At War: Communities of Feeling and COVID-19

Eilidh Marshall

Trigger/Content Warning

This work contains discussions of the COVID-19 pandemic and the loss of a close relative.

At War: Communities of Feeling[1] and COVID-19

Grandad died on the 8^th of July.

We did everything We could.

He was one of almost 130,000.

We did everything We could.

He was not Grandad, Gerry, Dad, Sergeant Major, Uncle Ged. He was a number on a list in a file on a computer in a civil servant’s home office.

He is dead but We did everything We could.

On the 30^th of December 2019, a doctor in China sends a text message to fellow medics warning them to wear protective clothing at work, telling them that the outbreak of ‘pneumonia’ he’s been treating reminds him of 2003’s SARS epidemic.

On the 2^nd of January 2020, he is summoned to the Public Security Bureau in Wuhan, where he is accused of making “false comments”.

On the 10^th, he starts coughing, the first symptom of the new virus the World Health Organisation will name COVID-19.

On the 7^th of February, he is dead.[1]

In Europe we barely register the news: like Swine Flu or Bird Flu, we think, it’s just another one of those strange epidemics that seem to be so common in ‘those poor countries’. Still divided by Brexit and climate change and Scottish independence and Trump and free speech and refugees, we are simply too busy with our own problems.

On my birthday in the middle of February, I call my grandparents in Wales. Increasingly unsure about this new virus – a man their age has just died in France, the country’s first fatality – they have decided to organise deliveries of their weekly shop for a while. That’ll be enough, I think. Grandad has a book he’s going to lend to me when I visit next month.

[1] Basham, 2015; drawing on Berezin, 2002

Next month, We are starting to unite around our uncertainty. We are shocked by the news coming from Italian hospitals, We are shaken by the realisation that We might not make it to Benidorm in the summer holidays. The Facebook rumour mill has us stocking up on supplies, half-expecting rationing to begin next week.

We are not reassured by the Prime Minister’s boasts that he has shaken hands with “everybody” in a hospital treating COVID-19 patients.[2] We are not mollified by the Chief Scientific Adviser’s mumblings about herd immunity, as on another TV channel the WHO makes clear that it simply isn’t an option.

At packed London concerts and in busy happy-hour pubs, We are asked to use the hand sanitiser We’ve been clearing from shop shelves. 150,000 people go to the races, and We wait ten days to lock down. It’s probably already too late.

Tripping at the bottom of the stairs, Grandad is taken into hospital for a couple of nights of observation. In an overcrowded general ward, staffed by nurses who sacrifice their PPE for their colleagues in the intensive care unit, the ending is inevitable.

He tests positive the day he is meant to come home.

Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives.

By now We’ve started to think about it differently: We are all in this together. We must be, if even the Guardian and the Sun can agree on a resurgence of “Blitz spirit”.[3]

The Prime Minister is recast as a Churchillian Atlas, bravely shouldering the burden as he asks us to unite with him in this second Battle of Britain, to form a human shield around our doctors and nurses. When he catches the virus, We are united in our worry. After all, his health is the health of the nation.[4] But he is a true plucky Brit, and he recovers.

An old soldier promises to walk a hundred laps of his garden by his hundredth birthday, raising millions for the country he was proud to serve as a teenager. We (rightly) celebrate the Captain’s strength, his caring, his British Lion heart. We do not like it when others (rightly) criticise the government which has spent the better part of a decade pushing our NHS closer to the edge of the cliff. It doesn’t do. It’s just not in the spirit of things.[5]

Two months later, another old soldier dies alone in a hospice bed. I say goodbye to Grandad through a cracked window in a rainy carpark.

The scientists have told us not to, but We are loosening the lockdown noose. We are eating out to help out, We are supporting British business. The threat is under control and We don’t need to stay at home, as long as We are staying alert. Quietly, the much-lauded trough starts to inch back towards a peak.

We try not to think about it, until it’s staring us in the face, until We register that even our ‘new normal’ is slipping through our fingers. At that point, the narrative shifts. Coddled students, selfish millennials, protesters who declared that Black lives actually mattered: We are still at war, but They are undermining our effort, endangering our NHS troops.[6]

(We don’t mean the Prime Minister’s right-hand man, who took a thirty-mile daytrip to test his eyesight: that was different.)

Outside the supermarket I am confronted by a billboard demanding that I look in the eyes of a man Grandad’s age, ventilated in a hospital bed, and “tell him I never bend the rules”.

I don’t need the reminder.

I have never needed the reminder.

It is already January again and we turn to face the second wave. What was unknown and frightening is painfully numb, a heart-breaking collective déjà vu that doesn’t merit the same screen time it did a year ago.

The numbers are ticking up day by day and We aren’t so united anymore. We send influencers to Dubai and death threats to junior doctors.[7]

Nurses are crying and more of us are dying and Grandma sits in her kitchen alone.

But We did everything We could.