We’re Skyping singing, clapping and caring... and eventually we will hug again
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IN THE dark times, will there also be singing?’ Bertolt Brecht, the great German poet and playwright, once asked. Well, we all know the answer: ‘You bet there will be, Mr Brecht. There’ll be singing from our windows, from our balconies and from the rooftops. There’ll be writing too, also texting and emailing and Skyping and Zooming and YouTubing, and clapping. And dancing in the streets, when we can, when it’s all over.’
We’ve been here before, through times even darker than these. We should remember that. Our parents and grandparents knew such times, and worse. And they sang their way through and out of their dark times. In the music-hall days, there was a rousing song whose chorus began like this: ‘Are we downhearted? No! Then let your voices ring and altogether sing! Are we downhearted? No!’
Singing chases away the demons of gloom and despondency, makes us feel we are not alone, that we’ll get through. We will too, but get through to what? To the world as it was before? I think not. I hope not.
The story of this pandemic is worldwide, of course, but it is also personal. I don’t think I really began to understand the seriousness of the coronavirus, of what was happening and its consequences, until I looked out of my cottage window one early morning a few weeks ago.
I saw a dozen or so schoolchildren in wellies, walking down the lane with sacks over their shoulders on their way to feed the sheep, as they had been nearly every morning for the past 45 years.
I knew this was the last morning I would be seeing this. Normally I loved to see them out at work on the farm, it cheered my heart.
One hundred thousand city children had been there before them, farmers for a week of their young lives. That morning I felt so overwhelmed with sadness that I had to look away.
I also had a very strong sense of deja vu. In 2001, the charity my wife Clare and I had begun in deepest Devon, Farms For City Children, had to shut down. Another epidemic was stalking the land: foot-and-mouth.
Strange then that this thought gave me hope. Because that epidemic was a dark time for so many rural communities like ours. Memories came back, of the mass slaughter, the black smoke from burning cattle drifting along the valley, of farming friends living through hell. Yet it ended, this terrible epidemic, just as this one will. There have been two spikes of hope in my lifetime: the late 1940s and the 1960s. Clare and I were children in the late 1940s and 1950s: Britain’s 1944 Education Act, a National Health Service, the fog of postwar gloom lifting slowly, with hope of a brave new world ahead. And by the 1960s we could believe it was really happening. In the flush of this optimism, we, with some good friends and farmers, launched Farms For City Children to enrich the lives of our urban children. And so for all these years they came to the farm, 35 at a time, soon to two other farms as well. They’d be working alongside real farmers, living the country life. And in the evenings I’d read stories to them in front of a log fire. This was our dream. And now at my window I was watching the last city children walk up the lane again, the last we would be seeing for months, for who knows how long.
Then I realised that thousands upon thousands are going through the same dark times. And I’m thinking, as many of us are: will there ever be an end to this?
Can our doctors and nurses keep going? Can they, can we, somehow get through it? When will we see family and friends again? When will we hug them again?
Befuddled by all these unanswerable questions, I remember two others: will there also be singing? Are we downhearted? Yes, to the first. No, to the second.
Out of this cruel pandemic, I have learned great lessons. Do we not feel more kinship with neighbours, because we really are all in this together, employed or unemployed, prisoner or rough sleeper?
See, Mr Brecht? Your question should have been. ‘In the dark times, will there also be singing in the shower?’ Yes, Mr Brecht.
Oh, yes.
Our lives will be more precious as we will no longer take them for granted