Worse than wartime
My mother is fast approaching 90 years of age, and as a young girl, lived through the Second World War.
She tells me how she remembers having to carrying a gas mask in a cardboard box, strung around her neck, to and from school and whenever she went out and about.
She remembers the bombed out buildings, flattened by the Luftwaffe, and the rubble-filled bomb craters left to darken with rain water.
My mother recalls how she listened to the radio with her parents as broadcasts of the German advance across Europe and the rest of the world made for shocking news; though she admits she didn’t realise the significance of it at the time.
However, she carries the memory of the worry on her mother’s face and the
anger on her father’s. Yet despite all this, and the constant threat of air raids and possible invasion, she remarks how she had no real sense of danger.
Perhaps, she admits, it was the innocence of childhood (she says she and her friends played outside without fear) but she never felt the oppressive unease that she does now.
I find it hard to believe, but she assures me that living with this terrible covid pandemic is far more disquieting than the years she spent during wartime.
I wondered how that could be? Yet she insists that for the most part life outside the towns and big cities carried on much as before hostilities began, with the war itself seeming to be a long long way away.
There was rationing and queues for essentials, but you could leave your house in relative safety.
This virus, she tells me, is a silent killer, an unseen enemy, that is here, not across the North Sea or miles and miles away, in
some unfamiliar country.
It lies in wait for the unwary and takes away family and friends without a second thought.
My mother has not crossed the doorstep since the virus took a hold; her jab having been administered by a visiting nurse – and only since then, she says, can she have hope.
Hope that the vaccine will bring about a return to normality, and she can once again walk the streets without fear. She tells me we are at war, not this time with man, but a virus, and it is a war we must win. I hope that, having seen off one enemy, my mother will witness the defeat of this one.
Robert Jones, sent via email.
“This virus, she tells me, is a silent killer, an unseen enemy.”