Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  In summer, life at the farmhouse goes on outside, on the cramped little terrace; people eat there, sunbathe, read, or potter in the terraced garden beyond. But most of the time they simply stare out at the Apuan Alps, hypnotised by the shifting light, by the mist rising from the Serchio in the morning, by the clouds drifting across the peaks in the afternoon.

  This being Italy, it is not quite as peaceful as it sounds. The Italians are addicted to noise and they have a genius for making it. They like their motorbikes unsilenced and their car engines rorty, and the road in the valley below is the kind of temptation they can’t resist: a sporting series of sharp curves which gives them an excuse to play arias on their car horns and make their car tyres squeal. The sound bounces off the hillsides and rises, mingling with the hiss of the wind in the chestnuts and the dry clatter of the leaves of the walnut tree at the edge of the terrace. The din is just far enough away to be comforting, rather than irritating, a reminder that life goes on, despite indolence and isolation.

  Twenty years ago, the house had no electricity and a cable had to be strung up from the valley below to connect it to the grid. Not all the other houses were electrified at that time. There were still contadini on the mountain who got by with oil lamps and candles, and regulated their days by the sun: they got up at sunrise, worked until sunset, ate by lamplight, then went to bed. The contadini are dying off now, their children have gone up in the world and have mostly emigrated to the big towns – Lucca, Viareggio, Pisa, Florence – and the mountain is gradually emptying. But that primitive diurnal rhythm seems to be part of the place, and when I am there I fall into it without even trying.

  In northern cities, night is something you shut out. You switch on the lights, close the doors, draw the curtains and forget about it. But out in the country night is a presence to be reckoned with and its slow approach is a subtle pleasure. Twilight – particularly summer twilight – is always the best time of the day in Italy. In town, people come out on to the streets to enjoy the cool air and watch the passeggiata. Up on the mountain, there is no passeggiata, so the only thing to do is go out on to the terrace and watch the night fall.

  The weather begins to break in late August. The days remain hot and sticky, with a haze over the mountains and, every so often, a faint roll of thunder somewhere off to the north. But at sunset, the sky usually clears in the hills and the heat relents. The mountains are layers of blue, each layer shading imperceptibly into the next, and the air is full of feeding swifts, dipping and arching. Far above them, a single hawk glides lazily towards the Apuans, riding a thermal, not bothering to stir its wings. Traffic rasps in the valley. The last rays of the sun pick out the white façades and pink roofs of the houses in Barga and the honey-coloured cathedral floating above them. As the light thickens, the nearby trees seem to gather weight and greenness, and extra dimension.

  Every evening I wait for the critical moment when the swifts and the bats change guard: a brief stir and confusion, always expected yet always astonishing, a muted flurry of wings and small, high-pitched cries. Then the swifts regroup and vanish towards the Apennines with a rush of wingbeats. With their narrow heads and curved wings, swifts are perfect creatures, taut and precise and aerodynamically flawless, and they fly like acrobats on the trapeze, a sequence of graceful miracles. Compared with them, the flight of the bats is pure anarchy. They erupt from the darkening trees into what is left of the sunset, flickering, stuttering, impossible to predict. They seem to stop dead and go into reverse, dipping towards the house, then off somewhere else entirely. This is a chaos theory of flight, bewildering fractals instead of direction and purpose. Bats seem less like creatures of flesh and blood than emanations of the night, blobs of darkness, soft-edged; if you touched one, your hand might go right through it.

  By eight o’clock, the light is rosy mauve, deepening to purple. The moon swings up above the ridge opposite the farmhouse, pink-faced at first, as if vaguely embarrassed to be visible this early. It storms up the sky so fast that the earth seems to be tilting under your feet – five minutes from the first curved sliver of light to the full glowing disk. When it touches the outermost branches of the walnut, the tree seems to grow; its outlines become sharper and deeper; it acquires a new, commanding, nocturnal presence.

  Slowly, the lights come on across the valley: a line of four along the houses bordering the road at the foot of the mountain, a rising tangle marking the place where Barga climbs its hill, two strings of pearls slung across the villages on a distant Apuan foothill. Cars are points of light on the road below, white or red, coming or going. Night spreads its black skirts and settles slowly, almost formally.

  The stars come out, first one by one, then suddenly in their thousands. The Milky Way is a thick smudge of light, trailing back towards the Apennines, so bright that it seems artificial. Every so often, somebody cries, ‘Look, a shooting star!’ but no two people ever see the same star together. Instead, they watch the satellites, tiny points of light moving unnaturally fast from one horizon to another, and the winking red and green lights of the planes flying south to Rome. Occasionally, an intercontinental flight goes over high up, dragging behind it a grey-white, moon-lit con trail.

  By nine o’clock, the valley is studded with scattered lights, Barga Cathedral is floodlit a ghostly green, and even the local village church is illuminated by a yellowish spotlight. Twenty years ago, when not everyone was hooked up to the grid, people around here thought of electricity as an expensive luxury and used it sparingly. The nights were darker then and the valley was a great lake of blackness, its surface broken intermittently by pinpricks of light that seemed too inconsequential to survive. Year by year, the lake has begun to fill. But there are still broad stretches of darkness out there, night as it has always been in these parts, and blackest of all is the ridge opposite the farmhouse. It sweeps straight down from the high Apennines and has only two buildings on it, shepherds’ houses, both of them far back into the mountains, high up and out of sight. The rest is untouched forest – chestnut, scrub oak and fir – too steep and tangled for anyone to bother with, even in this part of the country, where every foot of usable earth is terraced and cultivated and has someone’s name on it. By day, the ridge is silent and forbidding; by night, it is a great slab of darkness, a night within the night, the real, true thing. It makes all attempts at illumination seem intrusive as well as pathetic, so in deference to the ridge and the night and the mosquitoes, when the household has dinner outside they keep the house lights off and eat by candlelight.

  People go to bed early in the Garfagnana and when the lights go out the night creatures emerge. One evening someone left scraps of food on the terrace table; in the morning they were gone and the white plastic tabletop was smudged by the paw marks of a fox. All this happened without a sound and there has been no trace of fox before or since. Yet the night is full of small noises, faint scrapings and rustlings, a strange unquiet, punctuated, every quarter of an hour, by the chime of the village clock. Whenever I am in the house, I have to share the mountainside with creatures I never see.

  Above all, I share it with a screech owl, an assiolo. It lives in the woods behind the house and every night, in the small house, it goes hunting for food. Screech owls screech and so does their prey, repeatedly and with increasing desperation, loud enough to wake me and sometimes, when the mayhem seems to be taking place right outside, to send me stumbling out of bed to the window. But even when the moon is full, there is never anything to be seen: no owl, no prey, just icy light and black shadows, the looming mass of the ridge and, beyond it, the few scattered street lights that stay on in Barga after the cathedral floodlights are switched off. The screech owl might be part of my dream-life, mysterious and insubstantial, except that I am always wide awake when I hear its sinister cry.

  There used to be doves at the house, plump, amiable creatures that strutted around the parking lot, made love incessantly, fussed over their chicks, and filled the days with pleasant cooing. Occas
ionally, they would take off all together and fly in formation over the valley, banking and gliding. With the sun on their white wings, they looked like a flight of angels. But the screech owl got them one by one, however carefully they were shut in at sunset, however often they were replaced. Finally, I gave up trying. I chopped up the dovecotes to use for kindling and left the night to the owl.

  I see now that the doves were a kind of wishful thinking, a city-boy’s gesture, well meant but essentially absurd, and based on the frivolous conviction that night and its creatures could be eliminated by turning on a light. And it seems right that I have never seen the screech owl. Shakespeare thought it was a bird of ill-omen, a ‘shrieking harbinger, Foul precursor of the fiend’. These days, it is probably just another timid endangered species. But that is not how it sounds when it goes about its business and I am glad I have never seen it. The screech owl is secret and predatory and it belongs to the other darkness, the darkness of death, the night that gets us all in the end, the night that no amount of electric light will ever illuminate.

  (1995)

  Anne Alvarez is a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist. Her books include, most recently, The Thinking Heart: Three Levels of Psychoanalytic Therapy with Disturbed Children. A book in her honour, Being Alive: Building on the Work of Anne Alvarez, was published in 2002. Her academic positions have included Visiting Professor at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society. She has been working and teaching at the Tavistock Clinic, London, for over fifty years.

  As eventide crashes its banks, our nocturnal routine commences.

  We encircle ourselves – whether in a nest or a duvet (which the Americans more aptly call a ‘comforter’). We find somewhere secure, be it the warren or the closed bedroom. We shut away the world, cocoon ourselves in darkness. The rabbit burrows. The sloth settles onto his arm-branch. The otter wraps herself in kelp or seaweed and floats, while the walrus digs his tusks into the ice. The seal may ready himself for sleep in the water, but will first ensure that one side of his brain (including his eye and flipper) remains fully awake, while the other retires. The dolphin, with similar ingenuity, will fall asleep while swimming, also allowing one half of its brain a break while the other keeps on the move. Reef fish dart into tiny gaps in the coral, at the same exact moment each day, their timing as precise as the speaking clock’s. The giraffe, who gets by on just two hours of sleep out of every twenty-four (as opposed to the blind mole rat who simply spends most of his life asleep), languidly curls her long neck around herself, tucking her head onto the ground. Just as we assume the foetal position or curl our body into a cosy question mark beneath the blanket.

  If we are smart and able, we will regulate the temperature of our nook, then luxuriate into a properly plump pillow and welcoming bed. We must first exert some self-control, so as to forego it and lapse into healthy, golden slumbers: we should ideally not have drunk coffee for a few hours, or alcohol; and, in this brightened day-glow age of tablets and such, we will not have looked at bright light sources (including the television) for an hour or more. Studies have shown that the blue light transmitted by smartphones and tablets is antithetical to what our eyes should be seeing prior to sleep.

  Once our surroundings have been neutralized, our brains can begin to prepare for sleep. We tread water before diving in. To humour those who are still clinging to their brightly lit devices, despite their now better judgement, this final slumberous passage between the waking day and a sleep state can be regarded as similar to logging off a computer or shutting down its hard drive. We need to defrag our conscious brain.

  To aid our children, we turn to a bedtime story. Much as our little ones cling to their cuddly bear, rabbit or lion, so might these age-old, matter-of-fact stories feature speaking animals. Using zoological effects, they can smuggle home truths into our children’s minds, and talking beasts are, ironically, probably more common in such fairy tales than fairies. Transmogrification allows for appealing archetypes, however surreal or absurdist. These allegories don’t merely provide quiet moral tuition, they also rehearse the brain for what dreams – with all their echoing surrealism and wonder – may imminently come.

  Marina Warner, a world authority on fairy tale and folklore, not to mention a masterful storyteller in her own right, has written that ‘a fairy tale keeps on the move between written and spoken versions and back again, between print and performance . . . [it] is as fluid as a conversation taking place over centuries.’ Scientists in Durham and Lisbon Universities have taken this argument further, using phylogenetic methods to show that this exchange in fact has taken place over millennia. They have claimed to trace, among others, Jack and the Beanstalk back to a group of tales originating more than 5,000 years ago. In this sense, these bedtime stories are in fact a wellspring of humanity itself.

  Other terms for ‘fairy tale’ include ‘magic tale’ and ‘wonder tale’. Perhaps these are better-fitting glass slippers for the genre, that impish world of ambiguity, enchantment and mischief that at times slinks into malice – just like the Land of Nod (as coined by Swift). This is J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis’ ‘secondary world’, as legitimate as our own primary universe. The ‘wonder story’ dreamscape is an imaginary hinterland, one that bridges our minds (and children’s more impressionable ones) into real reverie. Auden, discussing the ‘secondary world’ of the imagination, might as well have been exploring dream state when he wrote: ‘Every normal human being is interested in two kinds of world: the Primary, everyday, world which he knows through his sense, and a Secondary world or worlds which he not only can create in his imagination, but also cannot stop himself creating . . .’ The storyteller, if not overtly its narrator, is the voice of our imagination, coaxing us forward. Often in fairy tales it will be through the mouthpiece of a Mother Hen (just as our mums themselves related the tale to us before whispering good night, the nightlight aglow).

  A small tale before lights-out snugly completes the workaday narrative. It offers a distinct end-point to the day’s story and, as such, takes our mind ‘off things’. Storytime rounds out the routine. Soon sleep will no longer itself be dormant. We are ready to leave our shadow – along with one more day – behind. Bedtime is almost over. We have been lulled by a bye.

  Another Bedtime Story

  by A. E. Stallings

  One day you realize it. It doesn’t need to be said—

  Just as you turn the page – the end – and close the cover—

  All, all of the stories are about going to bed.

  Goldilocks snug upstairs, the toothy wolf instead

  Of grandmother tucked in the quilts, crooning closer, closer—

  One day you realize it. It hardly needs to be said:

  The snow-pale princess sleeps – the pillow under her head

  Of rose petals or crystal – and dreams of a lost lover—

  All, all of the stories are about going to bed;

  Even the one about witches and ovens and gingerbread

  In the dark heart of Europe – can children save each other?—

  You start to doubt it a little. It doesn’t need to be said.

  But I’ll say it, because it’s embedded in everything I’ve read,

  The tales that start with once and end with ever after,

  All, all of the stories are about going to bed.

  About coming to terms with the night, alleviating the dread

  Of laying the body down, of lying under the cover.

  That’s why our children resist it so. That’s why it mustn’t be said:

  All, all of the stories are about going to bed.

  (2012)

  ★

  From Peter Pan

  by J. M. Barrie

  It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for the next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you wou
ld see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind; and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.

  (1911)

  ★

  Lights Out

  by Hugo Williams

  We’re allowed to talk for ten minutes