A watershed moment that will influence how we go forward

ON THE very day that Boris Johnson put the Government on a war footing, a report from Sheffield University on urban fruit and vegetable production was more prescient than its authors could have imagined.

Suddenly we were back in the 1940s, with the Ministry of Agriculture exhorting us to Dig for Victory.

The researchers’ proposition was that by growing food on spare land in our town centres, 90,000 people in Sheffield alone could be supplied with their recommended five-a-day intake.

This would require a comprehensive change of attitude, they admitted. But if ever there was a time for taking stock, it is now.

The fact is that when the present emergency ends, our perspective on almost everything will have changed, perhaps irrevocably. There will be a “new normal” and we have no conception yet of what it will look like.

But the Sheffield report gives us an intriguing glimpse of a possible future.

Many town and city centres were on their uppers long before coronavirus sent people fleeing from them. Shops were empty and shuttered because their customers preferred to buy online. Sadly, the pandemic will claim more businesses. But the reinvention of these spaces was already overdue, and turning them over to a mix of commerce, housing and small-scale agriculture is one way of starting over.

However, the mass digging up of so-called grey spaces may be easier in theory than in practice, for as the university’s lead author acknowledged, it’s a skill that increasingly few of us still have. Gardening is not often taught in schools (unfortunately, nor is anything else at the moment) and techniques that used to be handed down through the generations have been lost since the era of the victory plot.

Even in 1942, the Agriculture Ministry had felt it necessary to put out a leaflet called How to Dig, in which those on the home front were instructed to twist their spades to turn the soil as it fell into the ground. Today they’d have to tell half of us which way up to hold the spade.

We’ve forgotten how to grow our own food because we know we no longer have to. That is one of the many complacencies laid waste by the speed at which coronavirus has overtaken and overwhelmed every aspect of life in the last seven days. It has been unprecedented in my 60-plus years, and only those who remember rationing will have experienced such a wholesale upheaval. Indeed, if the panic buying goes on, we may be back on the ration by this time next week.

The virtual shutdown of normal life has brought out the best and worst in us. Two neighbours have knocked on our door offering to help if we need to self-isolate, which is a euphemism born of our politically correct times. During the Black Plague, they just painted a cross on the door. On the other hand, a relative who has motor neurone disease cannot buy the milk and eggs that are all that sustain him because others have hoarded them all.

A year from now, we may look back on all this as simply a blip, in the way of the flu epidemics of the early 1960s which few now remember. Right now, that’s the best we can hope for.

Even so, it is a watershed moment that will profoundly influence the way we go forward. Those who have been working at home for the first time will wonder why they ever had to commute in the first place. Many will be disinclined to continue doing so, and that will further reduce footfall on our high streets and strengthen the case for re-evaluating their purpose.

But, of course, that’s only the start. The cost in lost jobs at firms that will not survive the loss of trade; of the earnings deprived to tourism and leisure whose visitors never came; and most of all the loss of life, will teach every one of us to take less for granted.

In the meantime, there remain more questions than answers. If the foundations of society can collapse as quickly as they did, why had they not done before? And will they again?

Until we know, the best we can do is to learn from that wartime generation, by adjusting to each new circumstance, keeping calm and carrying on.

The National Trust is setting an example by throwing open its outdoor spaces to everyone, and it is in their direction that I am heading this weekend. Perhaps we should also look for likely spots on which to plant carrots. There are none in the shops so we may soon have no choice.

When the present emergency ends, our perspective on almost everything will have changed.