Western Morning News (Saturday)
A good night’s sleep is truly a precious thing
IWAS in London recently and visited the Cabinet war rooms in Whitehall. It’s a honeycomb of passageways where high ranking cabinet members and military leaders spent a great deal of time during the Second World War. Staff lived underground in fairly grim conditions planning the war. Winston Churchill often slept there, as did his wife, on site for all the immediate decision makings of war.
The building is really interesting and it’s awe inspiring to see where the beating heart of the war was monitored.
Comfortable it wasn’t. Staff put up with living underground in smoke filled rooms, no windows, poor bathroom facilities and worked 24/7.
I was surprised at the lack of comfort. The beds, particularly, looked torturous. All small iron-framed singles, and I wondered, aside from the obvious concerns of war, if anyone got a wink of sleep. Even Winston and Clemmie had spartan narrow single beds with wafer thin mattresses.
How times have changed. Now, according to leading bed manufacturers, king size beds, which are six feet wide and seven foot long, are the most popular and account for 50% of their sales.
The reasoning behind the sales, they reckon, is that during lockdown couples all saw a lot more of each other and wanted to have a bit more space when they went to sleep. And people are taller and fatter today.
I doubt there’s a parent in the land who hasn’t woken in the night with a child’s foot in their face, or an elbow in their eye.
Having a larger bed gives us some hope of nocturnal peace. If it’s not a small child it’s often pets. Our black cat will find me at about 4am, maybe rain-soaked, and will snuggle up like a soaking busby, purring in my ear. It’s cue for the dog to jump on the bed too, never Hubs side, who wouldn’t tolerate it, but always on mine who will put up with it as a child substitute – sometimes.
On cold nights I’ve always fancied having a four poster, complete with curtains round to keep out drafts. Curtains weren’t the only thing to keep sleepers warm. Beds used to be built high to avoid the drafts and the higher they were, the warmer, as the hot air rose.
The saying “left on the shelf” was a cruel way of saying that a woman was past marrying age. It comes from when people slept on shelves, often over fireplaces.
And if someone tells you to “sleep tight” it’s not an invitation to drain the brandy.
Wealthy people in the mediaeval times slept on beds that had ropes underneath the mattress that would be tightened for comfort, and “sleeping tight” usually meant they were tensioned correctly. There’s a great example of such a bed at Cotehele, the National Trust property in Cornwall.
Beds started to evolve from bundles of straw back in the ancient Egyptian times.
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London exhibit what they reckon is one of their greatest treasures. It’s certainly big.
The Great Bed of Ware is probably the largest bed in the world – it’s over three metres wide!
Built in around 1590, the bed was most likely one of the earliest and most successful publicity stunts to advertise an Inn in Ware, in Hertfordshire.
Ware was a day’s journey from London and people would stop over on their way to Cambridge University,
On cold nights I’ve always fancied having a four poster, complete with curtains round to keep out drafts
so the inn thought they’d try and get people to stop with them. The bed is reckoned to accommodate at least four couples, though I’ve no idea if it ever did. It makes current large beds look a bit weedy though.
If someone carved their initials on my bed today I’d be more than fed up, but the vandals of the day in Ware thought nothing of either carving their names or applying red sealing wax to mark their night – and their work can still be seen today on what is an exceptionally beautiful bed. The decorative woodwork and canopy is rich and flamboyant – typical of the late-Elizabethan period.
The only huge bed I’ve slept on was in Austria halfway up a mountain.
Used by hikers and mountain rescue teams throughout the year, the whole of the top floor, accessible by a ladder, was one big mattress.
No place for jimjams here, you just slept in your clothes and hoped the person next to you didn’t snore too loudly and that you didn’t need to pick your way over bodies, down a wooden ladder and out of a creaking door to have a wee outside.
Sharing beds isn’t new. Families have put kids together for generations.
Interestingly, TV programmes were remarkably coy about showing couples in bed together. The first one to do so was the Lucille Ball show love Lucy, featuring her husband Desi Arnaz back in the ’60s.
I realise Winston Churchill wasn’t going to hunker down with Clemmie in a double bed in a bunker in wartime circumstances, but I’m still surprised that they had such a spartan existence when life, let alone the beds, was so hard.
I wonder if today’s politicians would be that tough…