I marked the second anniversary of the first lockdown this week in the car park of Cardiff City stadium performing that all-too-familiar ritual of tonsil swab, retch, nostril swab, eyes water.
With a sore throat and my other half at home with Covid, the PCR test was, of course, inevitable. But as I drove between the various checkpoints, showing QR and bar codes, bagging up the sample and having it pincered through the car window by a man in a mask, it did strike me that a process that would have had the surrealism of a sci-fi movie pre-March 2020 had become entirely mundane by March 2022.
Two life-changing years have passed for all of us. While Covid hasn’t gone away the sheer terror that accompanied its arrival has dissipated. How quickly we forget that scary Spring when the world was startled into a complete standstill. There are moments, though, I will always remember. The fear on my elderly father’s face as we watched a solemn Prime Minister, devoid of his usual clownish touches, laying bare the severity of the situation. Dad was on the edge of his armchair, straining to hear every word uttered by Johnson and his scientific sidekicks.
Read more: Carolyn Hitt - The pandemic has shown us the meaning of friendship
“It is going to spread further and I must level with the British public: many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time,” said the PM. It was a jaw-dropping opening and I could see the anxiety on my father’s face as he processed this information.
Until this moment the coronavirus crisis had been a social media conversation about Happy Birthday handwashing routines and the scourge of toilet paper looters. Now it was real. Hitting home quite literally. And within days, home was where we were going to stay for the foreseeable future as Wales and the world went into lockdown.
There was a dreamlike quality to those first few weeks. The combination of silent streets and unseasonably stunning weather created the strangest ambience. Under the bluest skies, unsullied by vapor trails or road pollution, a mass hibernation unfolded.
Strange new customs became commonplace. Grocery scrubbing. Leaving “contaminated” post in the porch for 48 hours. Getting to grips with this new Zoom thing.Yet while it was dreamlike for some, others were seeing the nightmare of Covid at first hand.
My niece Megan, in her first year of nursing and newly qualified in intensive care, was on the NHS frontline in one of Britain’s busiest hospitals. As we fretted over her PPE supply problems, she sent messages to the family WhatsApp group urging us to take Covid seriously.
“You wouldn’t believe what we are seeing,” she texted.
Megan still feels a youngster to me, but she had to grow up overnight as she acted as conduit between dying patients and the devastated families who could not be with their loved ones to say goodbye. We counted our own blessings as a family. Yet while we did not suffer the terrible bereavement of so many, I felt a more muted sadness at the discernible impact on our oldest and youngest members.
Lockdown accelerated the physical and cognitive decline of my father, an eighty-something who had previously enjoyed an active social life centred on holidays, family gatherings and four nights a week at his beloved NUM club. His world shrank to the armchair he now barely leaves.
Alongside the fear of contracting the virus, that sense of precious time evaporating with every new restriction must have been so hard for the oldest in our society. At the other end of the scale, there were the children and teens missing all those milestones that won’t come again – from primary school proms to 18th birthdays. Like thousands of other students, my nephew completed most of his degree on a laptop in his bedroom, missing out on the social education college life also brings.
Only our surprise family baby saw it through in blissful ignorance. Niece Lyra went into lockdown at six weeks old and recently celebrated her second birthday with guest numbers still limited by restrictions. One of the most joyful memories of a later lockdown remains the video my brother circulated of her toddling in the park and seeing another child of similar dimensions for the first time in her young life.
She squealed loud enough to scare the squirrels and gave chase with open arms. The pair then examined each other with complete fascination. It was the kind of simple pleasure lockdown made us appreciate. A special interaction against the backdrop of nature. There was a time when just being able to meet a friend in the park clutching a takeaway coffee felt as much of an outing as a black-tie ball.
And for a while at least, putting the world on hold gave us a new perspective. Diaries were emptied of the usual clutter that keeps us busy on our selfish social pathways. As sporting and cultural events were cancelled, holidays abandoned, work and school routines disrupted, life was stripped back to basics and priorities reconfigured.
In a society usually saturated with celebrity worship, we realised who the real heroes were. The people we’d always taken for granted were the very people who kept us safe, fed and sorted through this most challenging of times – the carers, the binmen, the delivery people, the supermarket staff and of course the NHS workers. Their altruism rubbed off on others. The spirit of community and regular rather than random acts of kindness began to thrive.
“And so shines a good deed in a weary world” wrote Shakespeare, words that inspired author Anna James to mark the second anniversary of lockdown with a commemorative book collecting stories of “hard work and kindness” witnessed across the UK during the pandemic. She spent more than six months interviewing key workers, everyday heroes, familiar faces as well as charities and organisations, collating their stories and photographs. The result is Covid Kindness 2020, a self-published 350-page coffee table volume celebrating their efforts and raising money for NHS Charities Together.
Anna told me: “2020 was an unprecedented year with monumental challenges and heart-breaking sadnesses but amongst that, there was also exceptional hard work, adaptability and kindness. Our humanity and community spirit shone in the darkness and I thought it was important to pay tribute to that, so we’ve got something to look back on and be proud of.
“I also thought it was important to record some of the things we were all seeing and experiencing – in years to come, when this is hopefully far behind us, will we remember the rainbows? That people joined forces in their thousands to make masks and scrubs for the NHS? Will we remember that we clapped outside, every Thursday night?
“That whole towns and cities were deserted and that shops ran out of toilet roll? I wanted to document some of that to help us remember; as a social history record for us to show our grandchildren, and for them to show theirs. It’s probably the book none of us would ever have wanted but perhaps the one we all need, to remind ourselves what a kind and generous bunch we can be.”
Anna sent me the Welsh stories in the collection, among them an account from James Ward, the south Wales group co-ordinator of the 4x4 Response charity, which sees volunteers offering use of their vehicles in emergency scenarios. During the pandemic the group covered thousands of miles delivering food, prescriptions and PPE to isolated and vulnerable people, as well as carrying out less obvious “emergency” tasks like taking a cat to the vets.
“It was weird driving around with the roads so quiet,” James recalls. “It was almost deserted with populated areas like ghost towns in apocalyptic movies. The people who lived alone were so pleased to have some direct contact and a chat at a safe distance often lifted their spirits. You could see real relief on the face of many, especially the older people.
“On one occasion a lovely elderly lady living alone broke down, crying uncontrollably, saying over and over ‘you’ve saved my life’, when all we were doing was quite simply handing over a bag of medicine supplies. That demonstrated the depth of despair, isolation and fear that many vulnerable people felt.”
People like James “Beefy” Thomas of Tonyrefail came to the fore like the 4x4 Response volunteers. James, whose story was told on the BBC this week, had been made redundant as a scaffolder just before the pandemic so bought a food van “at the worst time”. But he switched his alternative job into an altruistic lifeline for his community: “I thought, ‘We’ll give 100 faggots and peas away in Tonyrefail’ and asked any elderly person or vulnerable person who’d like free faggots and peas on a Friday,” he explained.
The following week the lads of Gilfach Goch RFC joined forces with James and the service spiralled from 200 to more than 3,800 meals being delivered from his tiny burger van. The legacy of his kindness continues. James says the community is now pulling together to raise money for the people of Ukraine.
And it is to be hoped there is a legacy across Wales and beyond from the good deeds that shone in the weary world of lockdown. The pandemic has set a template of community action and responsibility that should continue as our screens fill nightly with heart-breaking images of war and terror in Ukraine. There are many things we would rather forget two years on, but lockdown also unlocked a collective kindness that we must hold on to.
Covid Kindness: UK 2020 is available to order at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Covid-Kindness-UK.../dp/1527275825 All profits go to NHS Charities Together and other good causes.
