Life on the Covid front line
Breathtaking: Inside The NHS In A Time Of Pandemic Rachel Clarke Little, Brown, £16.99
Although it is almost too gruelling a read as we sit out the third lockdown, Breathtaking is a scorching corrective to any suggestion that the pandemic is a hoax and that empty hospital corridors imply deserted intensive care units.
A palliative care specialist, Rachel Clarke has previously written unflinchingly about her own father’s diagnosis of terminal cancer in her tender, award-winning account Dear Life.
She may well be up for another award for this disturbing insider account of the NHS during the pandemic. It opens with the stark contrast between a bright spring morning outside and the grim reality of a Covid ward. One medical team with “bone-deep exhaustion” hands over to another the responsibility for wielding “a God-like authority”, for every decision has potentially fatal implications. Clarke is sharply critical of the UK government’s gung-ho approach that allowed the situation to spiral out of control in early March, making her “almost deranged with impatience”.
“Oomph and bravado” were not adequate in the face of a minuscule and “supremely indifferent” organism, and she scorns Johnson’s claim that we shall “send coronavirus packing in this country” as though it were some unwanted door-to-door salesman.
She writes with burning anger about PPE shortages in hospitals, hospices and care homes for the most vulnerable, the failure of the testing system in the UK, and the Government’s continued prevarication with figures.
Clarke has earned the right to her contempt, dividing her time between her calmer, if often heart-rending, work in a rural Oxfordshire hospice and serving in a hospital on the Covid front line, defumigating after each shift.
She pays tribute to the bravery and selflessness of patients and their relatives, and the almost superhuman commitment of medical professionals.
Her own nine-year-old daughter is traumatised by knowing the dangers Clarke faces daily.
A former television journalist, she recognises the power of individual stories, and they’re threaded through Clarke’s vituperations, bringing home to the reader the remorseless violence of Covid and the anguish of families divided from dying loved ones.
Written at pace as “a kind of nocturnal therapy” on sleepless nights, Clarke’s book has all the rawness of someone still working in the eye of the storm.
It will, as she concludes, take “a judge’s cool eye” in the future to understand why the UK’s mortality rate has been world-beating.