Our English friend with coronavirus remains in hospital on Day Thirteen of his illness. We’re taking solace from the fact they haven’t moved him into intensive care, but remain worried. Last night, his fever went up and his blood oxygen levels were down. He’s strong and fit, yet he’s struggling. 

We’ve all heard about the high mortality figures for old people with pre-existing medical conditions. But under the circumstances, I couldn’t help noticing a quote from a British Labour MP who is also a doctor. Dr. Rosena Allin-Khan continues to work part time at a hospital in south London, and told the BBC that she’s been surprised by the youth of some of the people who are ill.

“We have patients who are in their 30s and early 40s who are previously fit and well who are now in the intensive care and fighting for their lives.”

Which is another reason for everyone to stay inside. If protecting old people isn’t enough of a reason, what about protecting yourself?

That being said, I went out this morning to shop for staples, driving to a nearby Loblaws. Our niece has been shopping for us, but I needed some heavy supplies she couldn’t carry. It’s the supermarket I usually go to after playing hockey on Friday morning, located between the arena and our house, and I thought that knowing the lay-out would let me get in and out quickly. 

The lot was surprisingly full at 9:30 a.m. I decided to park near an outdoor shopping cart drop-off, where I claimed a large cart and cleaned the handle with hand sanitizer and a paper towel I’d put in my pocket. Afterward, I pulled on some gloves and my face mask and pushed the cart to the store, finding a security guard posted directly inside the door offering to wipe down the cart handle if I hadn’t done so.

Confession: the heavy items I needed were a big box of kitty litter and a large bag of cat food. Risking my life for kitty litter? A touch melodramatic to put it that way. But with one of our best friends in hospital fighting for his life, breaking out of self-isolation to buy kitty litter struck me as both fatuous and faintly bizarre. 

Of course, I was also stocking up on the recommended two weeks supply of groceries, list in hand. The store was quite busy, as I’d gathered from the parking lot. The manager was trying to maintain an orderly traffic flow, marking each aisle as one way, up or down, with green masking-tape arrows stuck to the floor. People generally ignored them, although they kept the requisite six feet apart, and I wasn’t the only one who retreated out of aisles where there were too many shoppers. 

Pushing my sanitized cart with my gloved hands, not always in the prescribed direction, I found these items missing from the shelves: 

Flour, yeast, fresh pork, (there were sausages), bacon, large eggs (although they had small and medium), chicken breasts (they had drumsticks and thighs, but not whole chickens) and three-litre homogenized milk bags. Supplies of 2 per cent and skim bags were scant, but they had two litre cartons of milk in all percentages. No doubt there were other shortages, but these were the ones on my list.

All these details are petty and ephemeral (although I don’t think they’re going to prove as ephemeral as we’d like). Yet I’m writing them down in such detail—writing this whole series of blogs in such detail—partly because of my fascination with a book I read not long ago, one which proved remarkably useful while I was researching a novel due out next year.

Civilians at War, Journals 1938-1946, by George Beardmore is filled with quotidian detail about life during the Second World War in England. I first read about it in the endnotes of English writer Kate Atkinson’s latest novel, Transcription. She says she’d heard about it too late to be able to use it in researching her novel, “but I do recommend the Beardmore to anyone wanting to read something accessible and articulate about daily life in wartime London.” 

Opening it at random, I find this entry for September, 3, 1940: 

“By chance last week I was on the Central Line (Underground) and saw a mass of people camped out for the night, on the platforms. All very orderly, with helmeted Marshals in charge, family groups established in a sort of enclave with old people already lying down swathed in blankets, mothers making tea or brewing up soup (as I supposed) on camp-stoves, and small children watching the train, not really interested because they’d got used to them. Some three feet had been left between them and the edge of the line for the use of passengers.”

Some six feet had been left between Loblaws shoppers. The length of a hockey stick, as we say in Canada.

Perhaps writing that down will prove useful to someone eighty years in the future—or at least provide a window outside for people quarantined now.

So let me also say that we kept exactly six feet apart in the line-ups for the cash desks, one snaking in from each side of the store. Rectangles were marked off in black tape to show the requisite distance to maintain between queued carts. I waited half an hour to cash out and considered myself lucky. Leaving the store, I saw there was now a long line-up of well-separated people waiting to go inside. Half an hour lining up at one end, half an hour at the other, shopping in between. The 2020 version of getting in and out of a store quickly.

Beardmore, 10 September, 1940, London, during the Blitz:

“On the Sunday night we knew that we were for it because a tremendous barrage broke out about 8:10 p.m., all the way from Uxbridge to Wembly to Northolt, dell reddish-yellow flashes stabbing the mid-air. And again (asthma was troubling me and the din woke Victoria—his daughter—who would not be pacified) we heard the racket of London being bombed. One terrific crash fetched us out of bed but we never found out what happened, and it was not repeated. On my way to work by motor bike, taking the back streets, I was compelled to go out of my way because of craters at Neasden, where also a concrete pavement was standing on end. More craters at Cricklewood, where a poor-class house had been completely demolished, and along the Edgeware Road. Here I saw two refugees who might have walked straight off the front page of the Daily Mail—sweaty, blowsy women with disordered hair, still grinning, although possibly they had missed by inches the death that had overtaken their friends and families.”

As I drove home, I found road crews had erected barriers on Pape Avenue so they could continue replacing the local water mains, which they’d stopped work on over winter. In places, traffic was back down to one lane. It was eight degrees C so the construction workers must have been cold, and it was drizzling, but I imagine they felt relieved to have a job. Pulling into our garage, I felt deeply relieved to get home.

It’s not the Blitz. No bombs are falling, the docks aren’t on fire. But 20,000 Londoners died over eight months of Blitzkrieg, and as of today, 32,000 people have died worldwide of COVID-19 since the end of January. Public health officials speak of the virus as being a tidal wave currently roaring toward Canada, and can’t begin to predict how many will die here.

I put the groceries away. Checked my email again for news of our friend. Felt worried not to find any. Cleaned the cat box. Ate lunch, washed the dishes, did my work (yes, work), cooked dinner, ate, cleaned up, then sat down to write this post.

Two months into the pandemic, such is my ordinary, fraught and very long day.