My life feels like that of a Jane Austen heroine these days
My mother, selfisolating in a village in Kent, telephones with news of my father, locked down in a nearby care home. They are both well, she reports, and the response of the local community has been wonderful. Nor has she been short of company – in fact, her social life, albeit conducted from a distance, sounds as though it has seldom been busier.
“How are things in London?” she asks. I think she is expecting lurid accounts of food shortages, looting and cannibalism, but I have none to offer. The difference between village life and life in the capital has suddenly become almost nonexistent. London is often described as a conglomeration of villages: that is generally more of an estate agent’s marketing fantasy than a lived reality. But for anyone who is not a key worker, the horizon has shrunk to the distance we can walk from home, and our social circle to our nearest neighbours.
The villageing of urban life has introduced aloof city dwellers to the unexpected pleasures of neighbourliness. In my partner’s apartment block, residents who exchanged perfunctory greetings in the lift are now sharing information on supermarket queues and rare sightings of bags of flour via a newly formed Whatsapp group. We haven’t encountered that less endearing feature of village life, the curtain-twitching busybody, but their numbers are legion – so much so that the police have implored the public not to waste their time with “deliberate false reporting” of breaches of the lockdown rules.
Reading English at university, I used to envy the peaceful lives of the heroines of 19th-century novels. Now, in a startling demonstration of the maxim that we should be careful what we wish for,
I find myself sharing their daily routines: writing letters in the mornings, taking decorous walks in the afternoons. But this placid lifestyle tends not to offer much in the way of epistolary narrative.
Jane Austen had the same problem. “Expect a most agreeable letter; for not being overburdened with subject,” she wrote to her sister, Cassandra, in January 1801. Writing to my father – too deaf for phone calls – I find all my news concerns the local wildlife: in Greenwich Park, the appearances of a small fox have been drawing fascinated crowds. A couple of days ago, another throng of onlookers gathered beneath a tree in which a furious stand-off was taking place between a crow and a small cat.
Who knows how long our interest in such tiny dramas will last when something like normal life resumes? In A Time to Keep Silence, a book that I have been surprised not to find included in the innumerable lists of “Essential Reading Under Lockdown”, Patrick Leigh Fermor described his experience of retreating to the Benedictine Abbey of St Wandrille to finish writing a book. His initial mood of “depression and unspeakable loneliness” was followed, on leaving the abbey’s quiet seclusion, by re-entry into a world that struck him as “an inferno of noise and vulgarity entirely populated by bounders and sluts and crooks”.
Of course, the shock of re-entry, like the shock of seclusion, quite soon resolved itself into quotidian normality. Nevertheless, Leigh Fermor writes in his epilogue that “the slow and cumulative spell of healing quietness has lost none of its magic”. For us, too, if we’re wise.