I was living through two pandemics at once
COVID-19 caught me off-guard. Like a daydreaming child, a writer lives in more than one world at a time, and in early March this year I was more absorbed in two artistic bubbles than in my real life. Switching between final rehearsals of the North American premiere of “Room” (which I’d adapted for the stage, with songs by Cora Bissett and Kathryn Joseph) at the Grand Theatre in London, and my treadmill desk where I was putting the finishing touches to the last draft of my novel about the Great Flu of 1918, I have to admit I wasn’t paying much attention to the news. On March 9 I delivered the novel (“The Pull of the Stars”), which wasn’t due to be published till spring 2021: now I could relax and enjoy the experience of the stage production of “Room” (my first to happen in the city where I’ve lived since1998), and then follow it to Toronto for its run at Mirvish’s CAA Theatre.
On the11th, the WHO declared a pandemic, and two days later, the afternoon before its opening night, “Room” was cancelled. I was gutted — even more for the creative team, crew and cast (including queen of Canadian musical theatre Alexis Gordon, and two brilliant child actors) than myself.
The one advantage to having your COVID-19 experience start with such a body blow is the rest has felt easier to cope with. I’m lucky I’ve had nothing worse to deal with than cancelled visits to family abroad, inconvenience, boredom and a background hum of worry about the state of the world.
My publishers decided that my novel about nurse midwives and doctors battling a bizarre new strain of influenza for their pregnant patients’ lives had suddenly become so timely, they should bring it out this summer. So, my main lockdown task was to go through the copy editing process for “The Pull of the Stars” at top speed. My days were divided between 1918 concerns (How many people were wearing masks on trams in Dublin? Why were governments so obsessed with how to kiss safely, through a handkerchief — did people kiss more often back then?) and weirdly similar 2020 ones (Am I scrubbing my hands in all the right positions for the full twenty seconds? How many rolls of toilet paper can I buy before it counts as hoarding?).
I sought out a young midwife to give me the benefit of her expertise about the many scenes of labour in the novel; in self-isolation at home in Hamilton, she managed to set her own worries aside and immerse herself in my fictional world. Her revulsion at some of the realities of a maternity ward circa 1918 gave me a fresh sense of the massive gap between then (when a stillbirth would be packed away in a cardboard box and spoken of as little as possible) and now.
I was lucky enough, too, to have a U.S. copy editor who is also an emergency room physician, dividing her time and head space between the two jobs, so she was able to give me detailed feedback not only on the medical details — she caught a blooper about exactly how they tested blood pressure with a device called a sphygmomanometer — but on the psychology of front-line hospital staff during such a gruelling time, in any era. At one point my nurse protagonist Julia Power, having almost stepped in a pothole, muses that if she breaks her leg at least she’ll be allowed, in fact forced, to take some time off — and my copy editor/doctor underlined this with a heartfelt “yes!!!”
My novels, whether contemporary or historical, are not usually full of echoes of the time I’m writing them; this was an eerie experience, living through two pandemics at once. When Trump babbled about disinfectant I thought of people in 1918 (far less riskily) wearing garlic and eating raw onions. It’s never been so clear to me before that health is political: as racist politicians blamed Black people for what they implied were selfinflicted underlying conditions, I thought of Julia’s patients in the novel, exhausted mothersof-twelve from the inner-city Dublin slums, trying to fight off this new plague with bodies weakened by the poverty they’d been born into. Government advice in 1918 — to lie down and rest for a fortnight, at the first symptom — seemed no more helpful to non-aristocrats than articles on WFH Zoom-styling are likely to be to grocery clerks or truckers who have to go out to work. In the public information notices sprinkled through my novel, I tried to capture that strange mixture of misleading reassurance, confusing advice and blaming-the-victim that we’re hearing from some blustering leaders today: There Is No Real Risk Except to the Reckless. Defeatists Are the Allies of Disease.
But I also felt the huge gap between these two pandemics. What was so strange about the
Great Flu was that it hit adults in their 20s and 30s the hardest (and perhaps especially women just before and after birth); COVID-19, by contrast, has devastated the elderly residents of Canada’s l ong-term care homes. Back in 1918 doctors like Kathleen Lynn (the one real historical figure in “The Pull of the Stars”) were peering vainly into microscopes to spot the bacterium they thought was the culprit, not yet knowing what a virus was or having the equipment to identify one. In desperation they dosed flu patients with aspirin, strychnine and whiskey, aware they might be doing at least as much harm as good. I realized how fortunate we are to be combating COVID-19 with a wealth of international scientific research and a range of at least helpful medicines and equipment.
I’ve always found history a comfort, in a darkly rueful way. The first book I read during lockdown was Hilary Mantel’s “The Mirror and the Light,” in which Thomas Cromwell strides busily through a Tudor London where an infection could rob you of your whole family by lunchtime. This too shall pass, says the medieval Persian proverb. Or as Doctor Lynn in my novel puts it, “The human race settles on terms with every plague in the end.”