Falling Asleep

It went on for years, but the worst of it was when I was eight. I know I was eight because I was given my first diary, and it was 1979, and I wrote in it in tiny letters about very superficial things. We were between houses, living temporarily at my grandparents’ holiday home in the Lake District waiting to move into a house in Kendal.

I say holiday home, that makes it sound like a chalet. It was a big old house, split into three the year before I was born; originally it would have had 12 bedrooms, I think; now each house has four. Victorian? I honestly don’t know. Granny’s part of the house had the master bedroom and the huge bathroom upstairs, and the dining room; but also the servants’ kitchen with iron hooks in the ceiling. The pantry became the kitchen, floor-to-ceiling cupboards with mice underneath them. The corridor floors were blue Lakeland slate, threadbare carpets that didn’t meet the walls, all the mismatched furniture that my great-aunt, who owned the building, didn’t want in the main part of the house.

I slept in a room with my mum’s sister, and after she died, it was mine and Nick’s bedroom. A laburnum tree grew right outside the window, fingers tapping on the panes in the night, even when there wasn’t a banshee wind. By the door a curtained corner shelf for hanging clothes from had a pile of games and ancient comics stacked up, and in my memory one of those blinking porcelain dolls, but perhaps I made that up. Or got rid of it.

Nick’s bed was a blue metal hospital bed that some family invalid must have finished with. Mine was wooden, and my pillow was a solid bolster. He was closer to the window. Anything evil coming through the window would get him first; if it came through the door, it would get me. I lay awake trying not to listen to the ticking in the walls, trying not to count the ticks. Trying not to hear owls calling, and not to count their calls. I prayed under the covers for protection from the unknown terrors of the night, kept my eyes tight shut because I was so scared of the depth of the dark.

It had to get really bad before I would dare put a cold foot to the floor, tiptoe with my eyes closed down twenty yards of corridor to the nearest light switch, pelt down the staircase, back along the cold slate floor to the sitting room at the front of the house. I can’t sleep.

Sent back to bed by annoyed parents. Switching off the lights and letting darkness close in behind me, or risking a telling-off for leaving them on; it was worth it. Checking there was nothing in my bed before I climbed in; hoping there was nothing under it. Pulling scratchy blankets back over my head and wishing for sleep, for daylight, for the safety and sanity of the morning.

I have never quite lost my fear of the night-time dark. Sitting with Bernard as he goes to sleep, I reflect on how mum tells me I was always such a good sleeper, when I think of myself as someone with a sleep problem. At least as far as I can remember, before pregnancy, before my sleep was demolished by having a baby, I have always had difficulty getting to sleep. Will I forget, one day, how hard he finds it to drop off?