Bats

In the article on Low Life in The Spectator this week Jeremy Clarke describes how a friend of his, villains on his tail bent of breaking his legs for grassing on them, says he's having to sleep with a bat in his room, which Clarke interprets as a living creature but which is in fact a baseball bat, for protection.
Bats can fly into rooms as I once found at a weekend course of writers when a lady returned to her room for the night to find a bat there. She screamed and people rushed to see what was going on. One brave gentleman somehow got it out the window but not before a rather strange lady on the course (we had a lot of those by the way) said "I must see it. A bat! How lovely!" She was too late and, of course, she was very disappointed.
She was the one who said that a friend of mine had "no aura". I never knew what she meant but, looking at him, I had an inkling: a sort of dry look about him.
I was once in a hut full of young men, mainly students, in France; we were all working there for the summer, not paid much, but we had keep - which is when I learned to drink a lot of red wine and smoke Gauloise cigarettes. It was one of those hair-brained schemes governments developed after the war to "get the nations together" or some such thing. Well, every night someone would, due to the heat, open doors at both ends of the hut and then we'd watch the bats, heaps of them, coming like racing cars through the building, brilliantly avoiding the vertical posts that held the roof up. Quite a sight. No one was afraid. No one had a beehive haircut for the bats to get tangled in (old wives tale). You went to sleep and didn't worry that your blood would be sucked in the night - like the young man in.... what was it?.... "Coral Island?".