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In the inland region of Washington State, in the rich, rolling, silt-covered hills known as The Palouse, my best friend growing up was an award-winning horse fanatic. Part of her equestrian pursuit involved mastering something called ‘English’. Before I had any particular knowledge of it, I could sense purely from the reverential way in which she uttered the word that this English was a serious undertaking, and one that was essential for any kind of proper advancement in the competitive world of horse-riding.
As a mere onlooker, no horsewoman myself, I relied on my friend to enlighten me on the ins and outs of the complicated discipline. This style of riding was like classical ballet, she explained, with its own rules of dress, posture, movement, and commands. The cowboy hat and boots that were the habit of horse-riding in our region were swapped for slender black boots, a long coat with high collar, and a hard, rounded riding helmet. English was an expensive, and clearly, for her, highly desirable escalation in the activity of riding horses, though what actual purpose it might serve wasn’t obvious to me.
Unlike the sheer speed, dexterity, and wrangling skills expected of Western riders, English riding involved displays of serene stillness and elegant steps, as well as a facility for leaping over white fences. Removed from its native landscape of endless hedgerows and yelping foxhounds, all of this appeared a pointless, yet undeniably beautiful exercise. I propped a leg on the wooden planks of the enclosure and looked on in awe as my friend mastered both worlds, that of the dusty corral and the dressage arena. The two styles co-existed for her like a butter churn and a Wedgwood vase; one for use, the other for prestige.
Another strand of Englishness running through the fabric of my childhood was the Indominatable Englishman. In his childhood, my dad had found inspiration in the explorers Scott and Shackleton and made them the godfathers of his own far-reaching aspirations and adventures. He forged an identity based on the mildly eccentric, learned adventure-seeker, for whom there could be no insurmountable obstacles, only challenges. It was an image he honed to the point that, by the time my parents met on a university ski outing, he stood out like an engraving. In a crowd wearing sleek new stirrup trousers, he was resplendent in English knickerbockers and lace-up boots, a visitor from a bygone, more heroic age. Once, when I was old enough to join my family on the slopes, a fellow chairlift passenger nudged my arm and pointed out a lone figure carving long, graceful turns in the snow beneath us. ‘Have you seen this guy?’ He enthused, ‘Incredible! He’s like a skiing museum!’
As a child who wondered about words and was frequently sent to look them up, I was aware of speaking something called English but, strangely, not living in the place called England. Alongside the Websters American Dictionary of the English Language was the many volumed tome that was our Encyclopaedia Britannica. That occupied an entire shelf of a bookcase, and it was a regular, revered source of information on just about anything you could imagine. All knowledge, it seemed, came from Britain.
Hence, in the heart of my American identity, there was an England-shaped hole. I padded it out with odd bits of information. Overseeing this project was a kindly, hat-wearing Quaker on a cylindrical container of porridge oats, smiling at me as I ate my breakfast. He seemed such a cheerful fellow, fresh off the Mayflower, I supposed.
One diligent family historian traced an unbroken line from my mother’s family in Alaska back to the earliest Quakers in 17th century Lancashire. Knee socked legs swinging under my desk, I stared up at the construction paper cut-outs of muskets, black hats, and turkeys that formed a Thanksgiving display in my First Grade classroom, and I imagined these ancestors of mine arriving in Tall Ships to New England. They came to escape the indignities visited upon them by the English Crown, and there would be no going back to Old England.
Except that one day, three-and-a-half centuries later, I did go back to the shores my forebears fled, and to the very streets and halls where their strange hats and ideas once caused such consternation. You could almost say I have reversed the Pilgrim’s Progress, returning to the country that held my ancestors in contempt.
And what, I wonder, might they make of me? Am I an insult to all they stood for and endured? Does my return to the very institutions that pronounced my ancestors traitors make me a traitor to them? One autumn afternoon in London, I rose from a row of seats to pace a little, nervous before an audition. Allowing myself to take in the room, I eventually found I was staring at a wall with a single plain wood framed sign. It read:
Goodness that preaches undoes itself.
It wasn’t a surprise to find a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson in this hall. It was, after all, a Friends Meeting House that only happened to be booked that day for auditions. But the self-consciousness the quote stirred in me was seriously unsettling. At that moment I was collecting myself to perform a few arias for a small panel of strangers in the next room and trying to ignore the woman who’d just emerged smiling triumphantly. I certainly wasn’t looking for a moral debate.
Only a few months before, I’d performed a kind of genealogical recital, charting my ancestor’s journey from the shores of New England along the Oregon Trail. I knew how difficult it was to join up these worlds of song and spiritual self-examination. It proved virtually impossible to tell a story of Quakers with music, or at least with their own music, since there is little or no music in their threadbare tradition. Their emphasis on plainness and self-guided introspection was, in fact, entirely at odds with the spontaneous theatrical work of exploration and particularly with the world of opera.
Now, in the midst of fashioning my own voice to ring in exuberant, ambitious, artistic endeavour, I am engulfed in a swirl of dry porridge oats from which a familiar, be-hatted figure emerges. His cheerful smile is replaced by a scowl. He holds up an admonishing finger, then cups his ear and listens for that ‘still, small voice’ through which God spoke to Elijah. I realise I have smuggled him back to England in my head, my own vigilant, questioning Quaker.
So, my career as an opera singer had brought me to Europe and eventually to settle in England where, like a moth to a flame, I moved unerringly to the heart of the establishment. Consider, for example, the English Choral Tradition, one of the most cherished, recognisable institutions of Great Britain, like the Queen’s head on a stamp or a Brit villain in a Hollywood film. Wherever you look, there they are, the robed rows singing as if with one crystalline voice. In the three-month soundtrack of Christmas, ancient hymns and carols share playlists with jazz and pop classics, and through it all, the lone, piping voice of the chorister calls to us in the hotel lounge, in airport bars, and in relentlessly festive miles of shopping malls.
How then did it come to pass that an American possessed by a permanently disapproving Quaker should find herself entrusted with this most conformist of all traditions, conducting a choir in the art of Plainchant, coaching the rounded vowels of Received Pronunciation in the mouths of Cathedral Choristers, and the woman to whom members of Cathedral Chapter rose out of respect when she entered the room?
On the last day of January 2020 two Chinese nationals staying at an aparthotel in York tested positive for Coronavirus and became the first known cases in the UK. Ten days later, a man in Brighton was found to have the virus after attending a conference in Singapore. He had stopped off at a ski resort in France before returning to Sussex. The term ‘superspreader’ was taken up around this time. On 14th March the UK death toll from the virus reached 21. There was controversy around the government’s apparent aim to achieve ‘herd immunity’ in the population. On the same day, UK retailers jointly issued a statement calling on the public not to panic buy products such as pasta, toilet paper and hand sanitiser.
Confirmation comes via his daughter Anna that Alastair’s 60th birthday party is going ahead after all. A ring around of friends reveals that two camps are forming already: the sombre voices that say, “Well, we’re not going. You know what it’ll be like – everybody crammed together talking, laughing, hugging too probably. I think we’ve got to take this thing seriously.” And the other camp, that we find ourselves in, who say … well, nothing, but who think (maybe): “Oh come on, life is full of risks. Do you mean you’re really going to stop seeing people, douse yourself in Dettol and stay indoors 24 hours a day?”
Nevertheless, this division has left us feeling uncomfortable, as if we were being judged for moral slackness.
To the Ropetackle, Shoreham, with Carla and Stuart, to see Danish acoustic duo Andreas Tophøj and Rune Barslund. In the bar beforehand, I get a call from Dave D. It’s hard to hear him for the babble of voices but, he has his serious voice on and he’s saying something about Cornwall and rising infection rates. I go behind a pillar and cup my hand over my other ear. I wonder why he’s phoned to tell me this, then realise what he’s saying: we have to abandon our trip there in June. I’m taken aback, but there’s no point arguing about it now. This is an over-reaction, surely? The booking’s confirmed and we probably won’t get our money back. Çi’s 60th birthday surprise aborted too. For what? It’s not as if we’d be mingling with the inhabitants of West Penwith – in our splendid isolation at Two Chimneys, the nearest other house 200 metres away. Why is everyone getting so panicky so quickly?
We’re looking across the channel (which has grown a lot wider since the start of the year) at what’s going on in Europe. Italy, in particular, because of our friends in the north. I’m struck by the extraordinary notion that you could tell an entire population to stay at home. Italians aren’t exactly famous for following the diktats of central government, yet from what we hear, they are doing just that (apart from the initial exodus from north to south when the stay-at-home message was first announced). People here seem very worked up about the situation, though the number of cases has been far fewer (21 deaths so far, I believe). This must have a lot to do with social media and 24-hour rolling news encouraging mass anxiety. Even we have had to stop ourselves from compulsively checking the latest updates, though in Çi’s case there’s a practical reason: she’s supposed to be flying to Istanbul next Friday.
Currently, flights to and from the UK are allowed; but by then, who knows? Her parents are being quite sensible about it: they aren’t worried about her bringing them the virus, but about her not being able to get back home afterwards – an improbable scenario I’d have thought. Many of her Turkish friends are more panicky (and silly, I think) – scores of WhatsApp messages flying back and forth congratulating each other on making their children wear face masks and self-isolate (!), and telling her, rather sanctimoniously, not to come, or that she’ll have to go into quarantine for a fortnight if she does (she’s only staying for a week). And there’ve been just five cases in the whole of the country!
To Al’s party, which is reassuringly crowded with old friends apparently determined to carry on as normal. Or perhaps like us they find the idea of leaving him high and dry on his 60th birthday with trays of unfilled glasses more troubling than any supposed risk to health. Greetings are shy and hesitant at first: should we hug or not? In the end most people do, laughing at this novel (and absurd) restraint. It feels like a necessary expression of solidarity, and something like defiance.
When I squeeze my way across the kitchen, which is elbow-to-elbow with the younger set, voices already raised beyond any hope of meaningful conversation, the first person I see is Paul S. I barely know him, but he greets me like a dear long-lost friend, and after a perfunctory exchange of shrugs, comes over and embraces me. The press of bodies is even denser when, later in the evening, Al takes up a position in the hall and in his best teacher’s voice makes a speech of welcome and thanks that carries into both reception rooms and to the back of their long kitchen. He warns us that he’s sure to cry, but doesn’t; his voice is steady and the speech is funny, warm and generous and our laughter heartfelt.
Sadness too is acknowledged, and it’s there on the faces of everyone listening, because this is also a speech of farewell. It’s nearly seven years since Sue died; the family home is up for sale now and Al has already re-located to County Durham, where he was born and brought up. I realise we may never see these rooms again and look around me at the faces of people we’ve known since the mid-nineties, whom we’ve met here at so many parties, only because of him and Sue. Sadness and the pain of loss are not driven out by present happiness, they co-mingle, and we still laugh but more seriously.
We’re here – some of us, anyway – for the last time, holding our glasses, smiling and listening intently, knowing the sad back story and wondering what she’d have made of all this. Our grown-up children. Party and plague. And this leave-taking.
Later, Çi tells me she didn’t try any of the food after she saw some of the younger guests eating straight out of the dishes with their forks.
I learn that the fear of crowds has a name: it’s called enochlophobia. Well, now at last enochlophobes around the world can come out (or rather, stay in) and say, with pride, This is our time!
I wake thinking about my barber, Luigi. A chain of associations lasting barely a second: wash hair? Did it. Length all right now. Luigi. A week ago, I was sitting begowned in one of his chairs while he snipped, combed and explained the rationale behind the Italian government’s severe measures restricting movement and forbidding gatherings. “It’s the only way to limit the effects. Really, Martyn. It’s what the British government should be doing now. And they probably will be doing it in another week or two.” He told me about a Facetime conversation with a friend in Turin, an exhausted doctor who had described the pressure they were under at his hospital, the shortage of beds and ventilators, the sight of people struggling for breath and even dying because they couldn’t be helped. At the time, I was still in my ‘Isn’t this all rather an overreaction?’ phase, wondering if Luigi’s vehemence was emotion overcoming reason. After all, his salon was still open, he was still cutting and styling a stream of customers from all over the town, any of whom might have the virus. And today, it comes to me: He will be closed now, for sure. I remember how he gently brushed my shoulders and the little exchange of amity that flowed between us, a blend of affection and regard that has developed over the last couple of years.
What are the implications for him of closing the salon? Most salon owners rent out chairs to other freelance stylists, but Luigi employs them and pays their salaries, including the young man who sweeps up and cleans the washbasins. Now they will be looking to him to be a caring boss and he, presumably, will be looking to a caring Chancellor.
It occurs to me that in a crisis like this (except there has never been a crisis like this before) the citizenry project ‘parent’ on to a leader, and will look to them, listen to them for paternal guidance. Habitual scorn gives way to something like respectful attention: You know best. You will tell us what to do. And leaders play the role: Boris Johnson wears a new, grave expression at the press briefings, standing at a lectern with the stark label nhs.uk/coronavirus on it. He is flanked by equally grave experts like Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance (no need for scornful quotes around that word ‘experts’ now!). Gone are the wisecracks, the buffoonery: the lids of the PM’s already hooded eyes are now steeple-sloped. The language too is dignified and grave to match the face: “a profound sense of urgency” “do whatever it takes to support…” “thousands of brilliant officials already working round the clock” and most of all, “We must act like any wartime government”. Much has been made of Johnson’s identification with his hero, Churchill, a comparison that’s inevitably evoked mockery from his opponents (us included); ironic, then, that so soon into his Premiership he seems to be having his Churchillian moment. Will he be equal to it?
On the Today programme the Business Secretary Alok Sharma adds detail to that “whatever it takes …”: £350 billion in loans to help companies, mortgage ‘holidays’, £20 billion in other aid. Vertiginous figures that take us back to the Labour Manifesto last December. But this time’s no one’s jeering that it’s all pie in the sky. Rather, they are saying, “What about renters? What about freelancers? And could you make those loans grants instead?” It’s a reminder of what many of us felt during the financial crisis of 2008 — what a strange thing money is. Nothing runs without it and yet it has no material existence – it’s an idea, a promise, an act of faith. Where exactly are these billions that will be disbursed? Will they be taken from somewhere else? Will the Chinese lend it to us at swingeing interest rates? Or will we raid the piggy bank of future generations? They won’t know after all – and we’ll be dead anyway. Is that how it works?
I do a quick inventory of my symptoms this morning: headache (medium to mild), discomfort and pressure in the nose and around the eyes (suggestive of sinusitis), nausea, the runs (mild). None of which are associated with Coronavirus. But I’m chesty too (no cough yet) which is slightly more troubling. At 10.30am I’m lying on the bed with my eyes closed, feeling already weary – not quite ill, but not quite well either. Decide that this is slacking and won’t do at all. Jump up and start the miserable process of trying again to resolve the cooker replacement problem. Find a number on the D&G website and phone with no expectation at all that anyone will answer. The normal rules of civil life are suspended; hardly anyone’s going to work; there’s panic buying in the supermarkets; troops may be called in: why should someone pick up the phone to answer a complaint about domestic appliance insurance? To my great surprise someone does.
My daughter Melis phones. She tells me she walked or ran 11 miles yesterday. And she’s still going in to work but avoiding public transport. We talk about empty shelves in the shops; she says it’s patchy in London, then switches to Facetime to show me live streaming of a Turkish shop in Hackney where there are abundant supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables and dairy products. But she’s surprised to see how many people are still travelling on buses and sitting in cafes. A popular take-away pizza place she passes still has its usual queue of people outside stretching along the pavement.
Take a morning walk down Elm Grove and experience a small sense of triumph at being able to buy a cinnamon bun from Flour Pot. But they’re no longer functioning as a sit-down café – the tables inside are gone and the queue for take-away feels more tense and urgent than usual (or is that my imagination?). Hilly Laine, the whole food grocer further down, still has a pretty good selection of fresh produce on the lean-to stall outside. The proprietor doesn’t encourage conversation, but today I risk a question. “Supplies still coming in all right?” He is only slightly more forthcoming than usual, and when I ask for a carton of oatmilk, he says “What – only one? Most people are buying whole multi-packs!” Then to the bottom of the road, where Luigi has his salon. To my surprise he is still there, clearly visible through the plate glass window, cutting someone’s hair. He sees me and beckons me in. We talk in Italian (it seems more discreet and I’m aware the pudgy red-faced man in the chair looking at us in the mirror).
Me: I’m surprised to find you still open.
Luigi: Believe me, I would prefer to close and I should close but, look, all the other barbers in the area are still open. If I close now, my customers will think, ‘Ah, Luigi’s infected!’
On the BBC News website the first six stories are all Corona-related. They range from the very sombre “EU seals borders” to the inadvertently comical, like “Gin distillery switches production to hand sanitiser”. (Come to think of it, we have no hand sanitiser but have four half-full bottles of gin. We might be reduced to washing our hands with the stuff.) Another troubling headline: “What are supermarkets doing about panic buying?” Yesterday my sister told me a cheering story about a young female employee at her local M&S coming up to her and saying discreetly, “Would you like some toilet rolls?” “What’s all this about toilet rolls,” my sister replied, innocently. “Oh, I don’t know, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it!” said the girl, “But I can get you some if you like.” And she went behind the scenes and brought out four rolls for her.
An email pings into my inbox announcing the cancellation of the entire Brighton Festival. I pause to try to digest the enormity of that alone, for so many people in so many organisations. My imagination fails me.
I sit on the bed going through what documents and information we might need for the telephone appointment about our wills. Find a list I made of the music I’d like played at my funeral (which will not feature in the consultation!) Rewrite it and feel rather pleased with the resulting balance of dark and less dark. The Sanctus from Fauré’s Requiem, Crossing the Bar by the Spooky Men’s Chorale, Out of this World by Loudon Wainwright III, Now until the break of day from the last part of Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Passacaglia della Vita by Stefano Landi – an upbeat and spirited memento mori that chimes with the times. I think I’d like it played at the end, as mourners are filing out looking forward to that first drink –
O come t’inganni
Se pensi che gli anni
Non hanno a finire
Bisogna morire
Bisogna morire, bisogna morire
It could be printed in the order of service, with a translation. It’s quite an earworm, so perhaps some of them will sing it again later and stop feeling so damned smug about having outlived me.
I text Melis and Kerim to ask for their consent to be executors. They are uncharacteristically prompt in their replies (affirmative of course). I wonder if the request, which came out of the blue (are they even familiar with the concept of ‘executor’?), set them wondering about our mortality, or theirs?
We all think about death and how it will be to die. Don’t we? It was certainly a major preoccupation when I was young. But then it was less about dread and more about curiosity and fascination. There were periods I thought a great deal about suicide. I don’t believe I ever got close to the act itself, but there was that sense that it was always there, in the dark recesses of a drawer, like an insurance policy you hope and trust you will never need to claim on.
I picture 33 Palmeira Mansions this morning – in darkness, its doors locked. The English Language Centre, where I worked for more than 17 years, which, apart from Christmas holidays, has been open continuously since 1964. And wonder about the fate of most of its teachers, the long-term temps who keep the place running. I suppose the Chief Executive and Board of Governors will try to keep on as many as they can, doing some tuition through an online learning platform on courses that were interrupted by Covid 19. But what chance of new enrolments in the present climate of anxiety and financial insecurity? For them or for any business that depends on international travel?
Çi told me yesterday that Pret à Manger are offering free coffee to NHS workers. Not to be outdone, Dominoes have upped the stakes with an offer of free pizza.
She speaks of her concern about the little OT kitchen at the hospital, which she and her colleagues cram into at lunchtime, and the inconsistencies in the whole notion of self-isolation and social distancing. Health workers can’t avoid contact with patients or with colleagues who are caring for patients, can’t know whether they are bringing the virus in to the hospital or carrying it out with them when they go home. If they self-isolate because they have symptoms, they put extra pressure on the service bringing it closer to collapse; but if they go in to work and do indeed have the virus they will infect more patients and colleagues also bringing the service closer to collapse!
Currently the practice of social distancing seems beyond most of us: at Flour Pot the counter is about three feet from the door, and about four feet from the shop window with the display of bread. Yesterday our small queue was squeezed into a quarter of the area of the shop. A tall man next to me whom I took an instinctive dislike to (there was a certain swagger to him) poked about amongst the bread, wrapped and unwrapped. A woman in the queue recognised him and they started chatting. “Of course, you’ve had it, haven’t you?” she said. The man smirked complacently. “Yeah, you could say I was an early adopter. Not exactly pleasant – I mean I couldn’t have run up Elm Grove, let’s put it like that – but got over it pretty quickly.”
I left the shop with a large brown sourdough – unusually for me, the plastic-wrapped variety.
All the retailers expect you to pay contactless now. I would have tutted inwardly at that, only a few days ago, but there are higher priorities now than holding on (literally) to the material expressions of our national, fiscal and cultural identity. Presumably this will only hasten the death of cash (‘real money’), which is already ailing and about as salient in the lives of most millennials as fountain pens or CDs. Before long, our legal tender will be relegated to the status of collectors’ item, like first-day cover postage stamps.
No evidence of panic buying at Infinity Foods: millet, mung beans, freekeh and keffir don’t yet provoke fighting in the aisles. There’s still an abundance of grains and pulses and the sort of produce you can’t, try as you might, ever imagine turning into actual food.
So what to do next? No more brain stuff, please, like writing or reading or listening attentively to yet another speculative studio discussion about the behaviour of pandemics or the aims of the Chancellor’s multi-billion-pound rescue package. Will this be the day when yet more stringent social distancing measures are introduced? Perhaps I should get outside for a walk while the getting is good? But grey skies and cold wind discourage. Maybe later. Clean the house? It certainly needs it. But no… it doesn’t feel quite urgent enough. Cooking? Always a good distraction with a clear end-result. I inspect the scarred, battered aubergines, flaccid courgettes and three spongy potatoes I got at Infinity and decide it should be a moussaka, of sorts. Then recall that’s a baked dish and we don’t have an oven. Bad luck it didn’t get fixed before all this malarkey. If the planned delivery of the new cooker on Monday is aborted, we could be like this for months: four gas burners but no roasting or baking. Scarcely a hardship in the current circumstances, and perhaps a spur to more creative cookery. Or should we just give in and get a microwave and live on ready meals, assuming we can find any?
At midday the post plops onto the hall mat: Occupational Therapy News and the Tate Members’ Guide for April-May. The latter is a puzzle since my membership lapsed last month and all the Tate Galleries have been closed to the public. I expect to find inside the envelope an insert saying BECAUSE OF THE NEW MEASURES ARISING FROM THE COVID-19 VIRUS… but nothing. Just the pre-planned events, like the massive Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern, Aubrey Beardsley at Tate Britain and Naum Gabo at Tate St Ives, none of which – perhaps – will ever be seen. I suppose it was too late to stop the mail out. Or did they think, “Oh well, at least let them read wistfully about what they would have been able to enjoy”?
I try to imagine the Director, Maria Balshaw, at this very moment. What is she doing? Not at home making chutney for sure. Perhaps she’s chairing a crisis meeting with the management teams of the various arms of the vast organisation; or if that’s not socially distant enough, at her desk in London taking call after agitated call from staff, artists, curators and patrons and having to repeat patiently to each the same words, “We don’t know yet, how or when…”.
P.M. The young woman at MW Solicitors, Brighton, emails to call off the telephone appointment to re-do our wills, saying she is going home because she feels unwell. “I don’t think it’s anything serious, but…etc.” Asks if we could do it next week instead. I wonder if I might go and die in the meantime with Kerim still not named in my will.
Churches are closed and services are being live-streamed via Facebook. Even God is online these days. As part of a national day of prayer and action, The Archbishop of Canterbury has asked people to place a lighted candle in their windows at 7pm. As I do so, I peer up and down Whippingham Road: the street is silent and deserted: only lines of parked cars like hibernating tortoises. No one will see our lit candle; and we will not go out and see anybody else’s. Does a gesture, a ritual have meaning, even if no one else witnesses it? (It is the branch falling unheard in the forest problem.) It has meaning, presumably, if God sees it.
And we see our own flame if we glance up from our screens or books, and are soothed vaguely by its corona of hazy light against the black window pane. Corona again. That word. The long association between religious worship and candles. Light bulbs and LEDs don’t do it. It’s the business of lighting them and the fact they burn down or can be snuffed out, or blown out suddenly by a puff of wind: the symbolism of all that.
Febrile is the obvious word to reach for when trying to convey the current mood. Too obvious, perhaps. I think we should reserve it for its literal meaning, Having or showing the symptoms of a fever. From Latin febris ‘fever’. It’s too useful now to waste in mere metaphor. For now, let’s use agitated to describe the state of mind where most of us are almost continuously texting, emailing, WhatsApping, Facetiming and even, God help us, Facebooking each other to share feelings, opinions and questions about this strange new reality and finding ourselves suddenly in the blinding spotlight of history. Thirty years ago we would have had the telephone in the hall, or if we were less fortunate the telephone box at the end of the street. Or we’d have written a letter!
Talking of words, how quickly we’ve got used to the vocabulary of this crisis: self-isolation; social distancing, hand sanitiser, ventilators, key workers, non-essential contact. At the end of every year, Oxford Dictionaries announce their choice of the word which is “judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year and to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance.” In 2019 it was climate emergency, in 2018 toxic, in 2016 post-truthand in 2015, scandalously, the face with tears of joy emoji. Not hard to guess the candidates for 2020. Unless of course we have more profound social and economic shocks still to come that will spawn their own neologisms.
I notice that ‘herd immunity’ has already been quietly dropped from public discourse as policy moves at an ever-quickening pace. Fated perhaps to be a phrase that was ‘famous for fifteen minutes’.
8.30pm. The Prime Minster addresses the nation on television. It’s estimated that 23 million people watch the broadcast. We are all ‘enlisted’, he says, in the fight against the virus. Military metaphors abound in discussions of this crisis, which is hardly surprising.
A few days ago I heard a commentator on the radio wonder, “Will the man who aspired to be a latter-day Churchill end up as a latter-day Chamberlain?” An easy hit, perhaps, but many will have had the same thought. Tonight, there was no air of appeasement towards Covid-19; it was the anticipated “stay at home” message and the assurance of sanctions to enforce it. But already there are mutterings: They should have done this two weeks ago!
Has a population in a modern democratic society ever before been commanded not to go out and not to associate with others?
The awareness that you are living through not just history (that’s always true) but one of history’s chapter titles.
Peter Hennessy interviewed on the radio a few days ago thought that in the future we will divide this period of history into BC and AC.
Another word ‘new to prominence’ is going the rounds: lockdown.
A couple of days ago all the Apple stores closed. I lay in bed this morning thinking, Now Çiğdem won’t be able to replace the dying battery in her phone (to which she is as attached as a pacemaker to an arrythmic heart); and then – My God, Capitalism has stopped!
Anxiously waiting for Hotpoint to phone back about the replacement cooker delivery which was aborted on Monday. Then realising This is pathetic! The leader of the nation announces a state of emergency and a cessation of almost all economic and recreational activity (something my parents never experienced even during the Second World War) and here I am fretting about a faulty cooker. So much for unworldly detachment! So much for ‘the years that bring the philosophic mind’!
When my grandchildren ask me “What did you do in the Great Pandemic, grandpa?” I shall have to say, “Well, I spent most of it on the phone to Hotpoint/Whirlpool Home Delivery concerning the replacement of a dual fuel cooker under the Domestic & General Appliance Cover Plan. It involved a degree of stress you young people can barely imagine. Hey, steady on – save a few of those wild roots and berries for your poor old grandpa!”
It’s sunny spring weather for the first day of the ‘lockdown’. Yesterday’s cold wind has softened to a cool breeze. I change from winter to spring anorak for my walk up to Whitehawk Hill. There’s a hazy line where the sea meets the sky – a sfumato effect that conveys tranquillity. (Why does it?) Below, the bowl in the landscape that contains Whitehawk. From up here, on the side of this hill, basking in the afternoon sunshine, it belies its fearsome reputation. There are plenty of walkers out in ones, twos, small groups (‘members of the same household’) but the space is wide as we pass on the strip of grass that runs alongside the racetrack. Seagulls glide easily on the air currents keening urgent messages not for the likes of us. The crows are raucous and cross-sounding, absorbed in their own drama. The thought comes to me: Nature is ‘taking back control’.
Here on this grassy bank beside Manor Road, sitting on an old concrete post with a metal plaque on it that reads: RACE GROUND 105 • 0 • 30, I am almost alone. Today feels like a bank holiday, but one taken on credit which will have to be paid off with interest. I read again the information board about Whitehawk Camp, a ‘causewayed enclosure’ dating back to the Neolithic age. It’s 500 years older than Stonehenge. I can’t read the estimated date because it’s obliterated by a huge smear of dried seagull shit. At that moment a young couple pass me (at a safe distance) descending the hill, and I hear him say to the girl, Shitehawk Hill!
People are still working out the rules and rituals of social distancing. When you pass someone on a pavement, (as I just did on Freshfield Road, with a man who smiled amiably and returned my greeting), it’s a challenge to maintain the two metres of distance without walking into the road. You don’t want to scare the other person by getting too close nor incur a risk yourself; on the other hand, there is a powerful taboo against veering away from someone to give them a wide berth. It implies I don’t like the look of you and feels like shunning, which is such a negative behaviour. So you slow down, step aside, smile in a way you hope looks reassuring and walk in the gutter.
Walking out into this familiar neighbourhood aware that strange new conditions and behaviours prevail here. A Day of the Triffids atmosphere –
‘It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that “it can’t happen here” — that one’s own time and place is beyond cataclysm.’
The few people I see are quiet and compliant. Outside Flour Pot I’m in a queue of one – in front of me a woman and her toddler are being served bread while I wait outside pulling faces for the child with goldilocks curls who is clutching a teddy bear, smiling back and pointing at something I can’t see. The mother turns and smiles at me too, apologises for keeping me waiting. Naturally I smile back and say it doesn’t matter at all and isn’t it all so strange? Inside the bakery: PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE COUNTER and WE NOW SELL EGGS. The girl behind the counter (which is now doubling as a defensive barrier) tries to interest me in their new range of preserves. I’m afraid I can’t concede yet that there’s a place in this world for strawberry and black pepper jam.
Much the same at Hilly Laine: a woman waiting on the pavement beside a palette stacked high with tins and packets wrapped in thick polythene sheeting. The quantity is reassuring – more there than I can imagine them ever accommodating in that tiny shop. I stand behind her at what I judge to be a respectable distance. We nod at each other, and she says, with an endearing embarrassment: “We’re compliant, aren’t we!”
A quiet triumph in small purchases: one head of broccoli, one red pepper, four spindly carrots.
The stream of analgesic pop on Co-op Store Radio is interrupted from time to time by a young voice with an uncharacteristically moralistic message for us customers: “Think of others before you buy. Let’s pull together for our community!”
The rest of the morning spent attempting to navigate the Mutual Aid Covid-19 Facebook groups for this community: scores of posts on the Hanover/ Elm Grove page, even more replies to posts, links to useful sites, free online concerts, photos, home videos, kids’ artwork, offers of free sausage rolls and gluten-free flour. An abundance of goodwill, but I left it feeling overwhelmed. Wanting someone simply to say, “Look, this is how you can help…”
A new awareness of just what little space many of our public spaces afford. Retailers conscientiously attempt to mark it out with tape on the floor, improvised barriers of string.
When I got my turn to go the check-out, a bizarre ritual ensued: the cashier said, “Put your basket down and I’ll step back.” Then, “Now you step back and I’ll scan the items.” Then, “I’ll step back and you pack the shopping.” Then, “How do you want to pay? Contactless? OK, I’ll step back and you pay with your card.” Then, “Do you want a receipt?” I said yes and he handed it to me, both of us breaching the cordon sanitaire (and could I trust that receipt?) I say to him, “You’re doing a great job!” He smiles back with a kind of weary appreciation. I move off and notice that I’m scratching my eyebrow. I probably shouldn’t do that. Touching your face is discouraged. Perhaps soon it’ll even be proscribed. I try to imagine the policing of that. Probably the Chinese have got it nailed already.
A bus pulls up at the bottom of Elm Grove. It’s habitual for people to huddle quite close as they wait to board, and the driver is exposed to all of them. This one turns his head and sneezes loudly, twice. Fortunately, in the other direction, through his cab window.
The sudden salience of hand hygiene in our daily lives. A ritual purification that looks like becoming as habitual for us as Wudhu before prayer is for Muslims. I think of the Co-op door handle I touched, the handles of the plastic shopping basket I used and left behind for the next customer. Back home I wash my hands slowly and carefully as instructed. Then hang up my house keys and think, ‘Oh, maybe they’re contaminated, and I should wash them too. And then wash my hands again. And what about my mobile phone?’ The next minute I’m at the sink wiping it with a piece of wettened kitchen roll. A smear of water slides under the protective plastic screen, spreading out like a contagion. “Water damage!” I think. The same thing that caused my last phone to be written off, barely a month ago.
Chalk graffiti on the wall outside the General Hospital on Elm Grove. Large well-formed letters, no spelling mistakes: THANKS SO MUCH TO ALL OUR AMAZING NHS WORKERS XXX. Slightly undermined for me by the PS – STAY SAFE SHARE THE LOVE
Back on Race Hill watching the corvids (another strange lexical affinity!). It’s their terrain now, not ours. We have become the untenable tenants here. Perhaps before much longer we shall be evicted. Those strutting crows remember Whitehawk Camp, the Causewayed Enclosure, back in Neolithic times. They had the same two integral tools then – beak and claw – as today. We have rather more, and hope that they will enable us to go on living.
The Coronavirus is now By Royal Appointment: the heir to the throne has tested positive.
I should have started earlier in collecting news headlines about the crisis. Two from today:
How to Carry On Dating When You’re Social Distancing
Argentina Makes Tooth Fairy Exempt From Lockdown.
I get another automated text from Park Crescent Health Centre saying, with more than a hint of alarm: DO NOT COME TO THE SURGERY! It’s like our cooker saga, but with your mind and body as the faulty appliance you can’t get fixed.
The sparrows are in a state of high excitement in front and back gardens, cheeping and squabbling. Another week or two and the cherry tree next door will be in bloom. I find a sunny spot in the back garden and sit there drinking in the prettiness of the spring, and realise I could spend the whole day writing about this alone.
Mutual Aid Brighton phone me about an old lady in the neighbourhood who is frail and self-isolating, who needs a bit of shopping. The caller warns me that she’s very deaf. I can’t for the moment think how they got my number, whose list I am on and for what, but am glad to have the chance to help. She is very deaf, and I have to bellow (though her voice remains soft and modulated throughout).
To my surprise, there is only a very short queue in the Co-op and – small miracle – I succeed in getting everything she asked for (a poignantly short list of items for a stew “that will last me the week”.) Her name is Margaret and she lives in one of the flats in Langbridge Court. I buzz her number to be let into the building. There’s what looks like an office inside but away from the public behind two walls of glass – a woman at a desk looking into a computer screen. Nothing resembling a reception area. I take the lift to a first-floor corridor and find the right door. A small plastic bag with the money in it is on the floor as arranged. As I set the bag of shopping down I catch a glimpse of her in the doorway – a woman in a dressing gown and slippers, wild white hair loose to her shoulders, a walking stick in one hand, the other holding a handkerchief over her mouth (no protection against Covid-19 of course but a gesture meant to reassure both of us perhaps). There’s a brief exchange of words and thanks; I’m not sure if she hears me. I wonder what state her flat is in. She told me on the phone that she sleeps a lot of the day.
Returning home up Whippingham Road I walk into the road to give space to a man and small child coming down. He acknowledges this with a smile and thanks. I notice that the postman is at the top of our steps and, encouraged by the conviviality that has arisen between strangers negotiating this peculiar new reality of social distancing, I greet him cheerfully. I’m about to say, “You’re doing a great job!” – as I said to the check-out person at the Co-op yesterday – but as I draw near, he shouts, “Stay there! Let me come down!” I stop dead, “Oh I was only going to…” He looks panicked. “I’m doing a job here – you need to let me pass!” He’s holding a large padded envelope in his hand, too large for our letter box perhaps. “Yes, I know, it’s just that I live here and I thought perhaps that packet was for me.”
“Well, it isn’t! I need space to pass!”
Afterwards I reflect that perhaps it’s a sign the government message is sinking in: stay at home, or if you do have to go out, keep a distance of 2 metres between you and the next person (the postman was demanding 12 metres). Last week there were news stories about people gathering in parks and beauty spots, on beaches and camp sites to socialise and enjoy the unexpected ‘holiday’.
Max Hastings interviewed on The World at One (BBC Radio 4). Chiding his (our) generation who have been the most privileged in history and yet have been selfish, fighting against any encroachment on that privilege (resisting paying for TV licences after the age of 75 and not wanting to contribute to the cost of our old age care). He warns of the terrible economic impact of the measures being taken for the next generation and the one after. In his view, economic activity has to be resumed as soon as possible, for their sake, even if it imperils him and his age group (70 +). I don’t lie awake at night thinking about me or my wife, or about us dying – I think about what we’re bequeathing or not bequeathing to our children and our grandchildren, and I’m terrified. There’s a cost for everything and the cost of this is stupendous. But we’re a very sentimental people; the compassion culture has taken hold; we don’t face the fact that all these stupendous sums of spending that are coming up… they’ve got to be paid for by somebody!
Flour Pot have started selling flowers. Well, just tulips – yellow, mauve, lipstick red, standing in metal buckets on the terrace outside the shop. I buy a bunch for Julia and a miniature carrot cake in a miniature cardboard box, and a small sourdough loaf for us. It comes to £13.40. Are they profiteering from the situation? Are those tulips a discounted buy-out from some poor florist who’s had to close? Julia is stuck at home because of her cancer diagnosis, hoping to keep her appointment on Friday about starting chemo. Or hoping not to.
I knock at her door and quickly retreat to the other side of the road. She appears in her dressing gown (is that the new wig she’s wearing?). I shout across, explaining the box and the flowers; she looks disorientated and not entirely pleased. Walking back, I wonder if I have misjudged: perhaps she can’t eat sweet things, and flowers have that association with sickness and hospitals. Perhaps she doesn’t want to be reminded of that right now.
8.00. The clap for the NHS in streets and squares all over the country. I’d been dubious about this, I admit: ‘This may be fine in Naples or Barcelona, but it’s just not British.’ In the event we both went out onto our step and, sure enough, Whippingham Road, which has been deathly quiet all week, came alive with neighbours, all of us looking up and down our street, applauding, cheering, whistling, full of wonder at seeing it behave so out of character. And of course, a lump came to my throat.
The tourism body VisitBrighton has changed the name on its Twitter account to DoNotVisitBrighton. Some wag has added the comment “StayAtHove”.
Before work, Çi takes advantage of the early shopping hour for NHS and care-workers. She reports afterwards that the lines were ragged and it was impossible to maintain the required distance (“People don’t even realise what 2 metres is!”). Also, of course, shoppers have to queue down the aisles to get to the checkouts, and there are two problems with that: first, others still filling their baskets have to squeeze past to take goods from the shelves; second, the little gap at the end of the aisle, which must be left clear for others to pass, provides an opportunity for the ruthless to sneak in and jump the queue. Which is exactly what happened.
Breakthrough of a sort on the cooker front. The new appliance is to be delivered today.
I had to declare that no-one in the house is self-isolating. (How could they check?). But because of the new restrictions they’re not going to connect it. That means we’ll have two cookers in our small kitchen, one partly functional the other still in its packaging. But – another small miracle – Çi has found a gas engineer, the partner of a colleague in her team of OTs and OT Assistants, who is willing to do it, willing, presumably, to bend the rules and perhaps risk his own health. On the phone to him I expressed my worry about how we’ll dispose of the old appliance. “Oh, it shouldn’t be a problem,” he says breezily. “Can you give me a hand?” “Oh. Yes, of course.”
Why did I say that? The thing is monstrous – it must weigh a ton. There are seven steps from the front door to the pavement; there are steps inside the house. I’m a ten-stone weakling of 71 and I’ve already got lower back pain. What am I thinking of?
Email to customers from Henry Butler Wine Cellar, sounding frazzled. They’re not taking any more orders online until next week. “My team need to catch up, go shopping, speak to family, rest and recuperate this weekend. Their well-being is my priority.” The tone is almost resentful. “You bunch of selfish wine bibbers – is that all you can think about – guzzling another bottle of my Albino Rocca Barbaresco Cotta (£52.99)? Don’t you realise the pressures that wine retailers are under? Spare a thought for our delivery driver, risking his life to keep you pissed throughout this crisis.”
An interesting detail in the new government regulations about who can carry on trading and who can’t: a few days after the list was announced it was updated to include off-licenses. Instead of Let them eat cake, it’s Let them drink wine.
On World at One today the advice of a man who lives in isolation with his family on the island of Gometra in the Inner Hebrides. It’s all right, he said, to find yourself talking to a fence post or to the wind (and there’s a lot of wind on Gometra). He learnt this from his father who fought in The Falklands War and told him, “Down there on South Georgia it’s OK to talk to the penguins; the time to worry is when they start talking back to you.” He said of a day on Gometra that if you managed to accomplish one thing, then it counted as a good day. It’s all about adjusting expectations and pace. I thought: Now is the time, if ever there was, to draw on one’s reserves of those ancient virtues of patience, charity, forgiveness, humility, even cheerfulness (though not sure that’s one of the ancient ones). One can only hope not to open that particular cupboard and find the shelves bare.
It’s probably a good idea not to begin sentences (spoken or thought) with, “I wish….”
Çiğdem told me of an incident at the hospital when she was sitting in one of the wards writing up her notes. There was music playing over the loudspeakers and the song YMCA came on. At one point she glanced up and noticed that an elderly man in one of the beds opposite her was moving his arm up and down to the chorus –
It’s fun to stay at the YMCA,
It’s fun to stay at the YMCA
She smiled across, thinking “How nice. In spite of his situation he’s getting into the music, enjoying the rhythm…” But then she looked a little closer and realised all was not well. She jumped up and called the Ward Clerk, who called the duty nurse. The man was having a seizure. She assisted at the bedside but couldn’t do much more than open an oxygen mask and put it on the patient, while the nurse got to work.
After lunch, a semi-licit walk with my business partner, Peter, in Dyke Road Park. Much weaving and tacking to windward; I am the stricter, occasionally telling him to back off a bit. He is very much bereft of consolations: all his many activities – Saturday football, evenings at the pub, lunches out, U3A events and groups, his folk club night on Thursdays, visits to his friend Patti — all of it stopped! Not to mention our business, which occupied at least a third of his time. He’s not a great reader; true, he can watch TV, but it was sport he liked best and of course there’s none of that going on. To his credit he says, “Whenever I begin to feel sorry for myself, I think of that woman, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, stuck in an Iranian gaol, enduring goodness knows what. And I think, ‘if she can put up with that, then surely I can put up with self-isolation in a comfortable heated flat in Hove, with daily exercise, nice food to eat and wine to drink.’”
We find a bench in the sun and take it in turns to sit there. Presumably not good to touch a public bench. Do woolly gloves help? And when I come to a pedestrian crossing now, I press the button with the joint of my second finger (making a mental note to give that an extra scrub when I get back at home). I’m conscious that this is probably on the same level as throwing a pinch of spilt salt over your shoulder to catch the Devil in the eye and put him off his stride.
We discuss whether our publishing business will revive after this is over or whether the hit to international travel and tourism will be so hard and so sustained that we – as one tiny organism on a gigantic host – will just fade away unnoticed.
When I do get home there’s news that the Prime Minister has tested positive for the virus, as has the Health Secretary.
I wake thinking about my barber, Luigi. A chain of associations lasting barely a second: wash hair? Did it. Length all right now. Luigi. A week ago I was sitting begowned in one of his chairs while he snipped, combed and explained the rationale behind the Italian government’s severe measures restricting movement and forbidding gatherings. ‘It’s the only way to limit the effects. Really, Martyn. It’s what the British government should be doing now. And they probably will be doing it in another week or two.’ He told me about a Facetime conversation with a friend in Turin, an exhausted doctor who had described the pressure they were under at his hospital, the shortage of beds and ventilators, the sight of people struggle for breath and even dying because they couldn’t be helped. At the time, I was still in my ‘Isn’t this all rather an overreaction?’ phase, wondering if Luigi’s vehemence was emotion overcoming reason. After all, his salon was still open, he was still cutting and styling a stream of customers from all over the town, any of whom might have the virus. And today, it comes to me: He will be closed now, for sure. I remember how he gently brushed my shoulders and the little exchange of amity that flowed between us, a blend of affection and regard that has developed over the last couple of years.
What are the implications for him of closing the salon? Most hairdressers rent their chairs to other freelance stylists; Luigi pays their salaries, including the young man who sweeps up and cleans the washbasins. Now they will be looking to him to be a caring boss and he, presumably, will be looking to a caring Chancellor.
It occurs to me that in a crisis like this (except there has never been a crisis like this before) the citizenry project ‘parent’ on to a leader, will look to them, listen to them, the habitual scorn of even a month ago giving way to something like respectful attention: You know best. You will tell us what to do. And leaders play the role: Boris Johnson wears a new, grave expression at the press briefings, standing at a lectern with the stark label nhs.uk/coronavirus on it. He is flanked by equally grave experts like Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance (no need for scornful quotes around that word ‘experts’ now!). Gone are the wisecracks, the buffoonery: the lids of the PM’s already hooded eyes are now steeple-sloped. The language too is dignified and grave to match the face: ‘a profound sense of urgency’ ‘do whatever it takes to support…’ ‘thousands of brilliant officials already working round the clock’ and most of all, ‘We must act like any wartime government’. Much has been made of Johnson’s identification with his hero, Churchill, a comparison that’s inevitably evoked mockery from his opponents (us included); ironic, then, that so soon into his Premiership he seems to be having his Churchillian moment. Will he be equal to it?
On the Today programme the Business Secretary Alok Sharma adds detail to that ‘whatever it takes …’: £350 billion in loans to help companies, mortgage ‘holidays’, £20 billion in other aid. Vertiginous figures that take us back to the Labour Manifesto last December. But this time’s no one’s jeering that it’s all pie in the sky. Rather, they are saying, ‘What about renters? What about freelancers? And could you make those loans grants instead?’ It’s a reminder of what many of us felt during the financial crisis of 2008 – what a strange thing money is. Nothing runs without it and yet it has no material existence – it’s an idea, a promise, an act of faith. Where exactly are these billions that will be disbursed? Will they be taken from somewhere else? Will the Chinese lend it to us at swingeing interest rates? Or will we raid the piggy bank of future generations? They won’t know after all – and we’ll be dead anyway. Is that how it works?
I do a quick inventory of my symptoms this morning: headache (medium to mild), discomfort and pressure in the nose and around the eyes (suggestive of sinusitis), nausea, the runs (mild). None of which are associated with Coronavirus. But I’m chesty too (no cough yet) which is slightly more troubling. At 10.30am I’m lying on the bed with my eyes closed, feeling already weary – not quite ill, but not quite well either. Decide that this is slacking and won’t do at all. Jump up and start the miserable process of trying again to resolve the cooker replacement problem. Find a number on the D&G website and phone with no expectation at all that anyone will answer. The normal rules of civil life are suspended; hardly anyone’s going to work; there’s panic buying in the supermarkets; troops may be called in: why should someone pick up the phone to answer a complaint about domestic appliance insurance? To my great surprise someone does.
My daughter Melis phones. She tells me she walked or ran 11 miles yesterday. And she’s still going in to work, but avoiding public transport. We talk about empty shelves in the shops; she says it’s patchy in London, then switches to Facetime to show me live streaming of a Turkish shop in Hackney where there are abundant supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables and dairy products. But she’s surprised to see how many people are still travelling on buses and sitting in cafes. A popular take-away pizza place she passes still has its usual queue of people outside stretching along the pavement.
Take a morning walk down Elm Grove and experience a small sense of triumph at being able to buy a cinnamon bun from Flour Pot. But they’re no longer functioning as a sit-down café – the tables inside are gone and the queue for take-away feels more tense and urgent than usual (or is that my imagination?). Hilly Laine, the whole food grocer further down, still has a pretty good selection of fresh produce on the lean-to stall outside. I don’t usually say much to the taciturn proprietor, but today I attempt a little conversation about the crisis. ‘Supplies still coming in all right?’ He is only slightly more forthcoming than usual, and when I ask for a carton of oatmilk, he says ‘What – only one? Most people are buying whole multi-packs!’ But at least he is smiling (sort of). Then to the bottom of the road where Luigi has his salon. To my surprise he is still there, clearly visible through the plate glass window, cutting someone’s hair. He sees me and beckons me in. We talk in Italian (it seems more discreet and I’m aware the pudgy red-faced man in the chair looking at us in the mirror). ‘I’m surprised to find you still open,’ I say. ‘I ought to close,’ he says, ‘but all the other barbers round here are still open. If I put up a CLOSED sign, customers will think I’m infected!’
On the BBC News website the first six stories are all Corona-related. They range from the very sombre ‘EU seals borders’ to the inadvertently comical, like ‘Gin distillery switches production to hand sanitiser’. (Come to think of it, we have no hand sanitiser but have four half-full bottles of gin. We might be reduced to washing our hands with the stuff.) Another troubling headline: ‘What are supermarkets doing about panic buying?’ Yesterday my sister told me a cheering story about a young female employee at her local M&S coming up to her and saying discreetly, ‘Would you like some toilet rolls?’ ‘What’s all this about toilet rolls,’ my sister replied, innocently. ‘Oh, I don’t know, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it!’ said the girl, ‘But I can get you some if you like.’ And she went behind the scenes and brought out four rolls for her.
An email pings into my inbox announcing the cancellation of the entire Brighton Festival. I pause to try to digest the enormity of that alone, for so many people in so many organisations. My imagination fails me.
I sit on the bed going through what documents and information we might need for the telephone appointment about our wills. Find a list I made of the music I’d like played at my funeral (which will not feature in the consultation!) Rewrite it and feel rather pleased with the resulting balance of dark and less dark. The Sanctus from Fauré’s Requiem, Crossing the Bar by the Spooky Men’s Chorale, Out of this World by Loudon Wainwright III, Now until the break of day from the last part of Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Passacaglia della Vita by Stefano Landi – an upbeat and spirited memento mori that chimes with the times. I think I’d like it played at the end, as mourners are filing out looking forward to that first drink.
I text Melis and my son, Kerim, to ask for their consent to be executors. They are uncharacteristically prompt in their replies (affirmative of course). I wonder if the request, which came out of the blue (are they even familiar with the concept of ‘executor’?), set them wondering about our mortality, or theirs?
We all think about death and how it will be to die. Don’t we? It was certainly a major preoccupation when I was young. But then it was less about dread and more about curiosity and fascination. There were periods I thought a great deal about suicide. I don’t believe I ever got close to the act itself, but there was that sense that it was always there, in the dark recesses of a drawer, like an insurance policy you hope and trust you will never need to claim on.
I picture 33 Palmeira Mansions this morning – in darkness, its doors locked. The English Language Centre, where I worked for more than 17 years, which, apart from Christmas holidays, has been open continuously since 1964. And wonder about the fate of most of its teachers, the long-term temps who keep the place running. I suppose the Chief Executive and Board of Governors will try to keep on as many as they can, doing some tuition through an online learning platform on courses that were interrupted by Covid 19. But what chance of new enrolments in the present climate of anxiety and financial insecurity? For them or for any business that depends on international travel?
Çi told me yesterday that Pret à Manger are offering free coffee to NHS workers. Not to be outdone, Dominoes have upped the stakes with an offer of free pizza. She speaks of her concern about the little OT kitchen at the hospital, which she and her colleagues cram into at lunchtime, and the inconsistencies in the whole notion of self-isolation and social distancing. Health workers can’t avoid contact with patients or with colleagues who are caring for patients, can’t know whether they are bringing the virus in to the hospital or carrying it out with them when they go home. If they self-isolate because they have symptoms, they put extra pressure on the service bringing it closer to collapse; but if they go in to work and do indeed have the virus they will infect more patients and colleagues also bringing the service closer to collapse!
Currently the practice of social distancing seems beyond most of us: at Flour Pot the counter is about three feet from the door, and about four feet from the shop window with the display of bread. Yesterday our small queue was squeezed into a quarter of the area of the shop. A tall man next to me whom I took an instinctive dislike to (there was a certain swagger to him) poked about amongst the bread, wrapped and unwrapped. A woman in the queue recognised him and they started chatting. ‘Of course, you’ve had it, haven’t you?’ she said. The man smirked complacently. ‘Yeah, you could say I was an early adopter. Not exactly pleasant – I mean I couldn’t have run up Elm Grove, let’s put it like that – but got over it pretty quickly.’ I left the shop with a large brown sourdough – unusually for me, the plastic-wrapped variety.
All the retailers expect you to pay contactless now. I would have tutted inwardly at that, only a few days ago, but there are higher priorities now than holding on (literally) to the material expressions of our national, fiscal and cultural identity. Presumably this will only hasten the death of cash (‘real money’), which is already ailing and about as salient in the lives of most millennials as fountain pens or CDs. Before long, our legal tender will be relegated to the status of collectors’ item, like first-day cover postage stamps.
No evidence of panic buying at Infinity Foods: millet, mung beans, freekeh and kefir don’t yet provoke fighting in the aisles. There’s still an abundance of grains and pulses and the sort of produce you can’t, try as you might, ever imagine turning into actual food.
So what to do next? No more brain stuff, please, like writing or reading or listening attentively to yet another speculative studio discussion about the behaviour of pandemics or the aims of the Chancellor’s multi-billion-pound rescue package. Will this be the day when yet more stringent social distancing measures are introduced? Perhaps I should get outside for a walk while the getting is good? But grey skies and cold wind discourage. Maybe later. Clean the house? It certainly needs it. But no… it doesn’t feel quite urgent enough. Cooking? Always a good distraction with a clear end-result. I inspect the scarred, battered aubergines, flaccid courgettes and three spongy potatoes I got at Infinity and decide it should be a moussaka, of sorts. Then recall that that’s a baked dish and we don’t have an oven. Bad luck it didn’t get fixed before all this malarkey. If the planned delivery of the new cooker on Monday is aborted, we could be like this for months: four gas burners but no roasting or baking. Scarcely a hardship in the current circumstances, and perhaps a spur to more creative cookery. Or should we just give in and get a microwave and live on ready meals (assuming we can find any)?
At midday the post plops onto the hall mat: Occupational Therapy News and the Tate Members’ Guide for April-May. The latter is a puzzle since my membership lapsed last month and all the Tate Galleries have been closed to the public. I expect to find inside the envelope an insert saying BECAUSE OF THE NEW MEASURES ARISING FROM THE COVID-19 VIRUS… but nothing. Just the pre-planned events, like the massive Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern, Aubrey Beardsley at Tate Britain and Naum Gabo at Tate St Ives, none of which – perhaps – will ever be seen. I suppose it was too late to stop the mail out. Or did they think, ‘Oh well, at least let them read wistfully about what they would have been able to enjoy’?
I try to picture the Director, Maria Balshaw, at this very moment. What is she doing? Not at home making chutney for sure. Perhaps she’s chairing a crisis meeting with the management teams of the various arms of the vast organisation; or if that’s not socially distant enough, at her desk in London taking call after agitated call from staff, artists, curators and patrons and having to repeat patiently to each the same words, ‘We don’t know yet, how or when…’.
P.M. The young woman at MW Solicitors, Brighton, emails to call off the telephone appointment to re-do our wills, saying she is going home because she feels unwell. ‘I don’t think it’s anything serious, but…etc.’ Asks if we could we do it next week instead. I wonder if I might go and die in the meantime with Kerim still not named in my will.
Churches are closed and services are being live-streamed via Facebook. Even God is online these days. As part of a national day of prayer and action, The Archbishop of Canterbury has asked people to place a lighted candle in their windows at 7pm. As I do so, I peer up and down Whippingham Road: the street is silent and deserted: only lines of parked cars like hibernating tortoises. No one will see our lit candle; and we will not go out and see anybody else’s. Does a gesture, a ritual have meaning, even if no one else witnesses it? (It is the branch falling unheard in the forest problem.) It has meaning, presumably, if God sees it.
And we see our own flame if we glance up from our screens or books, and are soothed vaguely by its still flame and corona of hazy light against the black window pane. Corona again. That word. The long association between religious worship and candles. Light bulbs and LEDs don’t do it. It’s the business of lighting them and the fact they burn down or can be snuffed out, or blown out suddenly by a puff of wind: the symbolism of all that.
Febrile is the obvious word to reach for when trying to convey the current mood. Too obvious, perhaps. I think we should reserve it for its literal meaning, Having or showing the symptoms of a fever. From Latin febris ‘fever’. It’s too useful now to waste in mere metaphor. For now, let’s use agitated to describe the state of mind where most of us are almost continuously texting, emailing, WhatsApping, Facetiming and even, God help us, Facebooking each other to share feelings, opinions and questions about this strange new reality and finding ourselves suddenly in the blinding spotlight of history. Thirty years ago we would have had the telephone in the hall, or if we were less fortunate the telephone box at the end of the street. Or we’d have written a letter!
Talking of words, how quickly we’ve got used to the vocabulary of this crisis: self-isolation; social distancing, hand sanitiser, ventilators, key workers, non-essential contact. At the end of every year, Oxford Dictionaries announce their choice of the word which is ‘judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year and to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance.’ In 2019 it was climate emergency, in 2018 toxic, in 2016 post-truth and in 2015, scandalously, the face with tears of joy emoji. Not hard to guess the candidates for 2020. Unless of course we have more profound social and economic shocks still to come that will spawn their own neologisms. I notice that ‘herd immunity’ has already been quietly dropped from public discourse as policy moves at an ever-quickening pace. Fated perhaps to be a phrase that was ‘famous for fifteen minutes’.
8.30pm. The Prime Minster addresses the nation on television. It’s estimated that 23 million people watch the broadcast. We are all ‘enlisted’, he says, in the fight against the virus. Military metaphors abound in discussions of this crisis, which is hardly surprising.
A few days ago I heard a commentator on the radio wonder, ‘Will the man who aspired to be a latter-day Churchill end up as a latter-day Chamberlain?’ An easy hit, perhaps, but many will have had the same thought. Tonight, there was no air of appeasement towards Covid-19; it was the anticipated ‘stay at home’ message and the assurance of sanctions to enforce it. But already there are mutterings: They should have done this two weeks ago!
Has a population in a modern democratic society ever before been commanded not to go out and not to associate with others? The awareness that you are living through not just history (that’s always true) but one of history’s chapter titles.Peter Hennessy interviewed on the radio a few days ago thought that in the future we will divide this period of history into BC and AC. Another word ‘new to prominence’ is going the rounds: lockdown.
A couple of days ago all the Apple stores closed. I lay in bed this morning thinking, Now Çiğdem won’t be able to replace the dying battery in her phone (to which she is as attached as a pacemaker to an arrythmic heart); and then – My God, Capitalism has stopped!
Anxiously waiting for Hotpoint to phone back about the replacement cooker delivery which was aborted on Monday. Then realising This is pathetic! The leader of the nation announces a state of emergency and a cessation of almost all economic and recreational activity (something my parents never experienced even during the Second World War) and here I am fretting about a faulty cooker. So much for unworldly detachment! So much for ‘the years that bring the philosophic mind’!
When my grandchildren ask me ‘What did you do in the Great Pandemic, grandpa?’ I shall have to say, ‘Well, I spent most of it on the phone to Hotpoint/Whirlpool Home Delivery concerning the replacement of a dual fuel cooker under the Domestic & General Appliance Cover Plan. It involved a degree of stress you young people can barely imagine. Hey, steady on – save a few of those wild roots and berries for your poor old grandpa!’
It’s sunny spring weather for the first day of the ‘lockdown’. Yesterday’s cold wind has softened to a cool breeze. I change from winter to spring anorak for my walk up to Whitehawk Hill. There’s a hazy line where the sea meets the sky – a sfumato effect that conveys tranquillity. (Why does it?) Below, the bowl in the landscape that contains Whitehawk. From up here, on the side of this hill, basking in the afternoon sunshine, it belies its fearsome reputation. There are plenty of walkers out in ones, twos, small groups (‘members of the same household’) but the space is wide as we pass on the strip of grass that runs alongside the racetrack. Seagulls glide easily on the air currents keening urgent messages not for the likes of us. The crows are raucous and cross-sounding, absorbed in their own drama. The thought comes to me: Nature is ‘taking back control’.
Here on this grassy bank beside Manor Road, sitting on an old concrete post with a metal plaque on it that reads: RACE GROUND 105 • 0 • 30, I am almost alone. Today feels like a bank holiday, but one taken on credit which will have to be paid off with interest. I read again the information board about Whitehawk Camp, a ‘causewayed enclosure’ dating back to the Neolithic age. It’s 500 years older than Stonehenge. I can’t read the estimated date because it’s obliterated by a huge smear of dried seagull shit. At that moment a young couple pass me (at a safe distance) descending the hill, and I hear him say to the girl, Shitehawk Hill!
People are still working out the rules and rituals of social distancing. When you pass someone on a pavement, (as I just did on Freshfield Road, with a man who smiled amiably and returned my greeting), it’s a challenge to maintain the two metres of distance without walking into the road. You don’t want to scare the other person by getting too close nor incur a risk yourself; on the other hand, there is a powerful taboo against veering away from someone to give them a wide berth. It implies I don’t like the look of you. And it feels like shunning, which is such a negative behaviour.
Walking out into this familiar neighbourhood aware that strange new conditions and behaviours prevail here. A Day of the Triffids atmosphere – ‘It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that ‘it can’t happen here’ – that one’s own time and place is beyond cataclysm.’
The few people I see are quiet and compliant. Outside Flour Pot I’m in a queue of one – in front of me a woman and her toddler being served bread while I wait outside pulling faces for the child with goldilocks curls who is clutching a teddy bear, smiling back and pointing at something I can’t see. The mother turns and smiles at me too, apologises for keeping me waiting. Naturally I smile back and say it doesn’t matter at all and isn’t it all so strange? Inside the bakery: PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE COUNTER and WE NOW SELL EGGS. The girl behind the counter (now doubling as a protective barrier) tries to interest me in their new range of preserves. I’m afraid I can’t concede yet that there’s a place in this world for strawberry and black pepper jam.
Much the same at Hilly Laine: a woman waiting on the pavement beside a palette stacked high with tins and packets wrapped in thick polythene sheeting. The quantity is reassuring – more there than I can imagine them ever accommodating in that tiny shop. I stand behind her at what I judge to be a respectable distance. We nod at each other and she says, with an endearing embarrassment: ‘We’re compliant, aren’t we!’ A quiet triumph in small purchases: one head of broccoli, one red pepper, four spindly carrots.
The stream of analgesic pop on Co-op Store Radio is interrupted from time to time by a young voice with an uncharacteristically moralistic message for us customers: ‘Think of others before you buy. Let’s pull together for our community!
The rest of the morning spent attempting to navigate the Mutual Aid Covid-19 Facebook groups for this community: scores of posts on the Hanover/ Elm Grove page, even more replies to posts, links to useful sites, free online concerts, photos, home videos, kids’ artwork, offers of free sausage rolls and gluten-free flour. An abundance of goodwill, but I left it feeling overwhelmed. Wanting someone simply to say, ‘Look, this is how you can help…’
A new awareness of just what little space many of our public spaces afford. Retailers conscientiously attempt to mark it out with tape on the floor, improvised barriers of string. When I got my turn to go the check-out, a bizarre ritual ensued: the cashier said, ‘Put your basket down and I’ll step back.’ Then, ‘Now you step back and I’ll scan the items.’ Then, ‘I’ll step back and you pack the shopping.’ Then, ‘How do you want to pay? Contactless? OK, I’ll step back and you pay with your card.’ Then, ‘Do you want a receipt?’ I said yes and he handed it to me, both of us breaching the cordon sanitaire (and could I trust that receipt?) I say to him, ‘You’re doing a great job!’ He smiles back with a kind of weary appreciation. I move off and notice that I’m scratching my eyebrow. I probably shouldn’t do that. Touching your face is discouraged. Perhaps soon it’ll even be proscribed. I try to imagine the policing of that. Probably the Chinese have got it nailed already.
A bus pulls up at the bottom of Elm Grove. It’s habitual for people to huddle quite close as they wait to board, and the driver is exposed to all of them. This one turns his head and sneezes loudly, twice. Fortunately, in the other direction, through his cab window.
The sudden salience of hand hygiene in our daily lives. A ritual purification that looks like becoming as habitual for us as Wudhu before prayer is for Muslims. I think of the Co-op door handle I touched, the handles of the plastic shopping basket I used and left behind for the next customer. Back home I wash my hands slowly and carefully as instructed. Then hang up my house keys and think, ‘Oh, maybe they’re contaminated, and I should wash them too. And then wash my hands again. And what about my mobile phone?’ The next minute I’m at the sink wiping it with a piece of wettened kitchen roll. A smear of water slides under the protective plastic screen, spreading out like a contagion. ‘Water damage!’ I think. The same thing that caused my last phone to be written off, barely a month ago.
Chalk graffiti on the wall outside the General Hospital on Elm Grove. Large well-formed letters, no spelling mistakes: THANKS SO MUCH TO ALL OUR AMAZING NHS WORKERS XXX. Slightly undermined for me by the PS – STAY SAFE SHARE THE LOVE ♥
Back on Race Hill watching the corvids (another strange lexical affinity!). It’s their terrain now, not ours. We have become the untenable tenants here. Perhaps before much longer we shall be evicted. Those strutting crows remember Whitehawk Camp, the Causewayed Enclosure, back in Neolithic times. They had the same two integral tools then – beak and claw – as today. We have rather more, and hope that they will enable us to go on living.
The Coronavirus is now By Royal Appointment: the heir to the throne has tested positive.
I should have started earlier in collecting news headlines about the crisis. Two from today:
How to Carry On Dating When You’re Social Distancing
Argentina Makes Tooth Fairy Exempt From Lockdown.
I get another automated text from Park Crescent Health Centre saying, with more than a hint of alarm: DO NOT COME TO THE SURGERY! It’s like our cooker saga, but with your mind and body as the faulty appliance you can’t get fixed.
The sparrows are in a state of high excitement in front and back gardens, cheeping and squabbling. Another week or two and the cherry tree next door will be in bloom. I find a sunny spot in the back garden and sit there drinking in the prettiness of the spring, and realise I could spend the whole day writing about this alone.
Mutual Aid Brighton phone me about an old lady in Hartington Road who is frail and self-isolating, who needs a bit of shopping. The caller warns me that she’s very deaf. I can’t for the moment think how they got my number, whose list I am on and for what, but am glad to have the chance to help. She is very deaf, and I have to bellow (though her voice remains soft and modulated throughout).
To my surprise, there is only a very short queue in the Co-op and – small miracle – I succeed in getting everything she asked for (a poignantly short list of items for a stew ‘that will last me the week’.) She lives in one of the flats in Old Viaduct Court. I buzz her number to be let into the building. There’s what looks like an office inside but away from the public behind two walls of glass – a woman at a desk looking into a computer screen. Nothing resembling a reception area. I take the lift to a first-floor corridor and find the right door. A small plastic bag with the money in it is on the floor as arranged. As I set the bag of shopping down I catch a glimpse of her in the doorway – a woman in a dressing gown and slippers, wild white hair loose to her shoulders, a walking stick in one hand, the other holding a handkerchief over her mouth (no protection against Covid-19 of course but a gesture meant to reassure both of us perhaps). There’s a brief exchange of words and thanks; I’m not sure if she hears me. I wonder what state her flat is in. She told me on the phone that she sleeps a lot of the day.
Returning home up Whippingham Road I walk into the road to give space to a man and small child coming down. He acknowledges this with a smile and thanks. I notice that the postman is at the top of our steps and, encouraged by the conviviality that has arisen between strangers negotiating this peculiar new reality of social distancing, I greet him cheerfully. I’m about to say, ‘You’re doing a great job!’ – as I said to the check-out person at the Co-op yesterday – but as I draw near, he shouts, ‘Stay there! Let me come down!’ I stop dead, ‘Oh I was only going to…’ He looks panicked. ‘I’m doing a job here – you need to let me pass!’ He’s holding a large padded envelope in his hand, too large for our letter box perhaps. ‘Yes, I know, it’s just that I live here and I thought perhaps that packet was for me.’ ‘Well, it isn’t! I need space to pass!’
Afterwards I reflect that perhaps it’s a sign the government message is sinking in: stay at home, or if you do have to go out, keep a distance of 2 metres between you and the next person (the postman was demanding 12 metres). Last week there were news stories about people gathering in parks and beauty spots, on beaches and camp sites to socialise and enjoy the unexpected ‘holiday’.
Max Hastings interviewed on The World at One (BBC Radio 4). Chiding his (our) generation who have been the most privileged in history and yet have been selfish, fighting against any encroachment on that privilege (resisting paying for TV licences after the age of 75 and not wanting to contribute to the cost of our old age care). He warns of the terrible economic impact of the measures being taken for the next generation and the one after. In his view, economic activity has to be resumed as soon as possible, for their sake, even if it imperils him and his age group (70 +). ‘I don’t lie awake at night thinking about me or my wife, or about us dying – I think about what we’re bequeathing or not bequeathing to our children and our grandchildren, and I’m terrified. There’s a cost for everything and the cost of this is stupendous. But we’re a very sentimental people; the compassion culture has taken hold; we don’t face the fact that all these stupendous sums of spending that are coming up… they’ve got to be paid for by somebody!’
Flour Pot have started selling flowers. Well, just tulips – yellow, mauve, lipstick red, standing in metal buckets on the terrace outside the shop. I buy a bunch for JM and a miniature carrot cake, and a small sourdough loaf for us. It comes to £13.40. Are they profiteering from the situation? Are those tulips a discounted buy-out from some poor florist who’s had to close? JM is stuck at home because of her cancer diagnosis, hoping to keep her appointment on Friday about starting chemo. Or hoping not to.
I knock at her door and retreat to the other side of the road. She appears in her dressing gown (is that the new wig she’s wearing?). I shout across, explaining the box and the flowers; she looks disorientated and not entirely pleased. Walking back, I wonder if I have misjudged: perhaps she can’t eat sweet things, and flowers have that association with sickness and hospitals. Perhaps she doesn’t want to be reminded of that right now.
8.00. The clap for the NHS in streets and squares all over the country. I’d been dubious about this, I admit: ‘This may be fine in Naples or Barcelona, but it’s just not British.’ In the event we both went out onto our step and, sure enough, Whippingham Road which has been deathly quiet all week came alive with neighbours, all of us looking up and down our street, applauding, cheering, whistling, full of wonder at seeing it behave so out of character. And of course, a lump came to my throat.
The tourism body VisitBrighton has changed the name on its Twitter account to DoNotVisitBrighton. Some wag has added the comment ‘StayAtHove’.
Before work, Çi takes advantage of the early shopping hour for NHS and care-workers. She reports afterwards that the lines were ragged and it was impossible to maintain the required distance (‘People don’t even realise what 2 metres is!’). Also, of course, shoppers have to queue down the aisles to get to the checkouts, and there are two problems with that: first, others still filling their baskets have to squeeze past to take goods from the shelves; second, the little gap at the end of the aisle, which must be left clear for others to pass, provides an opportunity for the ruthless to sneak in and jump the queue. Which is exactly what happened.
Breakthrough of a sort on the cooker front. The new appliance is to be delivered today. I had to declare that no-one in the house is self-isolating. (How could they check?). But because of the new restrictions they’re not going to connect it. That means we’ll have two cookers in our small kitchen, one partly functional the other still in its packaging. But – another small miracle – Çi has found a gas engineer, the partner of a colleague in her team of OTs and OT Assistants, who is willing to do it, willing, presumably, to bend the rules and perhaps risk his own health. On the phone to him I expressed my worry about how we’ll dispose of the old appliance. ‘Oh, it shouldn’t be a problem,’ he says breezily. ‘Can you give me a hand?’ ‘Oh. Yes, of course.’ Why did I say that? The thing is monstrous – it must weigh a ton. There are seven steps from the front door to the pavement; there are steps inside the house. I’m a ten-stone weakling of 71 and I’ve already got lower back pain. What am I thinking of?
Email to customers from Henry Butler Wine Cellar, sounding frazzled. They’re not taking any more orders online until next week. ‘My team need to catch up, go shopping, speak to family, rest and recuperate this weekend. Their well-being is my priority.’ The tone is almost resentful. ‘You bunch of selfish wine bibbers – is that all you can think about – guzzling another bottle of my Albino Rocca Barbaresco Cotta (£52.99)? Don’t you realise the pressures that wine retailers are under? Spare a thought for our delivery driver, risking his life to keep you pissed throughout this crisis.’
An interesting detail in the new government regulations about who can carry on trading and who can’t: a few days after the list was announced it was updated to include off-licenses. Instead of Let them eat cake, it’s Let them drink wine.
On World at One today the advice of a man who lives in isolation with his family on the island of Gometra in the Inner Hebrides. It’s all right, he said, to find yourself talking to a fence post or to the wind (and there’s a lot of wind on Gometra). He learnt this from his father who fought in The Falklands War and told him, ‘Down there on South Georgia it’s OK to talk to the penguins; the time to worry is when they start talking back to you.’ He said of a day on Gometra that if you managed to accomplish one thing, then it counted as a good day. It’s all about adjusting expectations and pace. I thought: Now is the time, if ever there was, to draw on one’s reserves of those ancient virtues of patience, charity, forgiveness, humility, even cheerfulness (though not sure that’s one of the ancient ones). One can only hope not to open that particular cupboard and find the shelves bare.
It’s probably a good idea not to begin sentences (spoken or thought) with, ‘I wish….’
Çiğdem told me of an incident at the hospital when she was sitting in one of the wards writing up her notes. There was music playing over the loudspeakers and the song YMCA came on. At one point she glanced up and noticed that an elderly man in one of the beds opposite her was moving his arm up and down to the chorus –
It’s fun to stay at the YMCA,
It’s fun to stay at the YMCA
She smiled across, thinking ‘How nice. In spite of his situation he’s getting into the music, enjoying the rhythm…’ But then she looked a little closer and realised all was not well. She jumped up and called the Ward Clerk, who called the duty nurse. The man was having a seizure. She assisted at the bedside but couldn’t do much more than open an oxygen mask and put it on the patient, while the nurse got to work.
After lunch, a semi-licit walk with my business partner, PL, in Dyke Road Park. Much weaving and tacking to windward; I am the stricter, occasionally telling him to back off a bit. He is very much bereft of consolations: all his many activities – Saturday football, evenings at the pub, lunches out, U3A events and groups, his folk club night on Thursdays, visits to his friend Patti — all of it stopped! Not to mention our business, which occupied at least a third of his time. He’s not a great reader; true, he can watch TV, but it was sport he liked best and of course there’s none of that going on. To his credit he says to me, ’Whenever I begin to feel sorry for myself, I think of that woman, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, stuck in an Iranian gaol, enduring goodness knows what. And I think, ‘if she can put up with that, then surely I can put up with self-isolation in a comfortable heated flat in Hove, with daily exercise, nice food to eat and wine to drink.’’
We find a bench in the sun and take it in turns to sit there. Presumably not good to touch a public bench. Do woolly gloves help? And when I come to a pedestrian crossing now, I press the button with the joint of my second finger (making a mental note to give that an extra scrub when I get back at home). I’m conscious that this is probably on the same level as throwing a pinch of spilt salt over your shoulder to catch the Devil in the eye and put him off his stride.
We discuss whether our publishing business will revive after this is over or whether the hit to international travel and tourism will be so hard and so sustained that we – as one tiny organism on a gigantic host – will just fade away unnoticed.
When I do get home there’s news that the Prime Minister has tested positive for the virus, as has the Health Secretary.
Chapter 1
IT WAS NOT THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE. Only those of strong stomach did not succumb to the seasickness. The keel of the boat ploughed so deep in the trough of the waves that all but the mariners feared they would be swamped. The voyage along the southern coast was proving more perilous than the sea-crossing from Normandy. They had quickly run into a squall after leaving the shelter of the estuary below Lewes. The waves had become so mountainous the oars had to be withdrawn. Whereas in the longship the painters had felt no more than queasiness on the moderate swell, in the smaller coastal cog each fresh assault of the waves brought last night’s piment up into the gorge.
Brother Luc, who had wisely abstained from the honeyed wine and not broken his fast in advance of the expedition, exhorted all to pray to St Benedict for the calming of the seas. Guy found himself instead praying to the Founder that the small deerskin purse he guarded in his undercloth would remain dry. This contained the packet of colours, wrapped in thin vellum, that Brother Gwynn had donated to him in the little workshop at Cluny, including the precious lapis. His mentor had warned that the powders would be useless if ever they came into contact with sea-water. According to him, it would be impossible to procure these in England.
Brother Luc carried a watertight pouch containing the basic ochres, but Guy could not ask for his assistance, as that would mean disclosing his separate little hoard. He was breaking the Rule, since, in the Painters Guild, as in the Order, all was to be held in common. If discovered, the paints would be confiscated from the apprentice, and handed over to Paulus, the senior muralist of the Guild. Brother Gwynn had instructed Guy to keep his colours secret. He had assured him the other painters would have similar ruses up their sleeve. Guy must act in a worldly way on such an expedition if he was not to become the dogsbody.
Out beyond the bar, wave after wave slapped over the sides of the boat. His tunic was soaking wet. While the others retched and groaned around him, Guy surreptitiously removed the purse from his underclothing. Carefully guarding it against the sea spray with his back, he re-wrapped it at the very centre of his bundle. Though this was porous, the many layers of cloth and the palette board might protect the packet a little while longer.
When the reek of the sickness became overpowering in the hold, Guy went aft, clinging onto the ropes and cross-timbers as he went. In the low-lying cloud, the boat still seemed to be in sight of the estuary from which it had entered the sea. The two local mariners who guided the vessel were surprised to see him up on deck. Guy shouted above the squall and pointed towards the coast:
‘Is it always Lewes?’
There was no response. Perhaps they did not understand the question. In the Norman accent the name of the town always came out as one sound – ‘Loose.’ Guy tried again, pointing across to the river-mouth.
‘Lo – ez?’ They cast a glance across at the obscure coastline but gave only a shrug in reply. As he moved away, the mariners began to chuckle at his expense.
Guy groped his way up to the prow. There were two further Englishmen on board. Neither of them seemed to be unduly affected by the rolling seas – perhaps because, being island folk, their constitutions were better adapted. One was Aelmar, the plasterer, the other Edric, the cook, both recruited by Brother Luc. Aelmar was the Priory’s most skilful limewasher, and, presumably because of his regular contact with the Brothers at Lewes, he spoke passable French. His countryman, Edric, understood the language poorly, having only worked among his own people in the Priory kitchens. This rotund, bewhiskered son of Sussex had wedged himself in the forecastle, while Aelmar had found a berth between two barrels nearby and appeared to be sleeping, despite the swell. Guy tried his question again, only this time in French. Aelmar opened his eyes, and held his gaze for a few moments. But he too seemed unwilling to talk. In the face of danger, perhaps, the Saxons kept their own counsel.
The sail cracked and billowed again, as the squall continued to torment the craft, announcing itself as a full-blown storm with thunder and lightning directly overhead. The wind came in relentless buffeting gusts. After another quarter hour in its grip, the First Mariner came down to Brother Luc in the well of the boat to ask him if, given the condition of the sea, he wished to turn back. The offer was refused. Now of sixty summers, Brother Luc had been chosen to lead the six-strong expedition of painters, not only because of his experience, but also because of his resolve. His response to the worsening of the storm was to ask his seasick charges to redouble their efforts at prayer. As he explained, it was for God to decide the fate of the expedition, not for the mariners who transported them.
Kneeling on the bare boards, with the sea-spume slapping him in the face, Guy now prayed in the manner in which he had been instructed at Cluny, first to his Lord God, and then to the Founder of the Order, St Benedict, from whom he also asked for forgiveness for hiding the pigments. After completing the prayer, he ventured his head above the gunwale. Despite the appeal to both Creator and Benefactor, there was no reduction in the ferocity of the waters. The mariners seemed oblivious to the prayers being offered around them. They attended instead to the single square of sail, furling and unfurling it according to each episode of the storm. Once, when the boat was badly blown off course and lost sight of land, Guy fancied he saw fear etched into their faces. How could these men who braved the elements so regularly, Guy wondered, not put their faith in God? In Cluny, in preparation for the mission, Abbot Hugh had taught him it was a monk’s duty to pray on behalf of those who were ‘strangers to prayer’, such as he was likely to meet in England. So, even though its pilots might not have thanked him for it, he began to include them in his prayers.
At times the waves grew to such a height that it seemed impossible the prow could surmount them. Yet the next moment the boat was borne aloft, as if a giant unseen hand lifted the boat by the keel and deposited it again beyond the danger. It was the first time that Guy had felt the full fury of the sea, but there was a buoyancy in his spirit that told him, as it will tell a young man, that his life would not be taken from him that day. Alongside the fear, there was something else in him that momentarily relished this engagement with the elements, willing the waves to capsize the boat, just to see what would happen. But all this was vanity, Guy realized, the self-absorption Abbot Hugh had warned him against. The young Novice now resisted such thoughts and resumed praying for their deliverance.
The storm passed over. The hem of the dark garment that had been laid over them all morning suddenly became visible, and lighter skies followed in its wake. A headland appeared, and the mariners altered their course towards it. Brother Luc now exhorted the painters to offer prayers of gratitude for their deliverance from the elements. The oarsmen returned their oars to the water, and the boat began to make smooth progress westwards.
Nevertheless, the sea-journey, which had been estimated at two hours, had absorbed double that time. It was late afternoon before the mouth of another river opened up in front of them. According to the First Mariner, it was the River Bramber, their ingress inland. The seaward part of their journey was over. They entered a sleepy port village which shared its name with the river. This was as far as they could navigate with the cog, and it was here that Brother Luc paid off the crew from the little sack-purse he kept at his belt. Before disappearing into the tap-house, the First Mariner pointed him in the direction of the local ferryman sitting on the river-wall. He could assist with the onward journey.
This boatman explained to Aelmar in their own language that they would have to wait another hour for the flow-tide to take them further upriver. Brother Luc made use of this hiatus to conduct the office on the dock. There seemed an uneasiness about the Englishmen during this monastic observance which they were forced to witness at close hand. The painters, as hirelings of the Order, were obliged to participate. Aelmar showed no inclination, removing himself to sit with the ferryman on the wall, but Edric the cook knelt down beside them and attended to the spirit of the office, allowing himself to be blessed by Brother Luc with the Sign of the Cross.
They now boarded a flat-bottomed, clinkered row-boat. It sat dangerously low in the water with ten persons aboard. There were two pairs of rough-hewn oars. The boatman navigated with a single long paddle. When the tide turned, he allowed the flow to carry them back towards the sea for about a mile, before he called for the painters to man the oars. The little craft left the main river and began to make its way inland along a tributary that joined from the west.
At first they were passing through the same curvaceous hills they had seen at Lewes, but now they had dense pockets of woodland in the clefts between them. Then the landscape began to flatten, and the river opened into a meander, with barley-fields on both sides, already harvested. Gleaners, bent almost double to the earth, moved across them filling back-sacks. Children ran down to the banks to watch the boat go by, staring wide-eyed at the incoming strangers. A single missile, a lobbed flint perhaps, plopped in their wake. Further on, the appearance of the boat disturbed a heron fishing from the rushes. It flew ahead of them for a time until they were in sight of their alighting point.
‘Gretham Bank,’ announced the ferryman.
It was a crude landing sloping down to the water, no more than a slip of reeking mud baked hard by the recent heat. The ferryman came in close but pronounced it too dry to run the boat ashore with so many on board. The travellers were obliged to wade the last yards through the shallows.
‘I shall be at Stopham Ford a week t’morrow, early,’ the ferryman informed Aelmar, ‘then not hereabouts for going on a for’night.’
When Aelmar had translated this for Brother Luc, the monk sealed the agreement with more coin. They barely had a week to complete the work.
Wet-legged and fatigued from their journey, the painters climbed the bank with their bundles. There was no one to greet them. Led by Brother Luc, they knelt down on the grassy bank and gave thanks for their safe delivery. As they prayed aloud with their mentor, the only other sound was a woodpecker knocking furiously in the holt beyond.
Aelmar was familiar with the country thereabouts, having journeyed here in advance in the month of June, at Prior Lanzo’s request, to apply the first layer of plaster to the interior of the church where the work was to be carried out. The Englishman now struck out across the fields in his cowskin boots, into the reddening sun. The painters were forced to trot to keep up, their sandalled feet pricked often and painfully by the recently cut stubble. The air was hot and dusty now. Crickets chirruped around them, and all manner of flying things took to the air. It was more akin to how Guy imagined the Holy Land might be, or even Aegypt, than the dank bogs of which Brother Gwynn had spoken so disparagingly. There was also a curious perfume in the air, a commingling of wood smoke and rotting yarrow, punctuated now and then by the reek of the late summer river which seemed to have followed on from the landing-place. It was arable country, not without small livings. They passed a ploughman stubble-breaking at the top of a wheatfield. He halted the ox at the end of his furlong to watch them pass but did not raise his hand from the handles of the plough.
The footpath led them into a beech wood where three hogs were rootling in the pannage. A long-billed woodcock was pecking around them, feeding on any grubs they might turn up. Thierry’s attempt to hit it with his catapult met with a groan of derision from his fellow-painters, before Brother’s Luc’s raised hand reimposed the silence. A mile further on, they finally stepped onto a well-trodden track which took them round to a ring of modest dwellings comprising the village of Heriedeham, their destination.
At the end of such a harrowing journey, a disappointed silence greeted the object of their mission – a humble rubble and sandstone church set up on a grave-pocked knoll. After the grandeur of the great halls of Lewes, were their labours to be wasted on such a barn? Much more impressive perhaps was the enormous yew tree, a greater darkness in the deepening twilight, its trunk hollowed out by the years. It had seen many more than the rough little church over which it now stood sentinel. Its age and the wish-ribbons tied to the branches left no doubt this was ancient holy ground, and suggested it was not just Christian feet that had trodden upon it.
It was Guy, with the impatience of youth, who first pushed open the oak door. The whole interior was no bigger than the Dorter at the Priory. It was dark and smelt of damp stone and plaster. A single rush light burned up in the chancel. The remaining travellers now all pressed in behind Guy to see their new accommodation and place of work, and they were not slow to offer comment.
‘Is this all …? No!’
‘It’s a mouse hole!’
Brother Luc was once again obliged to impose silence on their unbridled reactions. But into this silence a ghostly voice was raised from the offertory chest at the south-west end of the church upon which its guardian had been sleeping.
‘Brothers! Welcome to Hard’am! You are most welcome!’
The owner of the voice was a thin, grey, bald-pated man in mid-life, with side-hair falling to his shoulders – the Sacristan.
‘Parson Bowditch would have greeted you himself. But he is too infirm to be out on the road at night. Please make yourselves comfortable.’
Comfort was a bare stone floor. The few poor benches that stood around were not even able to accommodate half a man reclining. Beneath the west wall, there was the parish coffin, a plain oak box, gruesomely stained, its lid etched with a crudely wrought cross. Rollon would quickly claim this as his bed. And yet, when the larger rush lights which the painters had carried from Lewes were lit, the little church suddenly glowed luminous around them, revealing the gleaming plaster-work that Aelmar had carried out two months earlier. It raised the spirits, as did the further promises of the Sacristan.
‘Water’s plentiful in the brooks to the west, but don’t draw it from the river. It’s salty up here. There is today’s bread, and we will bring fish on Friday morning. It is arranged with the pondsman.’
‘Is there timber?’ asked Brother Luc.
‘Ah. There has been a problem with timber,’ the Sacristan replied sheepishly. ‘The locals are demanding payment. I’m afraid hardly any coin comes through the plate here these days, so the church has nothing to pay them with. This is a very poor parish, and the Whitsun Farthings, well, you must ask the Prior at Lewes about them … he now has the benefit of those does he not …?’
Aelmar cut him short. ‘We’ll see what we can procure hereabouts.’
The Sacristan was taken aback by the sudden brusqueness of an English voice. But then he recognized
Aelmar from his previous visit.
‘Ah yes, the plasterer …’
‘Ask him if there is a door key,’ Brother Luc instructed Aelmar, reasserting his leadership,‘for our safety?’ Aelmar put the question to the Sacristan in their own tongue, with a sardonic smirk as he emphasized –
‘For their safety.’
‘Alas … there is no key, I’m afraid. After all, there is nothing to steal here,’ the Sacristan replied, already easing himself out of the door.
The trustworthiness of the local population was yet to be established, and Brother Luc was by nature a cautious man. Though he was not a carpenter, Aelmar’s first job was thus to fashion a slotted board to bar the door. Guy watched as the methodical Saxon laid out the tools from his bundle. A broken bench that lay in pieces in the corner of the nave was appropriated for the timber. Aelmar did not join the sharing out of the black peasant bread, choosing instead to continue with his woodwork, even when, though it was long past the hour, Brother Luc cobbled together rudimentary prayers which concluded with gratitude to St Benedict for their safe arrival. Before bed, the elderly monk gave notice that, given the arduousness of the journey, work would only begin after Prime. It was Aelmar who performed the final office of the evening, slotting home the makeshift bar into the narrow cradles he had fashioned on either side of the church door. It fitted perfectly.
Guy had been billeted in the chancel, beneath the narrow window, through which the soft, scented night-air oozed, welcome to the nostrils amidst the mustiness of the church. In the rushlight, he laid out his bedroll and travelling cloak. Both were still damp from the sea-journey. He took out the palette board, the scraper and the horsehair brushes Brother Gwynn had equipped him with, together with the little silver cross that Abbot Hugh had gifted him as a boy. He still remembered the Abbot’s words as clear as day – ‘Keep this, so that you may pray for your mother’s departed soul’. His blanket was wet through. And to his dismay, he found the deerskin pouch was now greasy to the touch. Though he had learnt that a brother must not ask St Benedict for miracles (perfected prayer should be a selfless act on behalf of others, according to Brother Luc), on this occasion he made a direct appeal before gingerly unwrapping the vellum packet. The saint had answered his request. The powders within were dry.
Let’s climb the family tree,
Take hold of father,
Swing on to his shoulder,
Catch at an uncle’s thigh,
Kick at the trunk; scramble
Through the scratch of shade,
Stand on Aunt Maud;
Balance; almost tumble.
I tug at a branch; it snaps.
Rotten? Perhaps that one
Embezzled the family fortune.
I gaze up through the gaps
In the green light, and up
There is long ago.
This backward growing tree
Is seeded from the top.
Limb over limb: look where
High above the leaves
Great-great-grandfather waves:
A cloud in the clear air.
After going to bed with him
in the room he’d booked
for the occasion,
she buttons up her dress,
laces her boots
and hurries back home
to help Mutterle
in the kitchen.
She had said after breakfast:
‘This morning I’ll visit
poor Steffi who has had
her appendix out.’
She even picked flowers
in the garden for Steffi
which she left with regret
by the roadside.
Now, on the way home,
she meets two old ladies,
friends of Grossmutterle’s,
and curtsies. One of them cries:
‘That lovely child! I wish
my Lottie’s girls were like that.
But they’re both so wild!’
The other one nods and sighs.
But she, at her garden gate,
remembers how he gasped
and moaned with pleasure,
and she smiles: men, poor dears,
they enjoy it so much,
and for us it’s so little trouble.
She feels good as gold
as she tells Mutterle all about Steffi.
“Your Granny had a dreadful flight.
And that is why her hair is white.
And that is why she don’t speak right.
I shuddud in the glavering goom
As homing through the only wood
I skibbed and teeered past Tog’s tomb.
The path went skinny by a brook
Where heaved an owly-headed tree
And on its mozzy trunk a hook.
There Tog the Ribber once had dingled
While jags and maggies pigged his bones
and where they dropped he rose and wingled.
His shrieklich ghost and howling bones
Had driven men crazy far and wild;
And I all sibble on my lones
Must pass where Tog had done men dread.
I tibtoed priggled all with fear,
Then heard a twittling overhead.
It was no owl or roosting dook.
It was no friendly joking dad
But Tog there dingling on his hook.
I shrikked, “Oh woly, woly me!”
As Tog begun to clumber down,
Unhooking arm and leg and knee.
He did, but then his blackbone hitched.
I heard him swore. He could not move,
But as he rootled, tugged and twitched,
I rin. I never rin nor faster;
My liddle fleet went like the wind,
as Tog hobbed clitter clotter after.
And still he come. I heard him snork.
He snorked green brearh on my nick.
I rin. I rin. He seemed to walk.
But still he come. I felt his titch.
His shankle tried to trib me up.
But then I reached the fozzle ditch.
Oh highly, highly fozzle ditch!
Most blost of all the highly high!
He could not pass. He guv a skritch.
And as I twiddled round to look,
I saw Tog’s grozzly heap of bones
Go straggling back towards their hook.
Home, home! My mam a tear she shed.
My daddling kussed his liddle girl
And popped me in my cosly bed.
But ever since on owly nights
If I should hear the grunting wind,
I have to sleep all round with lights.
And that is why gran fears the night.
And that is why her hair is white.
And that is why she don’t speak right.”
It’s the silent ones
they might have a purple blade
sticking up through their hair
or sometimes they’re as good as married
to the girl in the love-bitten fur
doing sciences, the one who always talks
smiles, says she’s sorry she couldn’t do it
what with sports practice, computing, chemistry
always the diffident ones
who stare at you expecting
trouble when they tell you their idea
someone in a wheelchair in a dustbin
on a pay-phone in the mid-air, eating bacon rind
backwards would be their starting paragraph
they stare hard at you, wait for you to laugh
tell them they’ve got nothing much to say
then come at you with symphonies of sound
in embryo, usually written miniscule
or very untidy, often with notes of apology.
They strike a little match, and in its flare
show you what the world looks like out there.
It’s razzled with purple blades, mothy sex,
people trying to move on urgently through
unpick the world and find its pulse, its tune
their dogs on strings, their girls
making chemistry all night, those are the ones
who show you what it’s like out there for them
who show you what it’s like out there for you.
Chapter 1
IT WAS NOT the contemplative life. Only those of strong stomach did not succumb to the seasickness. Though she was solid enough, the keel of the boat ploughed so deep in the trough of the waves that all but the Mariners feared she would be swamped. The voyage along the southern coast was proving more perilous than the sea-crossing from Normandy. They had quickly run into a squall after leaving the shelter of the estuary below Lewes. The waves had become so mountainous, the oars had to be withdrawn. Whereas, in the longship, the painters had felt no more than queasiness on the moderate swell, in the smaller coastal cog, now each fresh assault of the waves brought last night’s piment up into the gorge.
Brother Luc, who had wisely abstained from the honeyed wine and not broken his fast in advance of the expedition, exhorted all to pray to St Benedict for the calming of the seas, but Guy found himself unable to concentrate on this devotion, so concerned was he with keeping dry the small deerskin purse that he guarded in the pocket of his tunic. This contained the packet of colours, wrapped in fine vellum, that Brother Gwynn had donated to him in the little workshop at Cluny, including the precious lapis. According to him, it would be impossible to procure these in England. Brother Gwynn’s warning that the powders would be useless if ever they came into contact with sea-water was still fresh in Guy’s mind. As the boat took the full force of the wind beyond the bar, and wave after wave slapped over the deck, he transferred the packet into his undercloth.
Brother Luc carried a watertight pouch containing the red and yellow ochres, but Guy could not ask for his assistance, as that would mean disclosing his separate little hoard. This broke the Rule, since, in the painters’ guild, as in the Order, all was to be held in common. If discovered, the paints would be confiscated from the apprentice, and awarded to the more senior painters. It was Brother Gwynn who had instructed him to keep these colours secret. His mentor had assured him the other painters would have similar ruses up their sleeve. Guy must act in a worldly way on such an expedition if he was not to be become the dogsbody. Now soaked to the skin, while the others retched and groaned around him, Guy surreptitiously removed the purse from his underclothing and, carefully guarding it against the sea-spray with his back, re-wrapped it at the very centre of his bundle. Though this was porous, the many layers of cloth and the palette board might protect the packet a little while longer.
When the reek of the sickness became overpowering in the hold of the boat, Guy escaped up onto the foredeck, clinging onto the ropes and cross-timbers as he went. Though he was not sure if he read the coastline correctly in the low-lying cloud, the boat still seemed to be in sight of the estuary from which it had entered the sea. The two local Mariners who guided the boat were surprised to see him up on deck, muttering amongst themselves and chuckling, he suspected, at his expense. They feigned incomprehension when Guy tried to speak with them, shrugging their shoulders, and returning to their own business.
There were two further Englishmen on board. Neither of them seemed to be unduly affected by the rolling seas – perhaps because, being island folk, their constitutions were better adapted. One was Aelmar, the plasterer, the other Edric, the cook, both recruited in Lewes by Brother Luc. Aelmar was the Priory’s most skilful limewasher, and, presumably because of his regular contact with the Brothers at Lewes, he spoke passable French. His countryman, Edric, claimed to understand the language poorly, having only worked among his own people in the Priory kitchens. This rotund, bewhiskered son of Sussex had wedged himself in the forecastle, while Aelmar had found a berth between two barrels nearby and appeared to be sleeping even in the storm. Guy bent down to him and shouted above the squall:
‘Is it always Lewes?’
Aelmar opened his eyes, and held Guy’s gaze for a few moments, but did not respond. Perhaps he did not understand the question. In the Norman accent the name of the town always came out as one sound – ‘Loose’. Guy tried again, pointing across to the river-mouth. ‘Lo – ez?’ Aelmar cast a glance across at the obscure coastline but gave only a shrug in reply. Like many of his kinsmen, he was dour of manner, and seemed unwilling to talk. The sail slackened momentarily. Guy went aft and attempted to ask the Mariners the same question, but they simply shook their heads as if to indicate they didn’t understand, or perhaps they simply did not want to acknowledge the expedition’s predicament.
The sail cracked and billowed again, as the squall continued to torment them, announcing itself as a full-blown storm with thunder and lightning directly overhead, and relentless buffeting gusts. After another quarter hour in its grip, the Senior Mariner came down to Brother Luc in the well of the boat to ask him if, given the condition of the sea, he wished to turn back. The offer was refused. Now of sixty summers, Brother Luc had been chosen to lead the six-strong expedition of painters, not only because of his experience, but also because of his resolve. His response to the worsening of the storm was to ask his seasick charges to redouble their efforts at prayer. As he explained, it was for God to decide the fate of the expedition, not for the Mariners who transported them.
On his knees on the bare deck, with the sea-spume slapping him in the face, Guy now prayed for their deliverance, in the manner in which he had been instructed at Cluny, first to his Lord God, and then to the founder of the Order, St Benedict, from whom he also asked for forgiveness for hiding the pigments. After completing the prayers, he ventured his head above the strakes to see what effect the concerted effort of prayer was bringing about; but, despite the appeal to both Creator and Benefactor, there was no reduction in the ferocity of the waters. The Mariners seemed oblivious to the prayer that was happening around them. They attended instead to the single square of sail, furling it and unfurling it according to each episode of the storm. Once, when the boat was badly blown off course and lost sight of land, Guy fancied he saw fear etched into their faces, but this was swiftly concealed again when a familiar headland was spotted in the distance. How could these men who braved the elements so regularly, Guy wondered, not put their faith in God? In Cluny, in preparation for the mission, Abbot Hugh had taught him it was a monk’s duty to pray on behalf of those who were ‘strangers to prayer’, such as he was likely to meet in England. So he began to pray fervently on behalf of the Mariners, to St Andrew, their patron saint, to intercede for the safety of the little wooden ship, even though its pilots might not have any belief in him.
At times the waves grew to such a height that it seemed impossible the prow could surmount them. Yet the next moment the boat was borne aloft, as if a giant unseen hand lifted the boat by the keel and deposited it again beyond the danger. It was the first time that Guy had felt the full fury of the sea, but there was a buoyancy in his spirit that told him, as it will tell a young man, it was not to be, his life would not be taken from him that day. Though there was fear, there was something else in him that relished this engagement with the elements, that almost dared them to overturn the boat, just to see what would happen. Was this the feeling of complete trust in God that Peter the Disciple had experienced when he said to our Lord tell me to come to you on the water on the Sea of Galilee? But thinking these thoughts, Guy realized he was aggrandizing himself (something Abbot Hugh had also warned him about), and that he should focus his mind solely on his prayers if he wished them to be heard.
The storm passed over. Whether it was the cumulative power of prayer, or the swift passage of the weather on this island, the hem of the dark garment that had been laid over them all morning suddenly became visible, and lighter skies followed in its wake. Brother Luc now exhorted the painters to offer prayers of gratitude for their deliverance from the elements. The oarsmen returned their oars to the water, and the boat began to make smooth progress westwards.
Nevertheless, the sea-journey, the duration of which had been estimated at three hours, had absorbed double that time. It was late afternoon before the mouth of another river opened up in front of them. According to the First Mariner, it was the River Bramber, their ingress inland. The seaward part of their journey was over. After only about two miles, they entered a sleepy port village which shared its name with the river. This was as far as they could navigate with the cog, and it was here that Brother Luc paid off the crewmen from the little sack-purse he kept at his belt. Before disappearing into the tap-house, the First Mariner pointed him in the direction of the local ferryman sitting on the river-wall. He could assist with the onward journey.
This feral boatman explained to Aelmar in their own language that they would have to wait another hour for the flow-tide to take them further upriver. Brother Luc made use of this hiatus to conduct the Office on the riverbank. There seemed an uneasiness about the Englishmen during this monastic observance which they were forced to witness at close hand. The painters, as hirelings of the Order, were obliged to participate. Aelmar showed no inclination, removing himself to sit with the ferryman on the wall, but Edric the Cook knelt down beside them and attended to the spirit of the office, allowing himself to be blessed by Brother Luc with the sign of the Cross.
When the tide turned, the anchor was raised, the sail unfurled again, and the boat began to make its way inland along a tributary that fed the Bramber from the west. It was still hilly country, as it had been at Lewes, the same pleasant, curvaceous hills guarding the inland, the same pockets of woodland in the clefts between them.
The sky showed a clear sun, not long before its setting. They were transported in a flat-bottomed, clinkered boat that was little more than a raft, sitting dangerously low in the water with ten persons aboard. The craft was navigated with a single long paddle on the flow tide. To begin with they passed through richly shrubbed and wooded hills, but about a mile upstream, the water went slack and the painters were obliged to pick up rough-hewn oars to help the little boat’s progress.
Now the landscape flattened and the river opened into a meander, with barley-fields on both sides, already harvested. Gleaners, bent almost double to the earth, moved across them filling back-sacks. Children ran down to the banks to watch the boat go by, staring wide-eyed at the incoming strangers. A single missile, a lobbed flint perhaps, plopped in their wake. Further on, the appearance of the boat disturbed a heron fishing from the rushes. It flew ahead of them for a time until they were in sight of their alighting point.
‘Gretham Bank’, announced the ferryman.
It was a crude landing sloping down to the water, no more than a slip of reeking mud baked hard by the recent heat. The ferryman came in close but pronounced it too dry to run the trow ashore with so many on board. The travellers were obliged to wade the last yards through the shallows.
‘I shall be at Stopham Ford a week t’morrow, early’, the ferryman informed Aelmar, ‘then not hereabouts for going on a for’night.’
When Aelmar had translated this for Brother Luc, the monk sealed the agreement with more coin. They barely had a week to complete the work.
Wet-legged and fatigued from their journey, the painters climbed the bank with their bundles. There was no one to greet them. Led by Brother Luc, they knelt down on the grassy bank and gave thanks for their safe delivery. As they prayed aloud with their mentor, the only other sound was a woodpecker knocking furiously in the holt beyond.
Aelmar was familiar with the country thereabouts, having journeyed here in advance in the month of June, at Prior Lanzo’s request, to apply the first layer of plaster to the interior of the church where the work was to be carried out. The Englishman now struck out across the fields in his cowskin boots, into the reddening sun. The painters were forced to trot to keep up, their sandalled feet pricked often and painfully by the recently cut stubble. The air was hot and dusty now. Crickets chirruped around them, and all manner of flying things took to the air. It was more akin to how Guy imagined the Holy Land might be, or even Aegypt, than the dank bogs of which Brother Gwynn had spoken so disparagingly. There was also a curious perfume in the air, a commingling of wood smoke and rotting yarrow, punctuated now and then by the reek of the late summer river which seemed to have followed them on from the fetid landing-place. It was arable country, not without small farm livings. They passed a ploughman stubble-breaking at the top of a wheatfield. He halted the ox at the end of his furlong to watch them pass but did not raise his hand from the handles of the plough.
The footpath led them into a pleasant beech wood where three hogs were rootling in the pannage. A long-billed woodcock was pecking around them, feeding on any grubs they might turn up. Anselm’s attempt to hit it with his catapult met with a groan of derision from his fellow-painters, before Brother’s Luc’s raised hand reimposed the silence. After a further mile’s walk, they finally stepped onto a well-trodden track which took them round to a ring of modest dwellings comprising the village of Hardham, their destination.
After such a harrowing journey, a disappointed silence greeted the object of their mission – a humble rubble and sandstone church set up on a grave-pocked knoll. After the grandeur of the great halls of Lewes, were their labours to be wasted on such a barn? Much more impressive perhaps was the enormous yew tree, a greater darkness in the deepening twilight, its trunk hollowed out by the years. It had seen many more than the rough little church over which it now stood sentinel. Its age and the wish-ribbons tied to the branches left no doubt this was ancient holy ground, but suggested it was not just Christian feet that had trodden upon it.
It was Guy, with the impatience of youth, who first pushed open the oak door. The whole interior was no bigger than the guest dorter at the Priory. It was dark and smelt of damp stone and plaster. A single-rush light burned up in the chancel. The remaining travellers now all pressed in behind Guy to see their new accommodation and place of work, and they were not slow to offer comment.
‘Is this all …? No!’
‘It’s a mousehole!’
Brother Luc was once again obliged to impose silence on their unbridled reactions. But into this silence a ghostly voice was raised from the offertory chest at the south-west end of the church upon which its guardian had been sleeping.
‘Brothers! Welcome to Hard’am! You are most welcome!’
The owner of the voice was a thin, grey, bald-pated man in mid-life, with side-hair falling to his shoulders – the Sacristan. Aelmar was obliged to translate for them.
‘Pastor Bowditch would have greeted you himself. But he is too infirm to be out on the road at night. Please make yourselves comfortable.’
Comfort was a bare stone floor. The few poor benches that stood around were not even able to accommodate half a man reclining. Beneath the West Wall, there was the parish coffin, a plain oak box, gruesomely stained, its lid etched with a crudely wrought cross. Rollon would quickly claim this as his bed. And yet, when the larger rush-lights were lit which the painters had carried from Lewes, the little church suddenly glowed luminous around them, revealing the gleaming plaster-work that Aelmar had carried out two months earlier. It raised the spirits, as did the further promises of the Sacristan.
‘Water’s plentiful in the brooks to the west, but don’t draw it from the river. It’s salt up here. There is today’s bread, and we will bring fish on Friday morning. It is arranged with the pondsman.’
‘Is there timber?’ asked Brother Luc.
‘Ah. There has been a problem with timber,’ the Sacristan replied sheepishly. ‘The locals are demanding payment. I’m afraid hardly any coin comes through the plate here these days, so the church has nothing to pay them with. This is a very poor parish, and the Whitsun Farthings, well, you must ask the Prior at Lewes about them … he now has the benefit of those does he not …?’
Brother Luc cut him short, ‘We’ll see what we can procure hereabouts’.
‘Then, if you are satisfied, I will bid you all a goodnight … I must get back to Pulberge …’ said the Sacristan, overlooking the sudden brusqueness.
‘Is there a doorkey?’ asked Brother Luc, as the Sacristan eased himself out of the door. ‘For our safety?’
‘Alas … there is no key, I’m afraid. After all, there is nothing to steal here.’
The trustworthiness of the local population was yet to be established, and Brother Luc was by nature a cautious man. Though he was not a carpenter, Aelmar’s first job was thus to fashion a slotted board to bar the door. Guy watched him lay out the tools from his bundle methodically, and then select a small saw that he used for cutting his plastering frames. A broken bench that lay in pieces in the corner of the nave was appropriated for the timber. Aelmar did not join the modest collation, (black peasant bread, but palatable) but chose instead to continue with his woodwork, even when, though it was long past the hour, Brother Luc cobbled together rudimentary prayers which concluded with gratitude to St Benedict for their safe arrival. Before bed, the elderly monk gave notice that, given the arduousness of the journey, work would only begin after Prime. But it was Aelmar who performed the final office of that evening, slotting home the makeshift bar into the two narrow cradles he had fashioned either side of the church door. It fitted perfectly.
Guy had been billeted in the chancel, beneath the narrow lancet window, through which the soft, scented night-air oozed, welcome to the nostrils amidst the mustiness of the church. In the rush light, he laid out his bedroll and travelling cloak. Both were still damp from the sea-journey. He took out the palette board, the scraper and the horsehair brushes Brother Gwynn had equipped him with, together with the little silver cross the Abbot Hugh had gifted him as a boy when he had first been taken into Cluny, after his mother had died. Seven years old but he still remembered the Abbot’s words as clear as day: ‘Keep this, so that you may pray for her departed soul’. The remainder of the bundle: the second tunic, the bandages, the blanket were all soaked. To his dismay, he found the deerskin pouch too was now also greasy to the touch. Though he had learnt that a brother must not ask St Benedict for miracles (perfected prayer should be a selfless act on behalf of others Brother Luc said), on this occasion he made a direct appeal before gingerly unwrapping the vellum packet. To his relief, he discovered that the saint had answered his request. The powders within were dry.
Down by the hump-backed bridge,
where the Grand Union
sets the pace of midsummer,
I watch my sons wind the windlass,
lean their backs into the beam
and swing the mitred lock-gates
to help the barges through.
Such work is leisure now,
but the bargee’s boy has the accent still,
tells me he’s turning fifteen,
the age I must have last fished here,
with my back to this red-brick mill.
It’s inhabited now, rustique,
drying-holes glazed to lights.
sills planted with geraniums,
the wharf gone to grass and cycle path.
I lend my back to the beam.
A waft of weed, silt and fish.
The sense of something moving far below,
as if I were pushing at a gate
into a slower scape of time,
before these willows took their shape,
when the mill breathed out its malted breath
into the chugging, coal-smoked afternoon.
But it’s not the past returning,
rather the present that extends –
the birds moving in their continuum,
the minnows rising, their perfect rings,
the bargee tinkering with his engine.
Call it canal time, the lower pulse
that beats, for example, in the tree,
a kind of witness, without memory.
And for the duration of that swing,
our feet overlap with all those
who pushed upon these iron steps,
with those who will follow yet
this custom by the water’s edge,
as if a giant key were turned
to unlock the living moment
with the fellowship of the dead.
Life is disappointing: I cannot make love
To the newsagent’s daughter, though she scribbled
I love you on an insert in my TV World.
A woman undresses in front of you every night
But you are too deeply immersed in The Seven Habits
Of Highly Effective People, secretly prising the rime
From under a yellow toenail, to notice.
Morning taps its watch. We meet at the mirror, you and I,
And I have to explain all over again how it is that everything
Is so different while we haven’t changed one bit.
The whole government is under sedation:
No one has the courage to break it to them
That they cannot, by any means, prevent us
From growing poorer and crueller by the hour.
The Second Coming is still to come
And flying saucers never land.
But that which disappoints the schoolboy
Is a source of relief to the grown man.
Evening pours out a sparkling consolation:
But the bubbles die so quickly that I knock it back
In order not to be left with something sugary and flat
And tasting merely bad for you.
Love letters from exile make good reading
On lengthening winter nights: I highlight
The racy bits in yellow to read again later.
Back at the mirror, it’s your turn to
Have to explain why you are so different
While everything around us has stayed the same.
The millennium approaches: all those sickening noughts,
Those rows of unfilled or unfillable decades, and amongst them,
Somewhere near, like a bomb strapped under a judge’s car,
The date that neither of us will look back on.