You are not alone

Bringing Britain Together

I’ve always said it would be lovely to spend more time with my children. On some level, I really did mean it. But heaven knows I didn’t have this kind of mayhem in mind.

When my husband delivered the bombshell, I was mired in a lengthy game of snakes and ladders on the upstairs landing. “Schools are closed from Friday,” he called out from the spare bedroom, where he claimed to be working and certainly not scrolling through Twitter.

Fine, I thought initially. We were expecting it anyway, weren’t we? Then we all had a fight about dinner – “I don’t like small vegetables!” screamed the three-year-old – and I rapidly revised my position. No, it was not fine at all that her nursery, and the six-year-old’s school, would be shut down indefinitely. It frankly could not be less fine.

Up and down the country, school mum (and, to a lesser extent, dad) Whatsapp groups were going into overdrive. The Prime Minister had announced that schools in the UK would close after this week until further notice, in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

It was presumably the right decision; nothing is more important than keeping people alive. Not even keeping parents sane. They had already closed schools in Italy, France, Ireland and Spain. Perhaps we could learn something from those Boris Johnson is so fond of calling “our European friends”?

Ah, here we go, what’s this? “Italian internet traffic surges as children swap school for Fortnite” reads one alarming headline. More encouraging news comes from Spain, where a #frommywindow initiative sees children putting the fruits of their athome arts and crafts sessions in their windows so they can see each others’ creations when they go out for walks. Nice. But will it get us through the next God-knows-how-many months without anyone losing their mind? (I’m talking about myself here: the kids will watch a lot of Netflix and be fine, and my husband is pathologically relaxed about all danger.)

If only we could follow usual emergency protocol and draft in the grandparents. But previous emergencies have involved someone contracting a minor tummy bug; an inset day that hadn’t been put in the diary. How nostalgic am I for them now; how dreamy and untroubled we once were. In 2020’s coronavirus crisis, grandparents are strictly sealed off on the grounds of their age, which makes them more vulnerable to a severe case of Covid-19.

This means that we parents who work are now all Professor Robert Kelly, the political science expert who went viral three years ago when appearing on BBC World News from his at-home study. No one remembers what he said, but everyone remembers the joyously unplanned entrance of his baby son and four-year-old daughter in the background. Many of us have no trouble working from home per se. I do so on a regular basis. But not when the children are present. Not when there’s a three-year-old, inexplicably naked from the waist down and chocolate-smeared from the neck up, climbing into your lap to explain something about pigeons to you while you field emails from the office; not when there’s a six-year-old who won’t take “please leave” for an answer.

Back on the class Whatsapp group, the Year 1 parents were getting resourceful, sharing links to online education sites; suggesting the children meet via Zoom to perform songs, and so on.

Family time: Rosa Silverman with Marcus and their children, who will all be at home

“Thank goodness the wine aisle is stocked at Sainsbury’s,” wrote one mum. Yes, thank goodness, I thought, until I switched to another Whatsapp chat in which a friend had posted a picture of an empty wine aisle in Sainsbury’s. “There’s a Châteauneuf and that’s it for red,” she reported from the front line of Britain’s stockpiling frenzy.

Wine, to be honest, is the least of my worries right now. Apart from the virus itself and all its concomitant terrors, the prospect of having to home-educate a Year 1 pupil while simultaneously entertaining a high-energy nurseryaged child, and holding down my day job, fills me with serious panic. My mother-in-law has thoughtfully offered to order us a trampoline for the garden; but whether I can get my daughter to bounce on it from Monday morning until the end of the apocalypse seems doubtful.

So what do the experts suggest? “Parents should not feel they are trying to reproduce the school curriculum and therefore be bound by trying to do things that are age-specific,” says Kevin Courtney, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union. “Look at things your children can do together.

“Your aim should be to encourage your child to be outward-looking and excited.”

He recommends doing plenty of reading (which is at least one tool I have in my limited teaching skill set). “Children are resilient,” he adds. “We’ve got to make this the best we can… People have great resources and imagination and will find ways to do that.”

People might. But will my husband and I? We’ve had the first tentative discussions about how to divide up the labour. I also took the opportunity to suggest a few big ticket items we could buy for the house to get us through this: an additional television; an outdoor sofa; basically, the essentials.

“It’s like being in the Second World War,” I said. “It’s nothing like being in the Second World War,” he replied. Our children’s new teachers are already at odds over how we interpret the past. Let’s see how the four of us fare in this most unprecedented present.