A calming bedtime story to help you fall asleep — the complete, unabridged short story In the Orchard by Virginia Woolf, narrated slowly and softly for anyone lying awake with insomnia, anxiety or a racing mind in the small hours.
It is under nine minutes, and it is one of the most purely beautiful things Woolf ever wrote — a piece about the layers of sound and light moving over a sleeping person who notices none of it. Which makes it, more than almost any story we have read, exactly the right shape for a wakeful night. There is no plot to hold on to, nothing to solve, and each of the three tellings ends in the same place, with the same small cry: oh, I shall be late for tea.
If you have a short window before sleep, or want something gentle after a longer reading, this is the one. Perfect for anyone who finds classic literature and short audiobooks more restful than silence. If you drift off in the first few minutes, that is exactly what this reading is for.
The story
Transcribed from the audio, so the odd word may be off. Tap any line while it plays to keep the words in step with Martin's voice.
Books at bed time by calming anxiety in the orchard by Virginia Woolf. Miranda slept in the orchard, lying in a long chair beneath the apple tree. A book that fallen onto the grass and her fingers still seemed to point at the sentence. This country is truly one of the corners of the world where the laughter of girls burst out best.
As if she had fallen asleep just there. The opals on her fingers flushed green, flushed rosy, and again flushed orange as the sun oozing through the tapultries filled them. Then when the breeze blew, the purple trerex rippled like a flower attached to a stalk. The grass is nodded and the white butterfly came blowing this way and that just above her face.
Four feet in the air over her head the apples hung. Suddenly, there was a shrill clamor as if there were gongs of cracked brass beaten violently irregularly and brutally. It was only the school children saying the multiplication table in unison stopped by the teacher, scolded and beginning to say the multiplication table over again. But this clamor passed four feet above Miranda's head, went through the apple bow and striking against the cowman's little boy who was picking blackberries in the hedge when he should have been at school, made him tear his thumb and the thorns.
Next, there was a solitary cry, sad, human, brutal. Old parsley was indeed blind drunk. Then the very topmost leaves of the apple tree, flat, like little fish against the blue, 30 feet above the earth, chimed with a pensive and a gulbrius note. The organ in the church, playing one of the hymns ancient and modern, the sound floated out and was cut into atoms by a flock of field fairs flying at an enormous speed somewhere or other.
Miranda lay asleep, 30 feet beneath. Then above the apple tree and the pear tree, 200 feet above Miranda, lying asleep in the orchard bells thudded, intermittent, sullen, didactic, for six poor women of the parish were being churched and the rector was returning thanks to heaven. And above that, with a sharp squeak, the golden feather of the church tower turned from south to east, the wind chained, above everything else it droned, above the woods, the meadows, the hill, miles above Miranda, lying in the orchard asleep. It swept on, eyeless, brainless, meeting nothing that could stand against it until, wheeling the other way, it turned south again.
Miles below, in a space as big as the eye of a needle, Miranda stood upright and cried aloud, "Oh, I shall be late for tea." Miranda slept in the orchard, or perhaps she was not asleep, for her lips moved very slightly as if they were saying, "This country is truly one of the corners of the world where the laughter of girls bursts out the bed, the bed." And then she smiled, and let her body sink all its weight onto the enormous earth which rises, she thought, to carry me on its back as if I were a leaf, or a queen. Here the children said to multiplication, haven't, or Miranda went on, "I might be lying on the top of a cliff with the girls screaming above me."
The higher they fly, she continued, as the teacher scolded the children and wrapped Jimmy over the knuckles till they bled, the deeper they look into the sea, into the sea she repeated, and her fingers relaxed, and her lips closed gently as if she were floating on the sea, and then, when the shout the drunken man sounded overhead, she drew breath with an extraordinary ecstasy, for she thought that she heard life itself crying out from a rogue tongue in a scarlet mouth, from the wind, from the bells, from the curved green leaves of the cabbages. Naturally, she was being married when the organ played the tune from him's ancient and "When the bells rang, after the six poor women had been churched, the sullen, intermittent third, made her think that the very earth shook with the hoops of the hall that was galloping towards her. I have only to wait," she sighed, and it seemed to her that everything had already begun moving, crying, riding, flying around her, across her, towards her in a pattern.
Mary is chopping the word she thought. Pierreman is herding the cows. The carts are coming up from the meadows, the rider, and she traced out the lines at the men, the carts, the birds, and the rider made over the countryside. Until they all seem driven out, round and across by the beat of her own heart.
Miles up in the air, the wind changed, the golden feather of the church tower squeaked, a Miranda jumped up and cried, "Why shall be late for tea?" Miranda slept in the orchard, or was she asleep or was she not asleep? A purple dress stretched between the two apple trees. There were twenty-four apple trees in the orchard, some slanting slightly, others growing straight, with a rush up the trunk which spread wide into the branches, and formed into round, red, or yellow drops.
The white chapel tree had sufficient space, the sky exactly fitted the leaves. When the breeze blew, the line of the boughs against the wall slanted slightly and then returned, a wagtail flew diagonally from one corner to another, cautiously hopping, a thrush advanced towards a fallen apple from the other wall a sparrow fluttered just above the grass. The upbrush of the trees was tied down by these movements, the hole was compacted by the orchard walls. For Miles beneath the earth was clamped together, rippled on the surface with wavering air and across the corner of the orchard, the blue green was slit by a purple tree.
The wind changing, one bunch of apples was tossed so high that it blotted out two cows in the meadow, or I shall be late for tea, cried Miranda, and the apples hung straight across the wall again.