AFTER THE GOODNIGHT MELODY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 11, 8 September 1939, Page 15

AFTER THE GOODNIGHT MELODY

A Discourse On Beds

(By

I. W.

DAVEY

| HE purpose of the "Goodnight Melody" is, I am told, to prepare body and mind for sleep. But I don’t believe it. The purpose is to prepare us for battle. To go to bed is not necessarily to sleep, as everybody knows who has lived long from home. Try going to sleep on a shakedown a foot shorter than your trunk; or through the wall from a Short-Wave artist! And those have not been my worst experiences. Now my bed at home was a bed of tried friendship. We knew each other. We sympathised with each other. We were what Crosse is to Blackwell, or what Gilbert is to Sullivan. What though the wire springs did sag somewhat? Merely a good hollow to curl up in. Yes. I remember that bed with regrets. I knew every lump in the mattress-and how to avoid them. That bed had six distinct notes with semi-tones, and once I managed to get it to play "Annie Laurie." But His Majesty the King, through the person of the Public Service Commissioner, decreed that I should leave my hereditary couch and adorn the bed of a boardinghouse. Beds in digs are never friendly. They are usually like landladies-pretty hard propositions. Sometimes they (the beds, of course), are like the curate’s egg, and life develops into a series of affairs of outposts; on one hand the landlady who acquires a genius for tying the softer spots into whorls of knots, and on the other hand the boarder who spends most ‘of the night trying to unravel them. And so it goes on. Almost like a game of chess, only the landlady usually manages to win the checkmate

unless, of course, the boarder marries her. I can’t say what the result would be in such a case, as I’ve never married a landlady. Another curiosity of this wellknown type of bed is that the same amount of bed-clothes keeps one warm in summer and in winter. A sheet (well patched) and a pair of blankets are all that one should need on the most rigorous winter’s night. At least, the landlady thinks so, and says so. "An extra blanket? Why! That’s positively the first time anyone has complained about the cold." Of course. The poor fellows are completely subdued. So it comes to pass that when the snow lies on the ground, and one awakes to the musical tinkle of ice being broken in the waterjug, pyjamas, those nice silk ones, in a glorious shade of crimson with purple dragons breathing fire over them, are cast hurriedly aside in favour of slacks and flannel shirts and pullovers and thick socks. Lucky is the person who is a tramper-for he sinks into his sleeping bag with that superior air of conscious pride seen elsewhere only on the faces of cats and successful politicians. I pass now to hospital bedsbut I do not linger on them. Assuredly not. The: recollections are too painful. At least they were painful until I was supplied with a bed ring. The curious thing about a bed ring is that it doesn’t ring. Thus it may easily be distinguished from Telephone or Engagement rings. Some hospital beds have the unfortunate habit of doubling up in various places most unexpectedly, which is naturally trying on the nervous system; but a firm will, and a few pithy, well-chosen remarks on the bed and its ancestors will usually ensure a night of uninterrupted repose,