrushes are d stirring in the plane trees outside, and o the whole of Surrey is quiet except it for them. A little tap at the door o brings in the maid with the inevitable shining can of hot water. A little g tug at the curtains and the thin sunlight leaps into the room. ;k “ Good morning miss. It’s a lovely day.”