As he approached his fourth birthday, we decided it was time for our Benedict to start making his own bed. All we wanted him to do was to pull up his blankets and put his pyjamas under his pillow. We soon lightened up on the second requirement as the pillow was needed to shelter all the little toys which Benny took with him on the journey to the Land of Nod, so there wasn’t much room left for pyjamas. We concentrated instead on getting him to arrange the doona neatly. He was resistant to the idea.
‘If God made the world,’ he asked, ‘why can’t he make my bed?’
It’s not a bad question. I wish I knew the answer.
‘God made the world so you’d have a place to make your bed,’ I ventured, not really sure of my theological footing but relieved that Benny was at least prepared to think about what I’d said.
‘So why does Mummy make your bed?’ he asked.
Bed-making is one of our culture’s more curious forms of behaviour. I suppose that just as we need reassuring rituals to get us into bed, so too do we need them to get us out of it again. Making the bed is a way of putting the world in order at the start of another day. It is a comforting work of fiction. In a few minutes you can impose order and regularity on the tangle of sheets and blankets that represent the third of your life over which you have least control, the hours you’ve spent in the Land of Nod, a country whose name sounds like a children’s pet name. In fact, the Land of Nod was the place to which Cain, the Bible’s first but by no means last murderer, was exiled after he’d killed his brother, Abel. His punishment was never to belong anywhere. The word nod means ‘wanderings’, an evocative description of sleep.
I thought that perhaps our Benny needed the firm hand of Florence Nightingale, a demon for making beds. She was the mother of that fine innovation in the deployment of bed linen, the hospital corner. She wrote: ‘a true nurse will always make her patient’s bed carefully herself.’
But a four-year-old is too young for Miss Nightingale. We simply tried to explain that a new day was a wonderful thing containing lots to look forward to and making your bed was a way of getting ready for it.
That night, Benny appeared between us in our bed. I looked across to the clock radio. It was 2.06 am.
‘Benny,’ I said as mildly as possible. ‘It’s nice to see you but you have your own bed so why don’t you go back there.’
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I’ve already made it.’
Not long afterwards, we read about the International Exhibition of Inventions, in Geneva, where an Italian engineer called Enrico Berruti exhibited a machine which he had been working on for ages. It was a bed which made itself, including straightening the duvet and tightening the undersheet. Berruti had devoted years to saving a few minutes. We thought he’d get along fine with our Benny.