‘Help!’ I scream, clawing at the bedside lamp, ‘I can hear something snuffling at my pillow! ‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ grumbles my husband sleepily, ‘It’s only my sinuses.’
Downstairs in the garage, which lies directly below our bedroom, the deep freeze is going ‘jub-jub-jub-jub’, punctuated sometimes by great bursts of ‘judder-judder-judder-judder’.
Outside in the middle of the road, late-night cars are crashing over large metal sheets put down by the men from the gas board. For weeks now they’ve been digging our road up looking for something. I do hope they find it soon before the traffic starts piling up in all the many holes and trenches right outside our door. But for now they cover up their excavations with these echoing metal plates and my nights are punctuated by ‘ger-bonga-bonga-bonga-clank’.
I suppose I shall just have to learn to sleep through all these strange sounds, but it isn’t easy. Ah well, at least my husband is there beside me even if he does add to the nightly symphony with his noisy nose. It is far worse when he’s away because then the house seems to be full of even more things that go bump in the night. Not only do they go bump. For a start, there’s our dining room table which suddenly goes ‘cra-a-ack’ just as I’m drifting off to sleep. People keep telling me that it’s something to do with the central heating cooling down and the table getting colder and contracting. Well all I can say is why doesn’t it make do with a quiet little shiver like the rest of us?
Meanwhile the pipes in our bedroom start up a high-pitched gurgling. They shouldn’t because the heating goes off at bedtime. Or at least it does throughout the rest of the house. But for some mysterious reason, our bedroom radiator waits until midnight and then gets hotter and hotter and noisier and noisier until, what with the gurgling on one side and the snuffling on the other, it’s no wonder that my nights are filled with nervous nightmares. My husband is sweet about my nightmares. ‘Poor girl,’ he says when I tell him about them next morning, ‘How rotten for you. You just wake me up dear if you get any more.’
So next time foul fiends start flapping noisily through my dreams, I tap my spouse on the arm and tell him so. Whereupon he leaps into the air, flails around among the bedclothes and shouts, ‘WHASSAT? WHASSAMAT-TER? WHAT DO YOU WANT TO WAKE ME UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT FOR? CAN’T A MAN GET A DECENT NIGHT’S SLEEP AROUND HERE?’ He then sinks straight back into a deep, peaceful slumber and has forgotten the entire incident by morning. Never mind, if there had been any foul fiends lurking about, I should think all that shouting must have frightened them back to wherever they came from!
At least his reaction is better than some. I know one poor soul whose shopkeeper husband once sat bolt-upright in bed – still fast asleep – punched her firmly in the eye and said, ‘That’ll be sixty-four pence please madam!’
At least my husband did try to do something about the creaking boards outside our bedroom door. ‘I know just how to deal with creaky floors,’ he said one keen evening. Whereupon he proceeded to drive two four-inch nails right down through the boards and, it just so happens, through the main hot water pipe as well. ‘Swoosh,’ went this great fountain of boiling hot water. Oh that was an evening!
Pets too can add their share of nocturnal disturbances. I have one tired-looking friend whose dog has a liver complaint which requires ‘walkies’ at regular intervals throughout the night. ‘I wouldn’t mind getting up so much if he’d just pop out into the garden while I waited at the kitchen door,’ she sighed, “But he’s not having any of that. No, he wants company, and a nice, long, moonlit stroll across the playing fields. Sometimes he even brings his ball!’
I certainly sympathise with her because Henry, our terrible tabby cat, has long since suffered from a similar midnight madness of his own. In fact he spends most of his time these days thudding against doors and windows in an effort to be let in, and out, and in again.
Unfortunately our house isn’t suitable to accommodate a cat-flap so we have had a carpenter build him a dear little draught-proof box, complete with cosy fitted carpet, just outside the French windows. The idea is that on cold nights he stays indoors with us but on warm, summer, mouse-hunting nights he can curl up snugly in his box until we let him in. Well that’s the general idea. Needless to say, Henry never ever goes anywhere near his box except sometimes to jump up on top of it and from there to throw himself even higher at the windows, loudly crying to be let in immediately.
If on the other hand we try to keep him indoors overnight he wakes us up at regular intervals with his own clever impersonation of Fred Astaire doing a noisy tap dance all along the landing.
So one way and another things don’t just go bump in the night down our way. No, in our house they frequently go snuffle, jub-jub, clank, gurgle, shout, creak, swoosh, thud, miaow, tappety-tap as well.