night fear

[…] just as Rainer complained he never had a childhood — what luck! — never to have suffered birthpang, nightfear, cradlecap, cold lake in your lung; never to have practiced scales or sat numbly before the dentist's hum or picked your mother up from the floor she's bled and wept and puked on; […]

It has required much British resolution to overcome the night-fear of going out into the unhallowed ground of matter-of-fact, where the farthest earlier excursions of the governmental agencies had taken them no farther than such financial transactions as are incident to the accomplishment of anything whatever in a commercial nation.