Mangan - Bedtime Stories for Stressed Out Adults

Bedtime Stories for

Stressed Out Adults

Introduced by

Lucy Mangan

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Introduction Lucy Mangan 2018

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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 978 1 473 69591 7

Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 473 69590 0

eBook ISBN 978 1 473 69589 4

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

Contents

O. Henry

Saki

Andrew Lang

Goethe, trans . Henry W. Longfellow

Oscar Wilde

Kate Chopin

E. Nesbit

Mildred Plew Meigs

Kenneth Grahame

Guy de Maupassant, trans . Albert McMaster et al .

Laura E. Richards

William Wordsworth

George & Weedon Grossmith

Andrew Lang

Katherine Mansfield

Christina Rossetti

Anton Chekhov, trans . Constance Garnett

Lewis Carroll

Virginia Woolf

T. Crofton Croker

Eugene Field

Edith Wharton

Johanna Spyri

Matthew Arnold

Leo Tolstoy, trans . Aylmer & Louise Maude

W. H. Hudson

L. M. Montgomery

William Blake

Richard Jefferies

D. H. Lawrence

Frances Hodgson Burnett

D. H. Lawrence

Nathaniel Hookes

Introduction by Lucy Mangan

Do you remember what it was like to read as a child? That blissful ease of total absorption in a book. The seamless slipping from reality to imagination. Sitting on the sofa as Cair Paravel, forgotten gardens, sea-bound Canadian provinces, bracken-filled moors, mysterious ruins, Minnesotan prairies and Swiss mountain ranges sprang up around you, and you accompanied red-haired heroines, loyal dogs, talking lions, ghosts, witches and children just like you but without the misfortune to be born in the dull here and duller now on their adventures until you were recalled to domesticity by the announcement of another mealtime, or bed.

I remember it well and would do much to recapture it. But not quite as much, perhaps, as I would do to recapture the similarly blissful ease of childhood sleep. I may have hated actually going to bed meal calls were fine but this I dreaded, for who knew what fun the grown-ups were going to have without me! but once I was there, the bountiful peace and warmth quickly overwhelmed me and I slipped as seamlessly as I had from Catford to Miss Cackles Academy from the waking world to the land of Morpheus.

Like most things in this life, the joy of sound sleep and immersive reading is wasted on the young. Its now, as adults that we really need all the restorative comforts they offer. Imagine a world in which you went to bed and... slept. Just... slept. Without lying there for an hour running through the days events perhaps updating the tally on your mental scorecard for personal success and failure (I subdivide mine into professional, domestic, maternal and daughterly categories for ease of access and more specific inner beratings; I am after all very busy. I dont have time for a scattergun approach to self-excoriation) and vowing to do better tomorrow. Without the need to plan the next days to-do list, map out a plan for the week and check it against the monthly planner in your mind (why dont you keep a notebook by the bed! screams your unforgiving inner critic, notching up another mark on the domestic failures board). Without running through the list of minor and major worries (from the ailing dishwasher, through to global warming and ending, always, on cancer) before finally falling asleep from sheer emotional exhaustion.

Imagine reading a book without a similar list of responsibilities crowding the words out of your brain, without a tide of anxiety pulling down the fictional world as fast as you try to build it.

This book is a small attempt to recreate these lost joys for as the title says stressed out adults, driven mad by the demands of home, family, work and the hopelessly porous boundary between all three. Which is floodlit, of course, by the cold blue light of the smartphone screen that somehow, despite our best efforts, seems to be the first thing we reach for in the morning and the last thing we scroll through why? Why do we do it to ourselves? Why?! at night. This collection of short stories (or nuggets mined from longer books because they similarly comprise a tale in miniature) and poems in this volume aim to dam for a little while the cross-currents of demand flowing endlessly through modern life and restore a little bit of peace to the end of our increasingly long and furious days.

Let the rhythms of the poems lull you (So shut your eyes while Mother sings / Of wonderful sights that be, / And you shall see the beautiful things / As you rock in the misty sea / Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three: / Wynken, / Blynken, / And Nod.) , let the rest carry you off in their different ways. The elemental power of a fairy tale like East of the Sun, West of the Moon works on all of us at a visceral level there are few worries and niggling irritations that can resist its insistent tug though my own great love will always be the allied genre of myth, here beautifully represented by Andrew Langs retelling of the most potent moment of them all; Arthurs revelation as the true born King, in The Drawing of the Sword . I would like to fall asleep every night hoping that the legend is true, and that he will come again to save us at our darkest hour. Which, metaphorically if not literally, by the way is four oclock in the morning, as anyone who has ever through bad luck, booze or newborn babe been awake at that time knows.

Or of course, there is the common route out of the daily grind for us all; retracing our childhood steps. Even if you cant read quite as a child again, you can get close by reading what you read as a child again. So herein lies E. Nesbits The Aunt and Amabel , whose disgraced young heroine goes through a wardrobe (and why not let this distract you with memories of other wardrobe-portals you have read, known and loved? It beats filling your mind with rage about the upcoming tube strike, need to make a costume for the next National Day of Needless Nonsense at school or inability of husbands to change the toilet roll) and finds both sympathy and redemption. Or you can revisit Heidi feasting on smoked meat and goats cheese with grandfather in his hut, accompany Anne of Green Gables and Diana on their trip to see an Exhibition in town and home again, or head for the hidden corners of Misselthwaite Manor with Mary and Dickon and let the magical peace of The Secret Garden work on you once more. With any luck, you will soon find yourself tumbling like Alice, who also makes an appearance here, down the rabbit hole of consciousness, though hopefully exiting into a less wildly energetic dreamscape than Lewis Carroll constructed for his girl.

If childhood is not a place to flee to, or pure escapism simply not your thing Bedtime Stories still has you covered. For grown-up fare and the adult comfort of a shared fate rather than a retreat, look to The Tiredness of Rosabel , as she replays the days events at the shop in which she works over in her mind, amending and improving as she goes before finally drifting off to what promises to be at least temporarily restorative sleep. Or let the abdication of responsibility and the fugue state into which the penurious protagonist and mother of four in A Pair of Silk Stockings descends induce the same in you for the few glorious minutes it takes to read her quietly subversive tale.