Books

Coronavirus: We’re used to lock-ins, not lockdowns. We’re not used to this new sort of war

Belfast author Rosemary Jenkinson offers a writer’s eye view of the Covid-19 crisis

The Covid-19 testing facility on Sir John Rogersons Quay. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw

Tue Mar 24 2020 - 05:37

The panicdemic is spreading even faster than the virus. It may originally have been called Covid-19 but now it’s Covid-20 and might even be Covid-21 if we don’t develop a vaccine fast. The name Covid, redolent of covert and fetid, seems designed by virologists to strike fear into our quaking hearts. The Big C has always referred to cancer but it’s about to be requisitioned as a new Big C swaggers into town.

Last week, after Boris Johnson and Leo Varadkar urged us to self-isolate, I went into Belfast city centre. At the gates of City Hall, Free Presbyterians were proselytising in their black overcoats, through their black megaphones, clutching black bibles with a rejuvenated zest in their warnings of the eternal hellfire awaiting us sinners – preceded no doubt by a 105 degree fever.

I soon bumped into another writer stocking up on last-minute provisions. She said she was working to complete two last short stories, “in case I don’t make it through this”, adding that she was 68. It was surreal to be having such a conversation after meeting her at a packed book launch two weeks before when everyone was brighter than bright.

The biggest metaphor from the UK government is that we’re now “at war”, but it’s one where the vast majority of us will bunker down without seeing action – except of course for the occasional fight to the death in a supermarket over the last pack of toilet roll. We think of ourselves as battle-hardened here in Belfast and like to boast that during our 30-year war the pubs never closed. We’re used to lock-ins, not lockdowns. We’re not used to this new sort of war in which, to paraphrase Seamus Heaney, “Whatever you do, do nothing”.

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The real fear comes from the fact that the enemy is not outside, but invisibly within. It’s like being surrounded by undercover agents and trusting no one, least of all ourselves. The shocking point is that any one of us could become a killer in due course.

On the very frontline of soldiering are the doctors and nurses; the guns are injections and the heavy artillery is comprised of ventilators. Most healthcare workers are women and it’s apt that in this feminist era women are in the line of fire, proving they have always been every bit as physically brave as men.

Since governments are impressing on us a sense of collective responsibility, there is now less tolerance for individualism. It’s yet another division to add to unionist or nationalist, leaver or remainer – this time it’s risk-taker or play-safer. However, those who live with their families should realise some people mentally struggle with being alone and, while it certainly isn’t a time for selfishness, it isn’t a time for judgementalism either.

It’s not only worry about infecting the vulnerable that restricts our movements but many of us, particularly the writers, are imbued with the moral lessons of literature. In Henry James’s Daisy Miller the eponymous hero cavorts round the Coliseum in Rome at night with her Italian admirer, ignoring social mores and the stringent medical advice of the time. Just as she had to die of “Roman Fever” (malaria) for not obeying the social isolation code for 19th-century women, we’re equally wary of what could befall us.

Recently I’ve been drawn to rereading The Diary of Samuel Pepys to see the parallels between the bubonic plague and Covid-19. Back then, victims and their families were forcibly locked in their London houses, their doors daubed with red crosses, making our social distancing seem like a literal walk in the park (while observing the prerequisite two-metre distance of course). Pepys’ entry of April 30th, 1665 reads “Great fears of the sicknesses here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.” The countryside gentry were so terrified of catching the plague Pepys had to pretend he was no longer working in London.

Pepys’s coping technique was to cultivate sangfroid. Coming upon a plague-ridden corpse one night, he commented, “thank God I was not much disturbed at it”. That September though, he’d lost so many friends and servants he was plunged into “great apprehensions of melancholy”. By December 31st he was delighted the plague had “abated”, but by January 1666 it was back with a vengeance. It’s likely we too will experience various abatements and resurgences of the virus.

Covid-19 is not entirely without precedent in my lifetime. I can remember the scary Aids campaigns of the late 1980s with the falling tombstones. The HIV virus was a dark backdrop to my hedonistic early twenties, but most of us came through it. It’s also worth bearing in mind that not everyone regards Covid-19 as a universal blight. A taxi-driver told me he honestly hoped it would take his mother who was suffering from dementia in a care home.

When I visited my local GP surgery this week, the atmosphere seemed different. Instead of a TV screen transmitting the usual morning show programmes obsessing about coronavirus, a radio channel was blasting out throwback hits, and instead of the impersonal automatic check-in, now deemed a germ-carrier, the receptionist wrote our names down personally by hand, another cool throwback move. Vive la change!

Three days later, however, the same surgery had tempered its exuberance with black and yellow barricade tape and a stop sign preventing patients from encroaching on the reception desk.

It’s hard to know whether our governments are adopting the right timings for various restrictions and shutdowns. Boris’s bumbling bulletins reveal a bulging distress in his eyes reminiscent of an actor who doesn’t know his lines, but at least the British government has done a volte face on their herd immunity strategy which was so unpopular with the public. Even as we move towards full lockdown, we now have to try to keep each other’s spirits up and remember how much worse things could be – at least the face is the only part of our body we’re not allowed to touch!

Ultimately, there are positives for writers in that those in self-isolation may rediscover the joy of books. It’s been inspiring in recent weeks to watch the Irish arts community, north and south, fundraise to support each other and create online forums for their work. Human nature is endlessly resourceful and, in this economically worrying climate, it is also heartening to recall how Samuel Pepys continued to do the business he loved in spite living in such fearful times, testifying, “I have never lived as merrily this plague time.”

Rosemary Jenkinson’s new collection of short stories, Lifestyle Choice 10mg, is available at doirepress.com and on Amazon, supported by ACNI. A memoir will follow.

Coronavirus