I once worked in an old folks home where there was a man, Charlie, who took particular care drying his feet. Every morning, I got him out of the bath and sat him on his bed where he started on his big toe with a towel. I then went and had a cup of tea; when I returned Charlie would be just about finished the little toe on the other foot. Sixty years earlier, Charlie had been a teenager in the trenches on the Western Front.
‘I had two long years with wet feet,’ he said. ‘You know, it’s impossible to sleep with wet feet.’
Throughout the war, Charlie carried the watch his late father had given to him, which had stopped at 12.30.
‘The spring had broken but it reminded me of him. Besides, it doesn’t matter what time it is when you can’t sleep.’
He wrote home to his mother and mentioned the feet. It was the least horrific thing he could think to write. She wrote back telling him not to be so silly and to put on dry shoes and socks.
‘She had no idea,’ he said. ‘Thank God she had no idea.’
The nun in charge of the home was not keen on couples sleeping in the same bed, even if they had been married for fifty or sixty years. She thought by this stage of the game they should be over what she called ‘all that’ and needed to be getting ready for their appointment at the pearly gates, where unnecessary sex would be regarded very dimly indeed. Besides, she only had single beds, which were made of stainless steel and had handles so they could be cranked into suitable positions. One couple had packed a lifetime into two suitcases and three boxes and were leaving behind a mahogany bedstead which had come down through the family and on which the husband had been conceived more than eighty years before. A bed is not just a piece of furniture; people seldom feel the same way about refrigerators. The mahogany would, admittedly, have been out of keeping with the decor of the rest of the retirement facility. But it had a hook in the bedhead where Alan always hung his pants at night and his father had hung his before him. You can’t put a nail into stainless steel.
But there are nuns and then there are nuns.
I knew another nun who worked in a school. One of her final year students had been kicked out of home on her eighteenth birthday, three months before her big exams, because she had gone to the police about some of her mother’s boyfriend’s dealings. She was a courageous young woman. The school quietly pitched in and helped her find a flat and furniture. The nun, my friend, went with her student to the Brotherhood Bazaar where they could get the basics of life for a song and the nun was amused that furniture familiar from her childhood appeared so funky to the young woman. The young woman chose a demure single bed.
‘That’s not going to last you long,’ said the nun. ‘Get a double.’
The girl blushed chastely.
‘For Chrissake, you’re not going to live like a nun for the rest of your life, are you?
When I stopped working as a priest at the end of 2000, I went off to the Brotherhood Bazaar myself and, for the first time in my life, bought a mattress. Bedding in the order was always provided but had sometimes been procured from unusual situations: I lived in one community where the beds were leftover camp beds used by Australian officers during World War I. They belonged in a museum, really. There was an interesting selection available at the Brotherhood. One had been donated with the sheets and blankets still on it; I checked to be sure that the former owner had got out of it and found a T-shirt between the sheets. Another mattress had a label falling off it which said, ‘only new materials and European labour used in the manufacture of this mattress’; another had its springs visible, a step ahead of department stores, which only tell you about the insides of mattresses. Here you could see them for yourself. The inner spring is said to have been invented by one Heinrich Westphal in 1871. Not much is known about Westphal: sources say he died in poverty but don’t indicate how they found this out. Some of his prototypes were on display at the Brotherhood.
My budget had been restricted by the fact that, leaving the order, I had attended to other necessities first, such as buying a complete set of Dickens. The baggy mattress I eventually dragged out the door was a bit the worse for wear. It looked as if someone had been murdered on one side and someone else had given birth on the other. When Jenny entered the scene, its days were numbered. If the princess in the fairytale could feel a pea under twenty mattresses, Jenny could feel a bloodstain under the sheets, even if she couldn’t see it. There is an ascending order of acquisitions which indicate the growing seriousness of a relationship: new pyjamas, new sheets, new pillows, new mattress, new bed, new house. We were up to new mattress.
In due course, the mattress man arrived from Goulburn with a replacement and looked curiously at the stains on the old one.
‘Who died?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘The first wife, was it?’
He turned the beast over to get it out the door and noticed the underside.
‘And the second?’
These days, people don’t sell second-hand mattresses although they don’t seem to have such qualms about secondhand sheets, second-hand pyjamas or second-hand hot water bottles. People are fussy. The Royal Children’s Hospital looks down its nose at kids bringing their teddy bears because they spread germs. I guess they have a point, but whoever said that love was clean.
When the twins were little, an invitation arrived in the mail to come to a free dinner at the Goulburn Golf Club. It was hardly a summons to Buckingham Palace but we’d watched all our videos and Jenny needed a break from me. A firm was demonstrating mattresses and had a product so sophisticated that they needed the whole evening to show you how it worked.
A dozen of us assembled at the club and were sat in a reverent semi-circle around the mattress. We soon found that the sumptuous meal described in the glossy brochure was really the leg of a rubbery chook with a few soggy vegies. The man next to me was happy enough. His invitation had been forwarded to the local St Vincent de Paul hostel where he was staying until he could organise a place of his own.
‘The missus got the lot,’ he explained. ‘I let her keep everything. I mean, you can’t divide a mattress, can you?’
I’d never tried, although it was possible that the previous owner of my Brotherhood mattress had attempted to cut it in half with his partner still on it.
The demonstrator, an earnest young man with a head full of facts, was not starting with the price. When someone says, ‘I don’t want you to think about the price’, it’s hard to think about anything else. His mattress was a plain-looking object, quite unostentatious.
‘Perhaps it doesn’t look that way, but looks can be deceptive. Rest assured, this mattress represents the latest in science and technology.’
He may not have realised, but the demonstrator was standing against the tide of history. For most of the story of sleep, the efforts of bed builders have gone into appearances rather than anything else; this is strange because a bed does its best work in the dark. But beds have needed to fulfil both public and private purposes and where these have been in tension, the public seem to have taken precedence. When Tutankhamen’s tomb was opened in 1922, the discoverers were impressed by his range of beds, made from precious materials such as ivory, ebony and gold and featuring elaborate carvings of cats, included more for their sacredness than their sleepiness. Comfort is not such an important factor for the dead, whose backs are as bad as they are going to get. While alive, Henry VIII, a big bloke, had a bed that was over three metres square. He did have six wives but not all at once. The bed was more about making a statement to the underlings. Louis XIV of France had 413 beds. He had a big house with lots of mirrors.
On the other side of the ledger, innovators such as Mr Westphal, father of the inner spring, have thought about beds as places to sleep. The expression ‘sleep tight’ comes from a practice, developed in restoration England, of putting a mattress on a lattice of ropes which would then be pulled tight to provide both comfort and firmness and also to discourage unwanted visitors such as rodents. From this, we get the saying: Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite. In 1873, a couple of years after the inner spring was invented, one Neil Arnott designed a bed for use in hospitals where patients suffered bed sores. It was called a waterbed.
The demonstrator at the Goulburn Golf Club was only interested in one mattress. He emphasised again that we were not to be deceived by appearances. He wanted to know how long we had owned our respective mattresses and asked the chap next to me.
‘I don’t own a mattress,’ he replied.
‘Perhaps we can change that tonight. Let me tell the rest of you that you need to replace your mattress and pillows on a regular basis. Do you know that after twelve months, half the weight of your pillow is dust mites? And do you know that every night, you perspire one to one and a half litres of sweat? All that fluid goes mostly into your mattress. The skin you exfoliate in the night is eaten by bed bugs. The salt and water and toxins which you excrete through your skin also feed them.’
In fact, the common bed bug, Cimex lectularis, is a resilient little bugger. This is not the technical use of the word: the derivation of bugger has nothing to do with bugs; it comes from an old word for heretic. While we’re at it, the words palliasse and palliation also come from different places, not from any custom of putting the sick on bags of straw to die. Bed bugs like palliasses because they provide warm spaces to hide. Not that they need much room. A typical bed bug measures less than five millimetres across and is flat, making it apt to fit in the tiniest places. It would not be such a nuisance if it just ate waste, as the demonstrator implied, but it’s a little Dracula, sucking blood by night, injecting victims with both an anticoagulant and an anaesthetic when it does so. This means that you don’t feel the dreadful itch until well after the burglar has come and gone, often leaving the tap still running so you find blood spots on the mattress. Bed bugs are patient. They can remain dormant for eighteen months between feeds. Despite popular myth, they work across barriers of income and class. The introduction of steel beds led to a decrease in their prevalence, as did cotton sheets because they could be boiled. But pest-control experts are at a loss to explain why bed bugs have become so numerous once again over the last few years. They breed like bugs.
The demonstrator insisted that we need a new mattress every five years, otherwise there’d be no knowing what we were sleeping on.
‘Well,’ said a chap across the room, ‘I am eighty-five. I bought my bed in 1940. I reckon if it was going to be a problem I’d know by now.’
The demonstrator was undeterred. The mattress he was showing off was sanitised in such a way that it could be safely relied upon for twenty years. The man who was eighty-five said he wasn’t going to be around for that long.
The information kept coming at us. We heard that people have no sense of smell when they are asleep, one of the reasons that smoke alarms are so important.
‘I lose the sense of hearing too,’ said the 85-year-old. ‘I take out my hearing aid.’
Despite losing the sense of smell, aromatherapy can apparently still make a big difference when we are asleep. So the mattress came with a washable layer that was impregnated with a range of aromatic herbs, all of which worked together to create beautiful slumber: hay flower, hops, eucalyptus leaf, lavender, arnica flower, hyssop, male fern, lemon balm leaf, field horsetail, elder flower, mother of thyme, shepherd’s purse, white willow, nettle wart, rose, chamomile and milfoil. One after the other, we put our noses to the herb quilt and one after the other we said how much better it made us feel already.
‘I won’t bother,’ said the man of eighty-five. ‘I’ve got a cold. I couldn’t smell a shit in a florist.’
Finally, we had a chance to lie on the mattress for ourselves.
‘I only wish I’d brought me tablets,’ said one woman. ‘I’d be right for the night.’
More information: Skin increases in sensitivity at night. The sleeper is on average 1.5 centimetres shorter at night than during the day. The sleeper shifts position 150 times between getting into bed and getting out of it.
Somehow or other, the designers had taken all these facts into account.
Finally, a card was passed around with the prices. Sleep wasn’t coming cheap. The mattress ensemble was about $7,000. The herb quilt was an extra $700. But if you were skint you could just order a pillow for $300. The 85-year-old said that for those prices he’d want a woman to come with it. The chap beside me responded that he used to have a mattress but his wife went with that. He added that he’d be telling the other guys back at the hostel what he’d seen tonight because St Vincent de Paul needed to lift its game and get rid of its cheap rubber mattresses ‘and get something decent’.
In gratitude for our interest, we were given a parting gift. The demonstrator moved around, allowing us to choose from either herbal muscular cream or herbal woolwash. When he got to me, he asked if I had sleep apnoea.
‘Have you tried Buteyko?’ he asked.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a discipline for breathing. An ancient art. A practice. People who learn it can often fix their own problems with sleep apnoea.’
I hesitated. I had a machine to do my breathing for me.