There were generally four of us in the bedroom, and a beastly place it was, with the defiled impermanent look of rooms that are not serving their rightful purpose … The room had been turned into a bedroom by thrusting four squalid beds in among this other wreckage … All the windows were kept tight shut, with a red sandbag jammed in the bottom, and in the morning the room stank like a ferret’s cage. You did not notice it when you got up, but if you went out of the room and came back, the smell hit you in the face with a smack. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
I could see him groping his way to the bed the tablet of soap in his right hand. ‘Now!’ John ordered. I switched on the light, and at the same moment he hitched back the covers from the bed and made several lightning dabs with the soap, moving it from place to place on the mattress as if making a feverish move in Draughts. I watched, fascinated and horrified, while Toby stood at my elbow, holding the rug in his arms. John straightened up and examined the under surface of the soap. Then he showed it to us. It had four small black corpses embedded in it. John was delighted with himself, and crowed like a child.
‘We got ’em! We got ’em!’ Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room
They felt the loss of the bedclothes more than anything else, for although all the clothes they wore during the day, and all the old clothes and dresses in the house and even an old coloured table cloth, were put on the beds at night, they did not compensate for the blankets, and they were often unable to sleep on account of the intense cold. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
England should literally put Algeria to bed. Andy Townsend
7I was just trying to get you into bed, Lauren, which was a waste of time. We Still Kill the Old Way 2014 starring Ian Ogilvy & Alison Doody & Danny Boy Hatchard & Chris Ellison & Lysette Anthony & Tony Denham & Red Madrell & Nicky Henson & Stephen Berkoff & Danni Dyer & Adele Silva & James Cosmo et al, director Sacha Bennett
— My brother Toby, quoth she, is going to be married to Mrs Wadman.
— Then he will never, quoth my father, be able to lie diagonally in his bed again as long as he lives. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
You’re useless in the kitchen. Why don’t you go back to bed? Funeral in Berlin 1966 starring Michael Caine & Paul Hubschmid & Oskar Homolka & Eva Renzi & Guy Doleman & Hugh Burden & Heinz Schubert & Wolfgang Volz & Thomas Holtzmann & Sarah Brackett et al, director Guy Hamilton, Palmer to bird