Home Front

Fred, my son, has finally landed a fulltime job, training as a history teacher.

Not that he was completely idle in the four years after he left university. He worked in television for a bit (hated it); taught English to Chinese students online; and had a short stint as a tour guide on HMS Belfast. He also wrote a novel about an unpleasant and dysfunctional family who live in the suburbs. No idea where that scenario came from.

The new term was delayed for a week to allow pupils to adapt to the new regime of having to wear face masks – the silliest, most impractical decision throughout this entire pandemic. A class of year 12s will swap them, drop them and use them as catapults. All the evidence shows that the chances of children’s passing the disease on to adults are minimal.

I have my own issues with wearing a muzzle (daughter Betty winces when I adopt Peter Hitchens-speak). As I suffer from a rare respiratory disease and find it hard to breathe when muzzled, I am ‘mask exempt’. The first time I ventured out post-lockdown, so many shop assistants came up and asked me to put one on that I now wear an explanatory sign around my neck, like a guide dog.

I thought this would be enough to keep COVID zealots at bay, but it just seems to reinforce their righteous anger. On a trip to Guildford to get Fred kitted out for his new job (I was harbouring a secret fantasy that I could dress him like Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr Chips), I was made to feel like a criminal wherever I went. At one clothes shop, a security guard refused me entry like a bouncer at some exclusive nightclub. Eventually the manager appeared, offered profuse apologies and allowed me in.

At the threshold of Boots, a female employee spent so long reading my two-word sign with a furrowed brow, you’d have thought I was wearing The Waste Land.

In Zara, a fellow shopper recoiled theatrically at my approach, lost her footing and stumbled into a pile of jeans. And at the Oxfam bookshop, a muzzled gentleman customer grumbled loudly to the shop assistant about selfish shoppers without masks who tell lies about having underlying health issues.

As I was the only other person in the shop, my hackles rose. ‘Do you mean me?’ I blurted, like a Home Counties Travis Bickle. ‘Because I can’t see anyone else here not wearing a mask.’ He said he hadn’t meant me. I suggested he mind his own business, adding that there was no overwhelming scientific evidence that masks even worked. ‘If anything, they might make things worse as people are forever fiddling about with them and then touching things.’

‘Well, if that’s the case,’ he said, ‘why do surgeons wear masks?’

‘To prevent bacterial infection, not viruses!’

On and on we went, each of us firing opposed pandemic theories at the other. He was all for obeying government orders without question, while I droned on about personal freedom. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘So you’re an anarchist, are you?’ The mask made it sound as if he was asking if I was the Antichrist.

Then the manager appeared from the storeroom and told us to stop shouting. I told him we weren’t shouting; we were having a lively debate. But we stopped anyway. I bought a copy of Nineteen Eighty-four for £2, and went to have my first haircut in eight months.

‘How much do you want taken off, then?’ my stylist, Ryan, asked. ‘All of it!’ I said wildly. When I admired his jungle-animalthemed tattoos, he stopped snipping to tell me the meaning behind each one: ‘This bird represents my nan, ’cos she kept birds. The lion here’s my dad, ’cos he’s the provider.’ And so on. Prelockdown, my eyes might have glazed after the tiger, but it was so nice talking to someone friendly and unhysterical that I hung on to Ryan’s every word. Afterwards, I met Fred in Caffè Nero. ‘You look as if you help run a lesbian co-op in Hackney,’ said Fred.

‘I had a row with a man in the Oxfam bookshop,’ I confessed.

It transpired that Fred had gone in there shortly after I left. And they were all still talking about it.

‘Were they agreeing with him or with me?’

‘Him,’ said Fred. ‘They all think you’re mad.’

Back at home, Mr Home Front and I did an online quiz to find out what Prime Minister we most resembled.

‘Why am I John Major?’ I asked, dismayed at my result.

‘Probably because you went to a state school and didn’t go to university,’ said Mr HF (a very smug Disraeli). Another quiz in the Mail concluded that both Mr and Mrs Home Front were Grumpy Social Conservatives.

‘But I’m blue Labour!’ I said, mildly affronted.

‘About as blue Labour as Alf Garnett,’ mumbled Mr HF.