The trouble with going to bed early, is waking up early. And I mean early. Last night, I awoke with a start after a very intense dream involving walking in a tropical wood with Tracey-Ann Oberman and recounting a very long work tale to her while my brother, always about 12 in my dreams, fought with a friend in the canyon below.
Mrs F-C is currently plying her trade in Chicago, so all was still and quiet. I was wide awake. It was 1.12am. So I lay there, hearing every noise in the house magnified a thousand times. Then I became feverish. I had songs going round my head, alternating between the Pentangle's Wedding Song and then new single from Boyzone, which is insanely catchy. But then thoughts turn a little darker. The sound of a car: are they watching the house? Is there a nun with no face hiding just outside the bedroom door? Then I remembered a spooky story from my childhood that is, apparently, quite true.
My mum had an acquaintance called Mrs Glass. I only met her once when she came to visit me in hospital in 1974 (she worked there). Mum told when she'd gone, that one day a man knocked on Mrs Glass's door and told her to come quickly, her husband had dropped dead on the cricket pitch. She dashed up there, to see her husband in bat - who then promptly dropped dead right in front of her.
This story used to chill me, along with thinking about the accident black spot in Southampton we used to pass every day on our way to school. Just past Southern TV, just a bit by Bitterne Manor there was a triangular sign with a black dot in it that said 'accident black spot'. The neighbour who drove us to school told us a tale of a woman who was knocked down there. She wasn't badly hurt, and the driver knocked on a door and they took the woman into one of the houses there to rest up in while they called the doctor. She lay down on a sofa in the back room. But when the doctor came, she was nowhere to be seen. Brrrrr.
So in the dead of night, thinking of the person who died of TB in the bedroom next to ours, or the servant girl who was starved to death by the cruel lady of the house, or perhaps the young couple who lodged there in the 1960s who were found dead due to carbon monoxide poisoning, or the troubled teen who hanged himself from the stairs at the turn of the century, it's then quite easy to drop back off, mainly because all alone in the dead of night, it's too scary to stay awake.
Morning!
