We return yet again to the theme of sheets.

In her 1996 memoir Are You Somebody? Irishwoman Nuala O’Faolain, telling of her “packed,” “clamorous” childhood home, explains that sometimes her cousins slept there, too. “There were so many of us that there were beds on the landing and in a windowless box-room. The bedclothes were supplemented by coats. There were only torn pieces of sheet—enough to put under your chin, to soften the rough coats. I do remember my mother pausing to fix a strip of cotton under some sleeping child’s cheek.”

So see. Cold unforgiving slippy slidey polyester wouldn’t have been the same.


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