Toast
“My bed is the thing I remember most clearly about the house, the feathery softness of the pillows, the thick stitching on the Witney blankets, the missing tufts on the yellow candlewick bedspread. Yet I never felt truly safe there, the way I should have.
Going to bed had always been fraught. I wanted to stay up a bit later, a request always refused, kindly but emphatically by Mum; impatiently, and with eyes ablaze, by my father. When I was in trouble over something, usually for being cheeky or ...thoughtless, my father would send me to bed with the stern warning: ‘I’ll be up later to give you a damn good hiding.’ I would snuggle down under the sheets, praying he would forget, twitching at every creak of the wooden floorboards in the hall, screwing up my eyes and burying my face at the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. I would lie there scrunched up in a ball under the sheets for an hour or more till I fell asleep. He would (almost) always forget.
After Mum died, going to bed was laced with a different horror.MoreLess
Going to bed had always been fraught. I wanted to stay up a bit later, a request always refused, kindly but emphatically by Mum; impatiently, and with eyes ablaze, by my father. When I was in trouble over something, usually for being cheeky or ...thoughtless, my father would send me to bed with the stern warning: ‘I’ll be up later to give you a damn good hiding.’ I would snuggle down under the sheets, praying he would forget, twitching at every creak of the wooden floorboards in the hall, screwing up my eyes and burying my face at the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. I would lie there scrunched up in a ball under the sheets for an hour or more till I fell asleep. He would (almost) always forget.
After Mum died, going to bed was laced with a different horror.MoreLess
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