During the pandemic I deliberately killed six people. I did this in their homes, in front of witnesses, with their families in the next room.
When paramedics decide that all options for resuscitation are exhausted and that a patient has died, they ask everyone involved if they agree to stop CPR. The first time this happened to me, I didn’t respond straight away. It had never occurred to me that I would consciously have to choose whether to continue with a patient’s treatment: I’d just assumed I’d be told what to do. I was taken aback. But I said yes, I agreed.
I know that I was doing CPR because the patients’ hearts could no longer function. That, in every clinical sense, they were already dead. But in an abstract way I was their heart. I was the last working part of them, and when I made the choice to stop, they died.
These are some of my strongest memories from the pandemic. And while much of the country has moved on from Covid, for the thousands of frontline workers who were involved in the pandemic response, things are not so easy. For many of us there is a disconnection between the ways in which the country at large is deciding to remember the pandemic and what it means to us.
Yesterday we had a glimpse of this with the release of the Sky Atlantic series This England, one of the first attempts to dramatise the Covid-19 pandemic. Directed and co-written by Michael Winterbottom, and starring a heavily made-up Kenneth Branagh in a jarringly sympathetic portrayal of Boris Johnson, it focuses on the political machinations behind the pandemic response. The overall impression it gives is of a nation bravely coming together to defeat the virus, with any errors in policy (the series includes a focus on PPE procurement and delays to lockdown) unfortunate but understandable, given the circumstances.
This narrative mirrors recent political discourse, which has framed the pandemic response as largely successful, built on a swift vaccine rollout, a robust public health effort and the heroism of healthcare workers. The idea that politicians and key policymakers “made the right calls” is, however, a position largely at odds with the opinions of many of us who have direct experience of the reality of the Covid response. And indeed, public opinion is deeply divided over the merits of the approach taken by the government. The way we shape our memory of the pandemic matters.
Work by historians on past pandemics has drawn a distinction between memories based on knowledge – that is to say, direct experience of the effects of the disease – and remembrance, the wider collective memory of the catastrophe.
The 1918 Spanish flu, which was responsible for the deaths of between 50 and 100 million people, prompted a great outpouring of literature and art based on direct experience. For a short time, it looked as though the collective memory would be shaped by the voices of those who had actually experienced its worst. Among those voices was the writer Katherine Anne Porter, who nearly died during the pandemic and remained hospitalised for months. Her Pale Horse, Pale Rider is one of the most significant works to come out of that period, and includes sentiments that will be familiar to those who experienced the Covid frontlines: “The road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up its own bitter resistance and to what end? The barriers sink one by one, and no covering of the eyes shuts out the landscape of disaster, nor the sight of crimes committed there.”
However, the longer term remembrance of that pandemic has been quite different. Few memorials remain to its dead, and it is largely ignored in contemporary culture. Rather than confront the reality of the Spanish flu, we have chosen to forget.
This is important because how we will remember the pandemic remains so uncertain. That This England barely mentions the disgrace of Partygate, or the subsequent downfall of Johnson himself, is deeply troubling. However, the real problem is that the reality of the pandemic response is left in the wings. Care workers, nurses and ambulance staff are glimpsed in passing, afterthoughts fitted in around the “real” action, which takes place in the corridors of power. Where the frontlines are shown, they are heavily filtered. Patients die serenely, or off camera. Exhausted doctors stare stoically into the middle distance at the end of their shifts. The result feels not just sanitised but utterly detached from reality.
I’m not saying that Winterbottom is disqualified from writing about these things because he doesn’t know what it feels like to break someone’s ribs during chest compressions, or hasn’t seen the expression on the faces of family members pleading for help when none is possible. I simply note that without these perspectives, his story is very different from the ones you might hear from those who were on the pandemic frontlines. The problem here is once again born out of the distinction between knowledge and remembrance. This England presents an ultimately triumphant story. But for those with direct, personal knowledge of the pandemic, to memorialise Covid-19 appropriately would mean to confront abject failure, arbitrary death and utter helplessness.
I no longer work regularly with the NHS. Nor do many of my colleagues from that time. For many frontline workers, the experience of the last couple of years has proven too exhausting, too painful, to continue. It is tempting, as time passes, to replace the reality of Covid-19 with a different, more comforting tale, one that presents the last few years as a collective triumph over the disease. But it wasn’t like that at all.
Rod Dacombe spent the pandemic driving an ambulance for the NHS
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com
