Pillow Talk

My colleague Camilla is one of those people who tends to be referred to as a good sport/good egg/brick/decent sort or whatever folk’s accolade of choice is, followed by a but which is not always vocalised, but always hangs in the air. 

     One of Camilla’s little ways is that though, generally, she isn’t remotely materialistic and looks genuinely mystified at the obsession with stuff, every so often she’ll get a gadget that she doesn’t know how she managed without, and Lord, do the rest of us know about it.

     I still remember the breadmaker. None of us really had the heart to tell her but the rolls she brought in always seemed to taste of yeast, and though yeast is undeniably a constituent of bread, unless it is unleavened, bread should taste of, well, bread. But it would have been like telling a soulful-eyed puppy that their new trick really is getting a bit tedious.

     Her latest one is the speaker pillow. “I don’t know how I managed without it!” she enthused. Now I’m not saying my own dialogue is necessary scintillating, but though I’m not a betting woman, I would put one on Camilla saying she didn’t know how she managed without it concerning the latest gadget. 

     I’ve seen them, of course, and often thought that the famous quote about Post-it-Notes applied, about being a solution looking for a problem. Not that the inventors of Post-It-Notes did too badly out of it. I can’t believe they’re really comfortable to lie on nor easy to tune, though Camilla is at pains to convince us otherwise.

     Or maybe I just can’t get excited because so far as I’m concerned, this is Old Hat. This is definitely in Stovepipe territory.

     I was one of those children who is generally not called either a difficult or an easy child. Not habitually. I was passably well-behaved, and a certain innate squeamishness I’ve not got rid off to this day stopped me being too messy, though I’ve never been all that tidy. I did quite well at school, and had reasonable table manners. 

     But I always had this resentful feeling that I wasn’t being taken seriously enough. That my compositions weren’t just good for my age but showed genius, and that I didn’t just have a nice little singing voice, but one that was positively angelic and moved old ladies to tears and made small boys forget their football practice because they much preferred to listen to me singing.

     I always saw myself as a natural leader. Not that I worked at anything involving what might be termed leadership skills. I simply had one of those charismatic personalities. 

     I’m making myself sound like an insufferable little Madam, and most of the time I really wasn’t that bad, but I concede that I could have been a tedious child, turning into a tedious teenager. 

     All I wanted was to be appreciated!

     “I wish you didn’t take yourself so ruddy seriously, Gwen,” my older brother Neil once (or probably more than once) said. “And that you’d get your head out of the clouds!” I hero-worshipped Neil a bit, though of course I didn’t let it show, not least because it would have intensely irritated him. He didn’t take himself seriously at all, and for all my devotion, I sometimes wished he was a bit more like the “nice” kind of Big Brother in my books. 

     Now that was unfair! My head WASN’T in the clouds. Unlike some of my classmates I didn’t fantasise about unicorns and dragons nor even (well, not much) about being famous. 

     I didn’t want to find a magic snowy wood beyond a wardrobe, nor mysterious little beings living under the floorboards and behind the wainscoating. I’m not saying I would have actually minded, but it wasn’t something I longed for. 

     What I longed for were comments that said more than this is a creditable effort but would have been better with more care and attention. 

     One thing I did know was that unlike medieval pilgrims going on quests (and I was not as interested in tales of the Middle Ages as some of my classmates were or I made out I was, at times) there was nothing deliberate or planned about finding the entry to other worlds and the magical among the mundane. You just found it, or perhaps more to the point, it found you, by accident that you only realised later might well have not been an accident at all.

     It had been a bad day. Oh, I don’t mean a horrible, unbearable day, even then I had some perspectives. I had lost nobody I loved, suffered no serious injury, not been bullied or had an argument with someone whose friendship meant a great deal to me. But there had been a tarnished chain of little indignities, of snippets of sarcasm, of not being appreciated. That word appreciated, so vital to me, had two layers of meaning, though they were interlinked. It meant both that my talents were overlooked (a poem of mine had been described by my English teacher as having good ideas but it’s too long and the subject isn’t original) and that I wasn’t shown a suitable amount of gratitude (I had offered to wash up Neil’s supper dishes so he could get to his soccer practice on time and he had merely said thanks, kid rather than telling me I was the best little sister in the world). 

     This is where I’m “supposed” to say I was in that faze state between sleep and wakefulness, but I wasn’t. I was weary, to be sure, but was perfectly wide awake when I heard the voice in my pillow, “Hello, Gwen! We’re so glad to have you join us!” Let me make this plain. It wasn’t some kind of ethereal whisper, it was a clear and normal speaking voice. “There’s nothing to be scared of.”

     “I’m not scared!” I replied.

     “It’s okay, we know you’re not. You’re brave. Look at how brave you were when you hurt yourself a couple of days ago.” Now THAT was more like it. I had stumbled and grazed my knee, and had borne the bathing and the application of the dressing with admirable fortitude. But the school nurse had just said, “Right, off you pop. Will be fine in a couple of days!” At home it had been no better. Neil had even said, “For pity’s sake, sis, it’s a grazed knee, so stop acting as if you’ve had open heart surgery without anaesthetic!”    I was beginning to reluctantly come to the conclusion that Neil simply wasn’t ideal big brother material. 

     “And that poem you wrote about the old lady picking the flowers, it was brilliant!”

     Though I now admit that perhaps I may have overdone my grazed knee heroics a little, I was brave. I wasn’t at all scared by the voice in the pillow. The speaker told me she was called Melanie, and that she was one of the pupils in the Night School and they wanted me to join the Night School. My only knowledge of Night School was the class that Mum went to to learn conversational French when I could have taught her for nothing even though Madame Lucas didn’t call me Formidable anything like as often as I’d have liked. She explained that there was some special equipment they had put in my pillow and it meant I could hear them and they could hear me. “I don’t know the science of it,” Melanie admitted, “Not really. But we don’t go in for science much here.” That suited me fine. I didn’t go in for science much either, nor maths.

     There were teachers at the Night School, but they called themselves Guides or Helpers, and were more like the wisest prefects in the best kind of storybook boarding school. We were on first name terms with them, and it sometimes seemed as if they were in awe of US. 

     But the Night School wasn’t some kind of airy-fairy ultra liberal establishment. We studied quite conventional subjects a lot of the time, like composition or French or music, and we got marks. My marks were always “A”s. And I was well and truly appreciated with comments both spoken and written (by me, but they dictated them) along the lines of This is such excellent work or I didn’t think you could improve, but you have. 

     Despite the helpers or guides reminding me a bit of prefects, there was no real hierarchy, but I did enjoy the feeling of being, as it’s said about the Prime Minister, First Among Equals. 

     My beautiful singing voice was praised too. I began to live for my Night School. Oh, I was careful. I was very careful. I kept the extra exercise books well hidden knowing that I couldn’t expect people like Mum and Dad and Neil to understand. They would make mock of it because they were jealous they had never been invited to join anything like the night school. I made sure that I had sufficient sleep not to seem drowsy or head-sagging or inattentive at home or school the next day, but I have always had a low sleep requirement anyway, and the hours awake and concentrating in the night never tired me. Rather they invigorated me and made me better able to face the annoyances and indignities of the day. I was also never even briefly tempted to write about the Night School when we were given a composition topic of My Secret World. I wrote some formulaic rubbish about a horse who was an imaginary friend, and it was quite well received, though I was careful to put it in the past tense so nobody jumped to the conclusion that I indulged in such infantile idiocy now. I thought that for once I had actually got an A in “Day School” but closer inspection and reading the comments revealed that it was actually an A minus and the minus was because I had used the phrase clattering canter too often. At Night School they told me not to worry about that and that some of the world’s greatest authors used a phrase that rung and resonated over and over and I was in very good company. So that was okay.

     I knew we all studied some different subjects because it was tailored to our strengths and our potential and to bringing out the best in us. My classmate Eileen, for instance, was good at maths, so she did work in maths, but had never learnt German before. She wanted to, though, and proudly told us she was doing beginners’ classes and catching up well.

     We were always encouraged to praise and share each others’ work, and Eileen was delighted when I heard her voice in the pillow telling me, “I didn’t realise I was coming on so well, Gwen! I was given one of the harder exercises today and I got an A off Johanna!”

     “That’s splendid, Mel,” I said, sincerely. She preceded to read her exercise out, and – well, I didn’t want to think there was anything at all amiss, and wondered if there were a bit of a fault in the speaker system (we were warned it could happen but assured it would be rapidly repaired) but knew deep down there wasn’t. One subject I undeniably WAS good at was German – we’d lived there for a while when Dad was in the forces, and I had relations there, too. I might find school lessons about the lives of the Schmidt family terminally tedious, but it was one of the few subjects where I generally did get good marks almost despite myself. And I certainly knew enough to know that Eileen’s exercise was full of errors. I didn’t blame her. She was still at the beginners’ stage; it was only natural. And I was all for a guide letting her down gently and saying there had been an error and it wasn’t Mel’s fault. But, again, almost despite myself, I had to face it. Every sentence had glaring mistakes in it. She mixed up her genders, she mixed up her cases, and had plainly not understood some things at all. There was something quite funny (and credit for her being imaginative!) about her thinking the Rathaus wasn’t the Town Hall but the Pest Disposal Headquarters (when it comes to some council workers I’ve known since she may not have been that wide of the mark, but that’s not the point!) but the fact remains it was wrong. 

     Well, it wasn’t like one of those moments when a traumatised toddler finds out the truth about the man with the beard on Christmas Eve (my own particular experience in that area came early thanks to Neil, though he always swore he never meant to) but the devious drip of doubt had begun to set in. 

    I don’t know if I lost interest in the Night School or if they lost interest in me.

     But something like that never quite goes away of course. And equally naturally it broke through out of the mist of sidelined memory when Camilla started going on about her ruddy pillow speaker.

     Well, early this morning, in the part of the morning that still seems like night, even when it is already light, I heard a voice that was not a whisper “Hello, Gwen! We were sorry you left us, but it happens sometimes. We can always get together again. You may as well admit it, it was that business about Melanie’s German exercise, wasn’t it?”

     “Partly,” I whispered, before reminding myself that I didn’t have to whisper. 

     “You don’t know the irony! She’s a senior lecturer in German at Durham University now. Still, that went a bit wrong. We got to the bottom of it and found out that Johanna was poorly and had got behind on her marking, and one of the others offered to do it, which was very kind, and she never got in any kind of trouble, but, well, she wasn’t quite up to it.”

     That was a perfectly rational explanation. There was no denying it. And after all, it if had been wholly my imagination, I thought, such things wouldn’t happen and it would all be perfect and nothing would ever go wrong or get mixed up. 

     Now that’s been cleared up I can be so much more magnanimous about Camilla’s speaker pillow. She really thinks it’s something. Bless!