DID YOU LIE IN BED LISTENING TO NOISES?

Its Saturday morning at Moonbase and all is quiet. The dog's asleep. The Missus has gone back to bed with a bad cold caught off the Grandson and I'm on the sofa staring at the bright blue sky. I would have been at work 1 and half hours already if it was a school day. Its great to do absolutely nowt.

On the sofa I can hear dull bumps and the odd thud from next door and maybe a car going past. I used to lie in bed as a nipper listening to these distant sounds on quiet mornings under the rayon bedspread. It was always impossible to say what the noises were for sure but I enjoyed listening to them, people going about their mornings, maybe my brother cleaning his motorbike and even snatches of fogged conversations next door. We always assume everyone does the same in every house but I was never sure really about our neighbours. 

As my childhood world was largely populated by monsters, at night I did sometimes imagine grisly stuff taking place next door, listening to the muffled voices, knocks and bangs. I conjured up dark misdeeds and foul play! Some chopping and hacking perhaps or even worse something slowly making its way through to our house and to my bedroom!

I did a lot of peering through the bedcovers as a kid. Being mad about monsters does have an effect before you become immune. It takes time. Like a vaccination. For ages I thought Dracula lived in my wardrobe in the wall. It was the door more than anything. Any other door besides the bedroom door was overtly mysterious and I stared at this second door for ages praying that it wouldn't open. I wouldn't mind, above my head was a huge six foot black and white poster of Karloff's Frankenstein stood next to a cellar .... door!

My worst imaginings in bed often involved a dinosaur or an escaped predator. A T.Rex would be slowly stomping down the street with the sole aim of peering through my window before taking me away for a snack! Possibly more frightening was the idea of a tiger or a lion loose and having found an open door downstairs it would pad up the staircase to my ..... bedroom door! I can almost hear those stealthy paws slowly taking the stairs and its cold nose nudging my door open! It must have been a deep-seated fear of mine, the escaped tiger, because its a dream I still have today 55 years later!

On a more pleasant note, I could also hear bells ringing from my bed. Preston, my home-town, was full of churches in the Sixties and early Seventies. Thousands of them and their bells peeled, it seemed, all day long. They would out-ring each other and some of those peels were loooooong and complicated. They always repeated themselves though, over and over until you knew the rings off by heart and you waited for the next note like a line in a pop song. 

Alas, on Sundays those same bells inexplicably compelled my Mum to get me up and drag me and my brothers to church for morning mass - Our Father, rock-hard pews, green baize money trays, homilies, confession, incense - the whole shabang. I hated those bells on Sunday mornings! Oddly enough, I miss it now, Mass, buts that's because I miss my old Mum I think, with her hat and her handbag and smell of Yardley, looking pleased as punch we were all in church.

And so, I'm still listening to distant noises even today. I'm still on the sofa slurping coffee doing it now. There's no bells at all now, ever. Someone's snoring in my house somewhere though. It could be the dog. It could be the Missus. I'll just have to keep quiet a while longer then. 

Its a hard life!

Did you lie in bed listening to the sounds around you readers?