6. Essay: Of Beds, Beasties, And Burglaries.
AN ORDINARY LIFE OF A SEVENTY-PERCENTER
Essay: Of Beds, Beasties, And Burglaries.
I said in my issue concerning my life at the Headmaster’s House that I would publish an Essay I wrote for our now-defunct SOUTHTOWN MAGAZINE on the subject of beds I experienced during my life but then I got sidetracked by the more topical subject of corruption in high places and published a short story about that instead. Here now is the Essay about beds before I carry on with my life story.
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Essay: Of Beds, Beasties, And Burglaries.
We normal human beings spend a full one-third of our lives on our beds, so I thought the subject deserves some attention. This direction of my thoughts was given more impetus when, reading through Genesis, that marvellous Book of Beginnings, I came to the bit where Jacob, fleeing from his brother Esau, sleeps out in the wild using a stone for a pillow. I assume that the rest of his body was spread out upon nothing but bare, hard ground, possibly rocky.
What a contrast to the luxury we know, but not too different, I suppose, from what he normally experienced when at home in his tent. And not too different from what my Zulu friends experienced when sleeping on mats on the hard earth-floor of their huts. I imagine it is a matter of what we are used to.
Coming back to Jacob, he must also have slept warily expecting at any moment to be eaten by wild animals, for such was the territory through which he wandered. That’s where my story begins. It was in my fourteenth or fifteenth year. I lived alone with my father in a house on the outskirts of a village in Natal — if one can call a place a village when it consists of a railway station, a trading store, a butcher’s shop, and a few houses for the people who run those institutions. The house we lived in — rented from the farmer who owned all the properties in the village — was a distance away from the other houses, on the edge of wattle plantations that stretched for miles and miles in every direction.
My bed was one of those iron beds with wire in a diamond-mesh design, attached to the metal frame by means of several stout coil springs, to support the mattress. The mattress was stuffed with coir which gave a neither hard nor soft platform for the body. The whole structure sank in the centre so that your body nestled like a pea in it’s pod. As the bed was old, the pod was permanent and there was only one position you could occupy when sleeping – sort of like in a hammock. It was not uncomfortable, but that may be because I had had no experience of anything different.
My bedroom had a large sash window of the genuine type in which the upper and lower halves slide freely up and down. That way it could be opened at the top or at the bottom, or a bit both ends. The norm was to have it open a bit at the top, but I was at the brave age, so I slept with mine open at the bottom.
This was a bit scary because in those days there was still the occasional leopard shot on farms in the district, and there were the many fearful dangers that lurk in the child’s imagination — dangers from unknown legendary beasts and from witchdoctors who needed human body parts for muti — all hiding away in the plantations!
At first my bed was in the middle of the room, so I could huddle under the blankets with an eye on the open window until I fell asleep, though what I would have done had I seen a leopard leaping through the window at me, I do not know! When I got used to braving all those possibilities, I moved the bed to a position under the window. If the leopard jumped in, it would land straight on top of me!
Then I became bolder and moved my bed onto the verandah, below my open window, where I was completely exposed to all hazards — including the cold of winter with only one woollen blanket to cuddle under. Sleeping out there was magical. I could look out at the stars which were brighter than anything you can ever see in and near cities where the night is polluted by a blaze of electric lights. The silence was profound, so that every slightest sound became a cause for alarm. At worst it would be a field mouse scurrying through the long grass, which had been allowed to grow right to the edge of the verandah, but it could also be the leopard coming for a midnight snack, or the witchdoctor creeping up for some new medicine! In the midst of the adrenaline rush, I would fall asleep, and sleep soundly until I would be awakened by my father calling from inside my bedroom window, ‘Are you ready for a cup of tea?’
After a while, the adrenaline no longer rushed through my veins; the test was over, and I moved my bed back into the middle of the room and slept once more with the top window open a little.
The next iron bed that figures in my story was encountered in a Boarding Establishment in Johannesburg in the 1950′s. My room was in the annexe with a window opening directly onto the pavement. That bed sticks out for three reasons: winter cold, bedbugs and ‘burglars’.
The winters in Johannesburg are colder than in Natal, and again I was supplied with only one blanket. I was tougher in those days, but soon I found myself shivering through the nights. It was then that I discovered — or invented? – the trick of placing the day’s newspaper between the sheet and the blanket. It worked amazingly well, and became a trick that Dorothy and I used in our ‘poor’ days.
That problem solved, along came the dangerous beasties — bedbugs! I had never heard of the creatures before, so when I started scratching at night and getting up in the morning with the crazy itchy bumps on arms and legs, I was puzzled. Then there was the peculiar smell that accompanies the beasts – sort of mustardy, spicey smell. I examined the bed thouroughly a couple of times but only saw the beasts one night when I acted fast in jumping out of bed, turning the light on, throwing the blankets back — and there were the little brown horrors scurrying to hide under the mattress. I spent the next half-hour hunting and destroying denizens of the night! Unfortunately, I had no final solution to the problem as the landlady wasn’t prepared to believe that there was anything unsavoury about her accommodation. I had to stage periodic night-forays to seek and destroy the enemy for the rest of my stay in that deluxe establishment. The worst part of the experience is the feelings of guilt, of being dirty for even harbouring such creatures in your bed. By some coincidence, after I started writing this piece, I read in New Scientist magazine that no one has ever been known to contract any disease from a bedbug bite! They are squeaky-clean apart from the itch.
Then came the final onslaught on the day I left Johannesburg. In my possession was a precious manuscript of a play written by a friend of mine which he had wanted me to read before I left. I went to breakfast leaving the manuscript on the bed ready to take back to my friend. The bed was directly under the window which I left open as always because it was protected by a wire-mesh screen. When I came back to the room, everything was as I had left it except that the manuscript was no longer on the bed. The house-servant had been in to clean the room, but he knew nothing of the missing document. In the end I had to assume that some opportunistic thief, passing by on the pavement, had spotted the document and filched it through the space left below the mesh to accommodate the stay for the window. The manuscript would have been of no value to him, but to my friend it was irreplaceable because that was a time before photocopiers, so unless one did all the typing with carbon paper between sheets of paper, there was only the one original. It was truly one of the sad days of my life, to have to tell my friend that I had lost his manuscript.
The next memorable bed in my history was a folding camp stretcher upon which Dorothy and I spent the first few months of our married life in a small room in an outbuilding. There some enterprising thief passed a pole through the open window, over us as we slept, to steal my trousers off the chair where they were left overnight. My motorbike keys were in the pocket ….. but that is another story.
… js.
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