In the time of Covid

1

Self-isolation made perfect sense to me when news of the pandemic and its reach into New Zealand first appeared. My mother lived on her family’s sheep station near Ōpōtiki during the 1918 influenza outbreak. She and her siblings stayed comfortably in the grand old homestead, untouched by the epidemic. Night after night they heard karanga and lamenting from tangi across the valley, as word spread of deaths accumulating at the nearby Māori pā. One world separated from another by a dip in the landscape, and much else besides. On the other hand, I knew about the famous Dr George Smith who helped to save Hokianga from even worse suffering than it endured, through armed roadblocks into the district. His daughter Janet was my good friend. I visit her grave at Rawene as often as my journeys take me north, remembering her stories of that time.

So when my son paid a lightning visit from Australia in early March 2020, and hurriedly returned as their border closed the following day, I decided straight away that I must isolate myself. It didn’t seem hard. I have a large house, a garden, a view across Cook Strait. What was there to be brave about? This would soon pass. By the first day of the official lockdown my chin had started to quiver. It was, in fact, my eightieth birthday. There was to have been a family gathering, people arriving from around the world – London, Australia and from the north. I ate fried rice on my own that night. But lest I make it sound too bleak, there had been calls all day, including neighbours ringing to say they would be leaving small gifts at the gate; my daughter coming to wave from a distance; a house full of flowers delivered in the previous days. Somehow, by the time I went to bed that night, it felt like a birthday. My challenge was to be a brave woman, reminding myself of my privileges, and that it takes courage to be old. I read that somewhere, and in that time of reflection, I could see that it must be true.

Neighbours kept dropping by with baking, leaving it at my door. I thought I should be doing the baking, that’s what I would have done once, but now I had become, involuntarily, an old person who needed to be minded and cosseted and, for the time being, I was grateful. I walked regularly and the way we distanced ourselves in those early days of lockdown interested me: going down the middle of empty roads to keep apart from oncoming walkers, jumping on and off the pavements, like a new dancing ritual, laughing and waving to one another all the same.

In this brief span of time there seemed to be a reordering of the natural world, one we would look back on and say that this was the way it should be, without cars, without planes. Some days were harder than others. I love the bird life that teems all around me here. Not just the humble sparrow, but tūī and pīwakawaka. For three days a long-tailed cuckoo took up residence outside my kitchen window, eating ripening olives. It is a migratory bird and rare. I worried that it should be leaving for its journey. I tried to imagine where that was.

Small amounts of work came my way but, contrary to what was expected of me, I wrote very little. Other writers have said the same. A great quietness had halted the impetus to write, as if communication with the world beyond were no longer important. The focus was getting myself through each day, making lists for my daughter when she shopped for me, making sure I ate well. I did keep in touch with family and friends, but that was enough writing for the moment.

Once the immediate crisis began to move away, I found it harder than I anticipated to return to what passed for ordinary life. The solitary existence had become the way it was. At nights I had looked out to where the airport lies. I couldn’t remember, in fifty years of living above it, a night when it didn’t glow with the green lights that illuminate the runways. During the lockdown, they were extinguished; it was as if an arm of the sea had extended out into a new tributary, linking Cook Strait with Evans Bay, a dark river of nothing. One night, for the first time in several weeks, I caught a glimpse of a passing Interislander ferry, like a stately lit castle above a sea of night. A return to the world seemed just possible.

That return brought challenges. I looked at myself in the mirror, seeing my wild, long hair, my unadorned face. There was a need to dress well again, to accept invitations, to shop for myself. I hadn’t entered lockdown thinking of myself as old, but now there had been this apparent transition. It was one which, as I discovered, I was ready to accept. I had not, as I had assumed, given myself permission to be like that. A part of me wanted to return to my former way of life and this would mean fighting for myself against the view that others now clearly had of me. It takes humility to learn the art of acceptance. Perhaps I’m lacking in that. I may have accepted that the face I saw reflected that morning was past its best, but the spirit that has always sustained me hadn’t been quenched. There’s a difference, I think, between acknowledgement and acceptance.

The world beyond has darkened as the virus has spread. It occurs to me that I may not travel far ever again. That saddens me. In London, one of my grandsons fell ill with Covid-19 and was very sick. Since then, he has been to visit me, after a time in quarantine at the border. He said when he was here that in this country, where the illness is held at bay, we didn’t understand that we were living in a different universe. It’s true, in a sense; we’ve been practising an almost wild sociability, living while we can, but with an underlying element of fear. Enough old people died during lockdown for we who are said to be old to feel afraid. It could happen again. It could come for us. We yearned for our vaccination, the jab that would give us safe passage through more days, and we were not disappointed. But the virus is not done with us, as it rears its ugly head in various mutations.

This is, I suppose, a meditation of sorts on a process that comes to everyone sooner or later. Covid has hastened it. But the fight is not over, or not for me. I have discovered that it is still possible to be happy. Friends come to my door, bringing flowers and conversation. We talk through days and nights. There are travels within the countryside here. There is a fine rapture about the embrace of the lives we still have.

After a time, I was taken by a familiar urgency, the stirring of words. As a writer, there is still the will to work. Always that.

The new beginnings, another book.