A couple of weeks into that first balmy lockdown, a bed sheet appeared on the hedge of a house along our lane. There was a message painted in red, or was it black? My husband remembers it stating: “Fuck off cyclists.” I remember reading, “Go home joggers.” It only remained on the hedge for a day or so and disappeared. I often think of this bedsheet when contemplating our collective response to lockdowns. Did another neighbour take it down? Or a cyclist or jogger? Or did the people who put it up consider their words to be a bit much and remove it in embarrassment? Where is the sheet now? Washed and returned to the airing cupboard, burned, or used as a dust sheet? I couldn’t possibly ask my neighbours, for then I would have to admit I noticed.
That the exact memory of this aggressive sheet is already fading, worries me.
Before we all forget similar lockdown episodes, is it now time to officially record ordinary life in 2020-21? Future historians will surely thank us – for who could make up the scale of small yet devastating insanities?
I’m thinking of a dinner party we attended in a greenhouse, whitewashed so no-one saw, and muggy beyond belief. And our terrified friend who decided not to visit his father in hospital, “to be on the safe side”, only to desperately regret the decision when the old man died alone. The bunch of flowers we ordered mis-delivered to neighbours, left in their garage for three days, “to decontaminate” and die. Locktails and quarantinis in the woods. Sourdough: an alarming post on WhatsApp where someone requested a new “mother” as his had ended up in the dishwasher. Green tape pasted onto the Victorian tiles in church to ensure social distancing; as if the church had ever been crowded. The chap who videoed children climbing into the taped-off, empty playground, threatening to call the police.
Not so funny now.
According to the U.K.’s National Police Chief’s Council, 525,738 of us made calls to the police about lockdown infractions. Half a million. If there was a historical endeavour to record people’s activities in lockdown, would anyone actually admit to how they behaved?
How many people actually kept their own children in their bedrooms and left food outside the door if they were sent home from school with a message to “isolate” because “someone in their bubble” had “tested positive”? I know of one family whose children were prevented from leaving their home for three months for fear of death. The garden too was verboten.
Etiquette decisions about face masks and when to Covid test. The buying of ‘exemption’ badges. Homemade hand sanitiser. Pleas on WhatsApp to make PPE from pillowcases – hastily cancelled because it was a scam. The washing of online food deliveries. Socialising with your own cutlery and shared bowls of guacamole. Window concerts with socially distanced chairs on the lawn. A decision to use a fan to blow out candles over a birthday cake. The now forgotten ‘House Party!’ app. The pingdemic. Dispiriting family quizzes via Zoom. The National Theatre Live on a Thursday. Joe Wicks.
Oh Lord, the pans. Have we already forgotten the pans? Will people, now part of an NHS waiting list of 7.75 million, ever admit to having banged them in celebration of ‘our’ NHS? One night, on the hill, an old man played his fairground organ.
Perhaps our involvement is still too raw to rake over. The fallibility and greed of politicians is to be expected, but the strange and fearful compliance of the population, and the contortions some made to get round the rules, and others to hug the rules tighter, is vital for future historians to understand.
Four years on, is the scab healing? Could we begin to have a look?
I propose someone arrange straight interviews with everyone willing, in one village, one street, one estate close, in various parts of the country. Any diary entries or relevant emails could be shared and participants would be encouraged simply to record what they did during lockdown, and those half lockdowns, the tiers, the rules of six: their daily routines, the things that frightened them, their doubts, their ways of finding joy in the strangeness of it all and, possibly, actions they took about which they’re now ashamed.
Dare we remember the truth?
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor. If you are a publisher interested in taking up this project – or run a national historical archive – you have a willing writer/helper. Contact me here.
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