I wake frequently at night.  It’s nothing new – I don’t think my depth of sleep ever recovered from the disturbance of having babies, while menopausal hot flushes have, more recently, put paid completely to long continuous stretches.  I don’t mind:  in fact I love the fact that, as I look at the clock and register the early hours, I realise I can turn to sleep once more. Caliban, when he waked ‘cried to dream again’.  For me, it’s not the dreaming – I’m rarely aware of my dreams:  I think I just enjoy sleeping.  One day is done and the demands of the next can be held at arm’s length a little longer.  The night-worries which can easily loom in the early hours and threaten to keep one awake are kept at bay by Audible, and headphones.  It needs to be a well-known book, because as soon as I get absorbed in it, sleep washes over  – sometimes I get stuck on the same chapter repeatedly, for days, so short is the time I manage to listen.  Because I usually listen only in short bursts, a little paradoxically it needs to be a long novel.  It needs to be at a slower pace, where the joy is in the detail.  Currently, it’s the wondrous Bleak House… and the interminable Jarndyce v Jarndyce legal case is inching towards collapse, and Lady Dedlock apprehends her approaching nemesis in the shape of Mr Tulkinghorn.

However, the other morning, as I woke for the second or third time, it was about 4.30am and dawn was breaking.  Much as I love being in bed, I forced myself out – and wondered, with apologetic admiration, how shift-workers cope with functioning then, as every cell in my body strained to return to rest.  I went through the sitting room in our small flat, and opened the doors on to our even smaller balcony.  It’s not a glamorous vista – a mainly brick and concrete courtyard, around which the block of flats is built on three sides,  no view apart from other windows, houses and flats.  But there is some greenery, and there are some trees.  And here, in east London, next to the Rotherhithe Tunnel and Commerical Road, next to the DLR and a mainline train line, the only sound in the otherwise silence was the dawn chorus in the clear air.  I can’t recognise any birdsong beyond a pigeon or an owl.  So I don’t know what I listened to.  I recognised patterns, as different individual birds repeated their varying calls.  I could listen to the interweaving of abrupt phrases and longer melodies.  Above all, the volume of it. Exquisite.  Precious.  Fleeting.

I don’t know what to do with this experience. The surrounding circumstances, and causes, are so bleak that admitting the pleasure of it also wakens guilt and the clamour of conflicting thoughts.  So I am just going to lay it gently down, here.  And, as always, find some refuge in other’s words.

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away … O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Everyone Sang by Siegfried Sassoon