The Biographers’ Club has been inviting members to contribute reflections, diaries or pieces of memoir prompted by the extraordinary times we are living through. Below are some of the wonderful pieces you have sent us, we hope in doing this to create a unique and wonderful archive of this terrible time. Please do, if you have not already done so, send in your writing to [email protected] we would love to hear from you (no more that 300 words please).
Elisa Segrave
April 1st 2020
BIOGRAPHERS’ CLUB CORONA VIRUS DIARY
I am seventy and lucky to be in Sussex where, as a child, I often roamed the fields alone with my terrier.
My favourite season then was spring and now we are having the most wonderful spring, despite the horrors on TV and radio. I dream that my father is dying and I am unable to visit him. He died in 1974. Then I dream of his old black dog Raven, who was so kind to me aged seven after my brother was drowned. In the dream, Raven is young again.
Several friends are in London flats. One, on a last Aeroflot plane out of India, is in her tiny W.10 basement. A heavy smoker, she is mentally resilient. Another, just recovered from flu, has left her Norfolk cottage to drive back to W.11 where her upstairs neighbour has Corona. She couldn’t stand her bossy sister.
My daughter is self-isolating in a small flat with three boys and husband. Christopher, four, had a one-day fever. A fourth boy stayed while his mother, traumatised by past war experiences, was in a psychiatric ward. Her ten year old loved the stability of his primary school, now closed.
An eccentric friend and I argue on mobiles about the UK libel laws. I promise to post her details of how novelist Francis King lost his Brighton house despite changing the name and sex of a character. She shouts her new address:
Me: “Nightingale Coast?”
“No, CLOSE! As in “Don’t Stand So Close to Me I’ve got the Corona Virus”.
I go on Facetime with my grandsons. Benjamin, ten, is teaching himself Latin. Looking at my old terrier, I say: ‘Canem lassata est!’
I dream that I am at a bus stop in a strange town and all my teeth fall out one by one.
Gillian Tindall
As I am one of the diminishing number of people who can remember WW2, my thoughts now inevitably go back to it. Finding the shelves bare where you’d hoped for tissues or pasta is trivial beside the constant preoccupation with getting enough of anything to eat that was war-time life at home.
You had to register with one shop for groceries and leave the ration books there. In the Sussex village where my mother and I had fetched up by 1944 (just in time for the V1 rockets to attack the south of England, but that is another matter) our grocer was Mr Goff. Housewives cultivated him, for sometimes he was able to `manage’ for his established customers an extra tin of corned beef or a few more spoonfuls of sugar or (delight!) some biscuits, slipped into their basket along with the official rations. I recall him as a genuinely nice man, who did his best and did not (unlike some shop-keepers) lord it over his less favoured customers. But in his desire to please he must have over-stepped the mark, as he was prosecuted for `black-marketeering’ and went to prison for one month.
I was far too young really to understand what `poor Mr Goff’ had done, but what I do recall is the flurry of welcome in the shop-queue when he reappeared and the tactful enquiries after his health. I suspect now that there was good deal of guilt there. In the country, everyone got the odd chicken or rabbit on the side and wheedled eggs out of hen-keeping neighbours in return for other services. You don’t quench resourcefulness by labelling it `panic buying’.
ANDREW ROSE
WEEK TWO OF ISOLATION
‘House arrest’ – ‘Greetings from the Gulag’ – ‘Twelve weeks’ CB’…my straplines for email recipient friends, phrases redolent of deep frustration at enforced, necessarily indeterminate, seclusion in darkest Surrey.
Media tags buzz around in my head. ‘Ramping up’ and ‘rolling out’. What’s wrong with ‘increasing’ and ‘setting up’? Of course, plain English doesn’t have SPAD appeal.
I’m easily irritated now. Every crisis produces a rich crop of clichés. This one is no different. Politicos and their creatures, tapers and tadpoles, purveyors of the hackneyed phrase, are expert in obfuscation. Fowler, return from Parnassus at once. You cannot be grounded. We need you.
Here, my unbarbered hair risks confusion with Struwwelpeter. James offers to trim the hopelessly unkempt thatch. No, no, no, please! With the best of intentions, I fear a pudding-basin job, creating the profile of an ageing Henry V, minus that little touch of Harry in the night.
The Great Egg Hunt. Our two local supermarkets seem permanently eggless. Luckily, an independent butcher – who, sadly, lacks footfall given so few about in the streets – offers a supply in his tiny shop – for the moment at least.
Childhood memories of pickled eggs. A large earthenware jar, heavy-lidded, placed on the floor of a cool cupboard, contained our household stock. Prudently stored in isinglass, the collection began as a hedge against 1940’s shortages. Today, wartime allusions abound, peddled by huge, distorted faces on Skype-based TV. Worrying. Solution: follow official advice, but go easy on the Media. It’s addictive.
At least there’s plenty of time to read. Let’s play catch-up (another hackneyed token). Eclecticism triumphans. The past week’s bedside faves: Margaret, Duchess of Argyll; Saki; Edward Ball; Nicky Haslam; Marguerite Yourcenar; Edward St Aubyn.
Celia Lee – Make of it what you will
W.B. Yeats on the subject of life and death:
‘Cast a cold eye
On life on death;
Horseman pass by.’
This extract is from one of the poems by Jean, Lady Hamilton, (1861-1941) the wife of General Sir Ian Hamilton, who led the failed attack at Gallipoli 1915.
Extract from Jean, Lady Hamilton’s poem titled GALLIPOLI
Soon you will hear the footsteps of the returning Spring,
The pink campion, and the yellow clover will stir sweetly about you;
The white orchids and the golden asphodel
Will lift their lovely heads out of your stony graves.
The unforgetting Spring will surely call these forth,
But more lovely spiritual flowers will awake on your graves tonight;
They glow and sparkle with unquenchable splendour,
Though the young eyes of spring will not behold them.
Jane Winter
LOCKDOWN DIARY
We have lived here for over 30 years, but only know our immediate neighbours. Suddenly, thanks to WhatsApp (which was new for us as we don’t use social media) we are part of a community. Anna, who lives two doors away, spent all day yesterday chalking “We love the NHS” in rainbow colours on the pavement, so we have to watch our step. As we go for our daily constitutional, everyone keeps their distance, or friendly conversations are had with complete strangers, six feet apart. We find ourselves doing things that we wouldn’t have imagined, like coming out in the evening and clapping our support for the key workers who are keeping us alive. On Friday we are all coming out at 4:00 pm to clap Frieda’s 90th birthday. We were hoping to go to Paris for four days to celebrate my 70th, but our hopes are fading. A lot of our shopping comes to the door by people wearing masks, who always ask us if we are alright, and we reply with the same question. Coronavirus is an invisible presence which rules our lives. No-one in the street has the illness, so far as we know, thank goodness. The only person I know who has it is a talented lawyer in his forties, who lives in Belfast. He is in a coma, and I worry about him. Coronavirus has shrunk our horizons: no holidays, exhibitions, meals out, trips to the cinema or theatre. I cannot visit my mother, who is 92 and lives the other side of London. Luckily she has help. We are doing what we can to help her and several elderly and frail friends at long distance. Only writing keeps me sane. “Real life” seems a distant memory. Life will never be the same again.
Gary Hicks
April 3rd 2020
BLITZ SPIRIT?
Stuck in my Kennington flat with no visits from children or grandchildren.the book that cheers me up most is E,M.Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in Wartime (first published 1940))
This classic work is a welcome antidote to sorting out the cutlery drawer or watching the dreary daily news conferences dispensing gloom and doom.
It is highly amusing, with a contemporary resonance.
Published in 1940, it describes with a dry wit the Provincial Lady moving to London to try and help with the war effort. Nothing much happens during the phoney war, but she eventually succeeds in getting voluntary work in a canteen. The book’s charm lies in its detail. It opens with a discussion as to whether Cook takes a medium or large size in gas-masks. This reminds me of my neighbour whom I saw yesterday wearing a mask, for the first time,as she ventured out for her daily walk, Clearly not a good fit as she kept tugging at it.
Fake news, speculation and rumour abound. Serena,girlfriend of the narrator, confides that a ‘very nice’ airman told her that the war would last ‘Six months at the very outside – and he ought to know.’ Sir Archibald, however, another acquaintance working in Whitehall, estimates ‘the probable duration at exactly twenty-two years and six months.’
One typical story has it that a large number of war casualties have already reached London having come up the Thames in barges and are installed in empty flats by the river ‘but nobody knows they are there.’
Of the sudden dramatic change to daily life, the Provincial Lady writes ‘Day follows usual routine, so unthinkable a month ago, now so familiar and continually recalling early Novels of the Future by H.G.Wells.’
How, I wonder, will we write up the current national calamity?
My latest book,out last autumn, was not actually a biography but a novel SHEEP TOWN, gentle satire on political life in the South Wales Valleys in the 1960s
Sally Cline
Tuesdy 7 April 2020.
DOWN THE ROAD..IN THE TIME OF CORONA VIRUS
You’re down the road.
You haven’t caught the virus.
Thankfully not yet.
You’re on your own in your own house.
I’m on my own in mine.
We can’t visit.
We can’t hug.
Once we lived together
Decades ago. A lifetime ago.
Brought up our daughters. Sent them to school.
Watched them grow into fine young women.
Now in their own houses with their own children.
And dogs and cats and chickens.
One of us could catch it.
I’m the one labeled vulnerable, locked in for three months.
You’re the one sharing my isolation.
Not sharing quite as you’re down the road.
But you haven’t caught the virus
Thankfully not yet.
We talk at night. Every night.
But do we say anything important or critical
We haven’t said in over 40 years?
If one of us caught the virus now what would we say?
Would I say I love you as much as I did in 1978?
Would I say you’ve strengthened me, empowered me..
Would you say “Don’t exaggerate!”
If one of us caught the virus now
We wouldn’t say
Much of anything,
That’s not our way.
But you’d be there down the road
On your own in your own house.
And I’d be here in mine.
John Holliday
In 1898, Clara Colby set off as America’s first woman war correspondent, bound for the Spanish American war. She got as far as Camp Chickamauga Military Park in Georgia, where the United States Army was preparing to leave for Cuba. What she found at Chickamauga was a situation of death and disease which would match the front lines of our current coronavirus crisis. A combination of malaria, dysentery, and worst of all, typhoid fever was threatening more deaths among the forty-four thousand men than they would ever face in battle.
British-born Clara Colby was the publisher and editor of the Woman’s Tribune, a leading publication of the women’s suffrage movement at the time and her ‘Letters from the Editor,’ reported on the suffering and neglect coming from conditions in the camp, causing hundreds of deaths. From the ignorance of the attendants and the carelessness of the officers in charge, the hospitals became disease breeders. Infection was spreading between kitchens and hospitals located too close together, and fever patients were left open to mosquitoes, thus broadcasting the disease through the camp. While thousands of women had volunteered to nurse the soldiers, in some cases, there was only one nurse to twenty-five fever patients, making it more the shouts of the stronger ones or the ravings of the feverish to call for help from the nurses.
The Woman’s Tribune became the publication that uncovered this story just as the Washington Post revealed the details of the Watergate scandal. The fact that every member of Congress received a copy of the Woman’s Tribune meant that Washington reacted quickly to the situation, and President McKinley sent his Secretary for War and the Surgeon-General to Chickamauga.
Taken from the book, ‘Clara Colby: The International Suffragist’ by John Holliday, available online and at most book sellers.
C Heather Waddell March/April 2020
Lockdown 2020 diary extracts 16th March -Easter April 12th
March 17th 2020
The UK government announced today that the vulnerable and elderly have to self-isolate for three months from this weekend. Schools are to remain open and we have been advised to avoid pubs, restaurants, theatres and bars, but no mention of galleries and museums yet. The National Gallery has postponed the Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition, but no word yet from the Royal Academy. Most commercial galleries are moving online. BA has closed all except 25% of its flights and tells me my flight to Scotland at Easter is still to go ahead.
I caught the Central line to Oxford Circus and had probably my last swim at Marshall Street leisure centre for some time. Later cousin Jane phoned and told me that their son Olly who runs Troubadour theatres at Wembley and White City has a US touring show stuck in New York. Australian friends Graham and Judy were on a cruise and no port would let the ship dock, but they are now in quarantine in a Sydney hotel. My wonderful “Last supper” Mediterranean-style lunch at Charles and Juliana’s house in Kentish town, will it appears be the last for a. long time. Tfl has closed many stations. My neighbours have fled to a farm in Suffolk, three generations, and were in panic before they left, telling me to do the same to Scotland.
Italy’s death toll has now exceeded that of China-horrifying! The blossom trees, magnolia, camellias, daffodils and other plants are a wonderful antidote to all the panic everywhere as people stockpile food and necessities in London and across the UK. Another cousin phoned from Scotland and she has two daughters who are nurses and one son-in-law a doctor in A&E in Aberdeen. A friend in Paris is also a doctor and tells me that her patients have a variety of symptoms. Their daughter Flo is a GP in Bristol but her husband is on the frontline and has asthma. He is working 13-hour days for 4 days, 2 days off them 13- hour nights for 4 days.
Monday March 23rd reality sets in, as Boris Johnson PM makes a statement at 830pm tonight on TV. We are now only allowed out for exercise once daily or for essential travel to work for key workers, or to collect food or medicine, schools are also closed. At least no curfews mentioned so far, but police may begin to check people walking around outside. I started my daily cycle round Hyde Park in glorious sunshine but still very cold. The two policemen at Palace Gardens gate have machine guns and some army reserves were there in a van. I always say hello as I whizz by. There are also two policemen by the entrance gate to Kensington Palace, which like most museums and galleries is now closed. The park is almost empty bar a few walkers or joggers and the five herons, swans and Muscovy ducks look somewhat perplexed at the flight of human beings. One heron swooped down across a waterfall in the Dell, quite magical. Nature gives us some solace in these troubled times. It is essential to remain positive. I have now heard that my BA flight has been cancelled and I will stay in London for some months, until lockdown is lifted. One good piece of news is that my London Art and Artist’s Guide 13th edition has been printed and copies sent to me, but the main stock is stuck at the printers in Devon, until bookshops and the Central Books warehouse re-open. I was only checking page proofs last week! The artists Natasha Kissell and Peter Harrap in their studio, on the cover of the guide, are thrilled and passing the word round, as online sales are still possible from late April.
On Friday March 27th it was announced that Boris Johnson the PM and Matt Hancock the Health Minister both have Covid-19, in a mild form so far. Professor Whitty has also succumbed. On Sunday March 29th most of us could reflect on how everything has escalated to lockdown and our daily lives have changed totally, but compared to doctors and nurses we are fortunate, as they have to deal with death and the nastier side of coronavirus. On March 27th and April 2nd we all came out to clap the NHS staff and later key workers who are keeping things running in Britain. Neighbourhoods have become much friendlier and newsletters passed round with local access details, help for the vulnerable and elderly.
Past pupils at Latymer School have come back to school labs to use 3D machines to print out visors and PPE for NHS staff. Many people seem to have found that they have useful skills and can volunteer. Farmers in the countryside need fruit pickers, volunteers are needed for the NHS and food banks. I nearly offered to pick fruit but realise that my age would prohibit me sadly.
By April 5th nearly 4900 people have died in the UK from this dreadful plague, but the good news is that China is gradually getting people back to work, after 3-4 months of severe lockdown in Wuhan, but Hubei province now has problems. The world of plane travel helps infections spread far too easily in the 21st century.
Patricia M Jenkins
THE CONSEQUENCES OF CONTAGION
One of the intriguing benefits of the lockdown is the opportunity to discover the contemporary
relevance of past memoirs. Today I finished Self Portrait by Gene Tierney. Tierney’s heart-
breaking memoir provides us with a salutary lesson in the devastating consequences of
contagion.
Gene Tierney was once described by the director Martin Scorsese as “one of the most
underrated actresses of the Golden Era.” After achieving success on Broadway, in 1941 she
starred opposite Henry Fonda in The Return of Frank James. Her can-do attitude earned Fonda’s
respect and the endearment, “one-take Tierney.” Later she displayed her flair for comedy in the
1943 hit Heaven Can Wait. This led to Laura – her most celebrated role and whose portrait in the
film inspired the title of her 1979 memoir.
In it she recounted her whirlwind wartime marriage to the fashion designer Oleg Cassini that
resulted in her parents’ rejection, leaving her devastated and triggering the mental anguish
that plagued her for years to come. A situation made worse by the birth of her blind, deaf and
mentally handicapped daughter Daria, her disabilities the direct result of Gene’s contact with a
marine who illegally broke her quarantine for German measles to watch Tierney entertaining
American troops. This tragedy resulted in the collapse of Gene’s marriage and a mental
breakdown in 1957. Eventually, Gene sought medical help. When the press discovered this, she
spoke openly about her condition becoming the first Hollywood to star to do so. Her poignant
memoir raised public awareness about mental illness and helped others to overcome
their personal traumas. Tierney’s tragedy teaches us the terrible consequences of contagion.
One frighteningly relevant right now.
JAN SLIMMING
Weeks of Firsts.
The days pass slowly; have done since March 8th, the day I returned home to Atlanta from California. Unprecedented. Perhaps we had prior intuition, or global knowledge from the BBC, that things would become far worse. Our local city council didn’t issue “shelter in place” until March 19th. But I’m glad we stayed in early—took precautions, as deaths in Washington State increased. Everyday seems like a Sunday; peaceful, the Spring sun is shining, but the wind chill is biting some days. Too early to get a tan. But in reality I can’t wait to drive five hours to the ocean, feel the sand between my toes and breathe in the salty air of the Atlantic; wonder how my friends and relatives across the sea are weathering this storm. England. Dear England. I hope everyone is well. We heard three friends had the virus; two have recovered, one is in ICU on a ventilator. Hours on the internet keep us busy. We read, we write, we eat. We exercise outside and cycling has become a regular habit. God forbid we all put on 30lbs and then find ourselves in another diabetic crisis. ‘Firsts’ have been fun. Turmeric on my hair!? Bisto is better! Ah! (Roots now not so obvious.) Happy Hour at 10.30am while Zooming with UK relatives and friends? Wine or Gin and Tonic for me. Yoga classes on-line at home; it’s good to purposefully slip into my workout gear. Wearing masks and rubber gloves in public – funny how that seems normal now…and responsible. Thankfully our friend has recovered after thirteen days on the ventilator – so far no family or friend deaths. Oh for a vaccine to be available; I crave its needle – now that’s definitely a first.
Jad Adams
25 March 2020
A call from Sandra: ‘Mother has been trying to get out. She waited till I was in the bathroom and took her walking frame and she was half way out of the door before I knew what was going on’
I hum the tune to The Great Escape. ‘It’s not funny, Jad,’ she says, ‘you have to speak to her, she listens to you.’
I call mother on her phone and have a chat about gardening and flowers – I know too well not to ambush her with an instruction early in the conversation.
‘You must say in,’ I say eventually, ‘because of your age.’
‘We’re all getting older’ she says, ‘your father wasn’t much older than you are now when he died.’
‘Thanks for the reminder,’ I said, ‘I am feeling very healthy. But I‘m not leaving the house, I couldn’t even visit you in case I might bring the virus.’
‘I don’t care if you do, dear,’ she said, ‘I’m ninety-one, I don’t care.’ Grandfather fought in World War I and she lived thorough World War II so military metaphors are at the forefront of her mind. ‘If your number’s on it, your number’s on it,’ she says cheerfully.
8 April 2020
We walk out to Dulwich Wood, a place I have always intended to visit, lovely shaded walkways in the last remnant of the Great North Wood. In the streets on our way we pass the moving statues outside Sainsbury’s, flinch from the zombie joggers and marvel at the ghost buses sailing past.
We rehearse the daily question of whether it will be nice dinner – with wine – or not. Should it be one of our 3-4 alcohol free days? ‘If we are going to die tomorrow,’ asks Julie, ‘what would we want our last meal to be?’
‘What would Jesus do?’ I ask. We agree He would have a last supper with wine. So salmon, prawns and pasta in tarragon sauce it is, with a nice Viognier from the sunny Pays D’Oc. Life could be much worse.
Judith Niechcial
Journal of a Plague Spring.
Monday 22nd March 2020
Things are moving so fast it is bewildering. Last week people over 70 were told to self isolate for ten weeks – yes, ten weeks. The summer is disappearing before my eyes. I empty my diary, and resign myself to living in jeans for the foreseeable future.
Tuesday 17th March
Rosalind, a parishioner whose husband recently died, phoned, distressed. People are pulling out of Jon’s planned funeral. The Church of England has banned all services except weddings and funerals. Alex reassures her it can go ahead. The sun streams through the West window onto Ros’s beautiful flowers for her husband. They will be left to wilt in an abandoned church, I fear.
Alex sets up a WhatApp group for the congregation, which is an immediate success, but I reckon several elderly church members will not have smart phones.
Tues 24th March
Lock down. Luckily Alex has electrician skills. Today he finally manages to install wiring from the Vicarage to the church, in order to be able to live stream services on his tablet…
Wednesday 25th March
Only to hear today that the Archbishops have decreed that, not only do churches have to close to the public, priests themselves cannot enter, even for private prayer. All the effort of installing wiring is as nought. Alex is angry and upset. We fail to see how a priest, on his own in a locked church, is a health risk. Locked church doors, with forbidding notices on them, send just the wrong message to people in greater need than ever of spiritual support. Seeing the inside of the church is so important to people. Broadcasting from the vicarage dining room is just not the same. I write a letter to the Church Times questioning the reasoning.
Maunday Thursday
Alex has a dilemma. He very much wants to stream the Good Friday and Easter services from the church, despite the decree. He writes to all his people. If even one of them feels they would not be able to join the service, he will stick with the dining room. A flurry of beautiful supportive messages arrives, but two responses are negative, so we decorate the dining table/altar with lilies and candles for tonight’s vigil.
Meriel Buxton
Four weeks into lockdown. The fridge holds only eggs with scrambled eggs last night and omelette for lunch. I no longer reach for the car keys. Instead I check the delivery after the next (eagerly anticipated) one is also booked. I stop myself before ringing friends to ask them for supper. The scrabble board is still out from last night’s match with grandson Archie (13). We play on Zoom with a virtual letter bag devised by my son. At 11.00 p.m. the score was 284 each. Archie reluctantly accepted that VUN was not a word. What happened then remains arguable, and will long continue to be argued.
His sister Eleanor (12) is teaching her guinea pigs to dance (Bubble’s speciality) and jump (Squeak excels). Clips of the action, to an accompaniment of We are the Champions, flood Whatsapp.
“When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning or in rain?” I ask my daughter. “When the hurley-burley’s done, when the Battle’s lost and won,” she replies. Far-seeing chap, Shakespeare.
Turn on the government briefing. Why does the tone of questioning from some reporters imply crass stupidity at best and probably malicious intent by government ministers? Hindsight is a wondrous thing. Rival politicians show greater empathy, realising these problems are not easily resolved.
Term resumed today for the younger grandchildren. Zoom to Eliza (6) and Hector (4) and read them a book. Eliza plays “Mon Ami Pierrot” to me, shows me London on her globe and reads me a story. Hector finishes his tea then fetches his digger to clear the remains.
Continue two writing projects and start a third. Enjoy the glorious white cherry blossom. Give thanks again for a home in the country with space, a garden, green fields. Whatsapp, Zoom and Word. Two dogs, four grandchildren.
Hugh Purcell
The Lock Down in Wales
I arrived the week before lock down at our isolated barn in the Brecon Beacons looking forward to getting to grips with my latest biography, the story of Christopher Burney MBE. He was a hero of SOE who wrote important accounts of his time in solitary confinement in Fresnes prison and then in Buchenwald concentration camp where he led a resistance movement in the weeks leading up to liberation. All my papers are here, all my interview recordings etc.
HOWEVER, come the virus, come another world. In my case, the world of my childhood. Researching Christopher Burney in WW2 is too depressing and, more important, too irrelevant. My days here outside in the sun watching the arrival of spring are enjoyable but turning on TV or radio and I’m confronting my own mortality. This brings me back to my childhood and the wish to tell my grandchildren and grand -nephews/nieces about my dominant, eccentric father whose genes they inherit.
So I’m writing them a 7,000 word story ‘My Father’. From a writer’s point of view this presents difficulties. Their ages are between 10 – 15. What style to use? How to tell them a personal story the context of which is outside their frame of reference? How to interest a child of 10 and an adolescent of 15? I find I am learning from – I hope not parodying – the children’s books of Roald Dahl.
I suppose like many other members of the Biographers’ Club hiding in the countryside I am quite enjoying life from day to day but dreading the economic future.
Deborah Spring
Covid 19, Day 10, 2nd April
The same audio book has played for days. I miss whole chapters and endlessly rewind. It’s The Thirty-Nine Steps. Time passes in a fog of coughing and sleep. Richard Hannay runs through the heather in borrowed tweeds. A villain with hooded eyes locks him in a barn. A medieval-looking, menacing spiked sphere fills the news broadcasts. It has got into my house and locked me in my room. I have strange chills and my skin crawls. Across the bed sits a great solid blue lump of a book, Hilary Mantel’s grand finale, but I can’t lift it. ‘Quartan fever’, I think. ‘Plague.’ ‘The Sweat.’ Thomas Cromwell lost his wife and daughters to one of those deadly maladies that struck from nowhere. Outside the window, a perfect spring uncurls, under a cloudless sky. Every morning from my bed I see another blossom, or a new sheen of palest green clouding the bare boughs. Downstairs, the Judge argues with the cats in lieu of lawyers to wrangle with, cooks and cleans. He does beautiful ironing. Screens hold my children’s faces. The joyful life of my infant granddaughter appears in fleeting video clips. I sing her a croaky song, she offers me a toy and a book. For one long night, my chest tightens as it did when I was an asthmatic child, as in the dark, silent house I wait for a doctor to call me back. After six hours there’s a tired, careful voice at the end of the phone, questioning, absorbing my story. A new symptom, but not pneumonia, it seems, because I can still speak in whole sentences, and I must try old methods to support my struggling lungs – steam, hot drinks, and sitting up to sleep. As they would have done, I think, reprieved and dozing in the morning light against the pillows, back in Cromwell’s time.
Angela Thirlwell
Lockdown week 5 – Zoom Gym
Lucia – instructor
Bea – learner
L: So we’re back online. Sorry about Tuesday. We had storms over Perugia. I’m out here in the countryside with my parents and I couldn’t get a signal.
So first I’m going to mute you all. Today we’re going to engage our core.
B: I’m on mute so she can’t hear my thoughts. What is my core? Where are my glutes? Do I have any of these?
L: Get 2 weights ready and a chair if you don’t want to get on the floor.
B: I can get on the floor but I can’t get off the floor. I should learn from last time when my back went into spasm. But once I’m on the floor it feels nice. Shall I get on the floor this morning?
L: Don’t worry if you can’t get on the floor. For each exercise I’ll show you an alternative, either with the wall as a support or with a chair.
B: How can a young person relate to the bone ache of older people? Yes, I’ll choose the wall. Not much wall here. Too many books. This flat is not equipped for a gym.
L: Now actually this squat against the wall with a weight in your outstretched hand is more challenging than doing it on the floor.
B: More challenging! Hell. Can I do this? Watch her, copy her. Slide my back up and down the wall. Hold out this can of lentils as my weight.
L: Now extend your right hand high on the wall, raise your left knee and bring your hand down to meet the knee. Push your hand against your knee and your knee against your hand. Hold for 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds…Release. Now turn around and repeat on the other side. Do 12 reps.
B: 12 reps. Can I get to even 6 reps with all this switching around?
L: Well done everybody. Now you can record our session and practice during the week.
B: Practice during the week? I think not. I still don’t know where my core is, in my trunk or in my head?
L: So that’s it until Saturday. Now I’ll un-mute you all.
B: Thank you Lucia. (Chorus of thanks like turkeys gobbling.)
Zoom: The host has closed the meeting
Catherine Layton
Reflection on Covid-19
A photo of our friend in Atlanta, Sam, wearing a mask and a homemade face shield, shocked us. We’re privileged in Wollongong; we can walk alongside the ocean and simply scowl at joggers if they pass too close while puffing.
We’d met Sam and Sarah on a 17-day cruise from Santiago to Buenos Aires in February, during which every precaution was taken to keep the ship virus-free. We felt safe and smug, even when the Captain announced the suspension of all cruises because stops at Montevideo and Buenos Aires were unchanged. At Montevideo, Sam and Sarah received urgent advice to get out of Argentina before the border closed. They rearranged their flight and we held a farewell dinner, laughing about Australians and toilet paper.
Then our flight to Houston was cancelled and our planned stay in Buenos Aires suddenly seemed unwise. We left, experiencing five days of boredom hanging around airports interspersed with seismic anxiety rearranging schedules through places in which we feared we’d be trapped (Sao Paolo, Chicago, Vancouver, Taipei). We skirted around strangers and wrung our hands with sanitiser before and after handling anything in public spaces. Many travellers wore latex gloves and some even sported white paper suits and ski goggles. By the time we left Vancouver, the hotel dining room had closed, and, when we reached Taipei, everyone, including us, wore masks.
Arriving in Sydney on 21 March, immigration officers had neither masks nor gel. We got the impression the virus was still viewed like flu, an irritant rather than a threat. On 22 March–three days after disembarked passengers from the Ruby Princess spread Covid-19 across the globe–Australia went into lockdown. Credit for a lucky escape in the lucky country lies more in geography than in an early response.
2 May 2020, Wollongong
Five weeks in, I find home isolation little different from everyday retired life. The only extras are washing my hands after unloading the shopping and holding my breath when passing people who blithely ignore social distancing. The loss, on the other hand, is contact with the grandchildren. Facetime and Google home (the two families have different technologies) cannot replace the 20-second hug.
Some time last year, I read that a 20-second hug increases oxytocin production and reduces stress and high blood pressure. Harry and I experimented; I felt my shoulders melt. One pair of grandkids came for a weekend without their parents, and little Anthony sat on his bed and sobbed that he couldn’t go to sleep because he missed his mum. I said, “Hey, Anthony, let’s have a 20 second hug. We’ll count.” He relaxed, had some milk, and went to sleep. He liked it so much, he often came to count out a hug. Andrea, his older sister, was less demonstrative, but still relaxed in the closeness.
So it’s the hugs I miss the most. Anyway, we received a text, asking us to guess what was in the cardboard box Anthony held. I thought a tortoise or a kitten, he looked so pleased. Then I forgot about it.
We walked quite late yesterday afternoon because of the rain, and found a parcel on the doorstep when we reached home. I thought it was technology for Harry, but no, it was a book. Tucked inside the flyleaf was a wad of folded paper. I pulled at the paper, and shook it out. It wasn’t one sheet, but two–life-size cut-outs of Anthony and Andrea, both with long arms outstretched for a huge hug. Anthony’s box held the best things in life…
Emma Bielecki
Coronavirus Diary
Yesterday was Mayday. In Holland Park, now my rec yard, the Green Man had been busy making merry. Everything was budding, blooming, bursting: gyp frothing energetically forth, tulips in the Dutch garden, grape hyacinths tilting drunkenly, shrubs hung heavy with pink and purple flowers whose names I do not know. Flora was running riot everywhere – and the fauna was quite, quite shameless.
Yesterday was also my 39th birthday, or, as my friend K would style it, with the clear-sightedness that makes her a good friend, but not always a welcome one, the start of my 40th year. Thirty-nine is still in one’s 30s, and in one’s 30s is still…if not young, exactly, clearly not middle-aged. I didn’t think these landmarks would bother me, but they do, and the more so in lockdown, where time asserts its objective reality. For reasons extraneous to the coronavirus crisis, I found myself at the start of lockdown back in my mother’s house, the house I grew up in, in the bedroom I wrote, smoked, and dreamed in through my teenage years. Impossible in the parental home, even on the brink of middle-age, to assume the responsibilities of adulthood. I am back in chafing adolescence then, without the smoking, but with all its endless frustrations, waiting for life to start.
Philip Ward
An uneventful life has got even more uneventful.
1 May. Mountain goats roaming through a Welsh town, jellyfish in the Venice canals. ‘Rewilding’ on unforeseen scale. All it takes is for humanity to release its grip just a little and Nature fights back, recolonising the eco-niches she was driven from. I sit in front of the computer, wondering if I should ‘rewild’ myself. Do I need the daily shave? Or shall I postpone it until the next hook-up on Zoom or Skype, where sartorial standards may be higher? I’m invited to a “virtual tea-party”. On-screen the other guests look wilder than me; and from their exuberance I’m guessing they’re on something stronger than Twinings.
5 May. A TV documentary on Angela Carter sends me back to her writings. I stumble across Carter’s review from 1979 of Joan Collins’s memoirs. It’s the sort of review that is so withering it makes you want to read the book. The actress’s prose is castigated as “copywriter’s kitsch”. Example: “Zsa Zsa Gabor bit crisply into a shrimp and surveyed me shrewdly…” But who wouldn’t want to be “surveyed shrewdly” by Zsa Zsa Gabor if fate should ever bring one within survey distance?
6 May. It’s true what they say – with little traffic noise and clearer skies, your perceptions are enhanced. Plus, I find I deliberate for longer. The lawn needs mowing, but rogue primroses have flowered across it. Shall I mow around them? A dead bird lies on the patio, victim no doubt of the neighbour’s tomcat. Shall I bury it like a fallen warrior, or chuck it to a sequestered corner of the garden? Why am I spending so long in deliberation? Do I have too much time on my hands? Am I ending too many sentences with question marks?
Karen Christensen
COVID-19 has separated me from my son, who lives in Beijing, and that’s hard. But he’s young and we’ll be together again. It’s Sheila Mitchell Keating, a 94-year-old friend in London whom I think of most and long to see, especially because she just published her first book, a biography of her husband H. F. R. Keating. I was planning to trip for June so I could be there for her party. Instead, we make do with emails and an occasional WhatsApp call.
Sheila is one of the remarkable women I’ve met because of the biography I am writing about Valerie Eliot, T. S. Eliot’s second wife. When I started my project in 2013, I had a graduate student assistant who got a list of names and addresses from the boarding school Valerie attended. He had letters back from eight or ten of them, and I began interviewing them by phone and visiting some on trips to England.
One former schoolmate was Sheila Mitchell, who’d been a couple years ahead of Valerie and knew her only slightly, but she didn’t mind being pestered by email with questions and we soon got onto other subjects. On my fairly frequent trips to London I would always try to visit her in Notting Hill.
Incidentally, she offers a contrast with Valerie Eliot that I’ve found thought provoking. Sheila was also the devoted wife of a well-known author, she had a career as an actor and even now records audio books professionally. In fact, when we last spoke she was waiting for new audio equipment so she could have a recording studio at home.
I remember dropping in at Sheila’s a year or two ago, on the run between events on a hot afternoon. She had cold wine and piles of sandwiches waiting. We talked and talked. How I long to turn up at her door again. This time I’ll bring champagne.
HRF Keating: A Life of Crime by Sheila Mitchell (Level Best Books 2020)
Martyn Bond
A Silver Lining?
It is not easy to claim that there is a silver lining to lockdown, but it has been a reminder to concentrate on essentials, on the inner rather than the outer landscape, and that brings its own psychological reward.
Like other authors, I could not travel to see neighbours, friends and family, so I wrote. I finally closed the last chapter of a biography I had been working on for years. My subject is Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, and it all started when I stumbled across his grave during a Swiss walking holiday in 2015.
The Count set up a political movement after WW1 that attracted support from the liberal intelligentsia of the continent. He called it PanEuropa – the title of his best-selling manifesto – and this handsome young son of an Austro-Hungarian diplomat and a Japanese geisha promoted it among the great and the good. Einstein, Freud and Thomas Mann all supported his vision of a peacefully cooperating European alliance of nations, a forerunner of the EU. For some years it looked as if he might lead a political alliance that could counter Hitler and the Nazis.
But, as we all know, brute force won the day. With his famous Jewish actress wife he was forced to flee Vienna in 1938, first to Switzerland, then via London, Paris and Lisbon to New York. Viktor Laszlo, the hero in Casablanca, is modelled on the Count, the Resistance organiser who knows all the anti-Nazis across the continent. The Count advised Truman and Marshall on rebuilding a united Europe after the war. Churchill consulted him. In 1950 he was the first recipient of the Charlemagne Prize for his contribution to European unity. De Gaulle and Adenauer awarded him medals later for his work for Franco-German reconciliation.
I already miss the visits to the archives, reading his letters, piecing together his adventurous story, tracking his wider family and his three wives, interweaving his life with the stirring events of the past century. Now the text is with the publishers, I am casting round for the next life to take his place on my desk and in my mind. Not that I wish for a second wave, but if it does happen, I want to be ready.
Nabarupa Bhattacharjee
5th October 2020
Anandi, the English tree
I walked barefoot on the lawn yesterday. Even a repetitive ghostly stroll in nature feels a luxury in the quarantine days. How happy I was to stand on the wet soil of England. In my mind, time rolled back and I arrived here in a ship to Her Majesty’s land and docked at Southampton in a monochromatic buzz. And as I stood on the grass, time left me.
The weather was cool at the teatime and the English breeze brushed on my face, a sensation of joy introduced itself. The emerald carpet stretched few yards and I opened my shoes to feel its grass on my warm feet. The cool dew awakened my senses. There was a beautiful tree, standing with all its might and grandeur.
I loved its form. I could detect its unique fragrance from a fair distance. Trees, the very nature, the living reflection of our metaphysical experiences.
Taking small steps I reached out to the tree and it spontaneously asked me, “where are you from?’’… “I am from the far east’’ I said… “I belong to the oldest civilization of humankind’’. It got curious and we immediately became friends. The way its arms laid dangling towards the earth, I sensed it wanted to raise and embrace me in her yellowish-green branches. I wish one could listen to her stories. She has witnessed history, perhaps knows more than the Bible, the Quran, the Gita. She gave me a sense of root, a pocket of silence where I can root myself and grow. She was my first friend in England, Anandi, as I had named her, the Sanskrit word for bliss.