Interview with CD, HIST 150 Spring 2021, Conducted by Phoebe Merrick, March 10, 2021.

Biography

CD is a grandmother to seven. She is a former teacher and now is involved with youth theater. She currently resides in Northumberland, England. She has been self-quarantined in her home with her husband, Richard, since March 11 of 2020. She considers herself at high risk for the Covid-19 virus and has been taking heavy precautions. CD has not been out to a restaurant since March of 2020. She has not been to a hair salon or back to her in person work with youth theater. Since summer 2020, she has not been out of the town she resides in. In England, a new variant in the virus and an outburst of cases makes exposure to Covid-19 a greater risk for CD.

Transcript

[The beginning of this interview up until the end of the answer of question one was a repeat of CD and I’s original conversation due to technical difficulties our audio had not been recording]

PM (00:01):

Wait, can I do yours with you back?

CD (00:04):

Recording? Now I can see that I got a little light at the top of my screen.

PM (00:08):

Okay. We’re good. All right. Let’s, let’s try this again. Are we recording now, do I have your permission to record this?

CD (00:17):

Yes, you do.

PM(00:19):

And would you like to introduce yourself just a tiny bit?

CD (00:22):

Okay. I am, uh, uh, a woman in her seventies. I live in a part of Northumberland in England and I have…I’m married. And I have my husband and I between us have two sons and two daughters and seven grandchildren. I was a teacher for many years until I retired. That was quite a long time ago now, but in my retirement I do still teach in a way because I run a youth theater and I, my main hobby is directing plays. I’m also, I’ve also been a school governor and I have great interest in education because of my teaching background. And I think that’s probably enough about me.

PM (01:19):

Yeah, that’s great. So with everything you just said and what your life looks like, I want to have you walk me through a basic day in your life now with the new factor of the pandemic and during these times, and you can go into what obligations do you have? What do you do to pass the time? How has work changed for you? Anything like that?

CD (01:40):

Okay. I’ve just been looking out of interest before this interview. I’ve been looking at my diary from last year this very week, the week of your birthday, everything suddenly closed down. So my diary was full of lunch appointments, hair appointments, going and having my eyelashes. We were in the middle of rehearsals. We were going,  just about to rehearse, to perform a production of [Oscar Wilde’s play] The Importance of Being Earnest. And I was helping as, as the producer, I wasn’t directing somebody else directing at fibers producing and suddenly with all the news about the back, the vaccine the, sorry, the, the virus, everything came to a grinding halt.

 

And I remember going into rehearsal that week and saying, I’m sorry, I’ve just heard that we should because of the virus being socially distancing, using social distance, I’d never heard that term social distance before. And lots of the younger people in the cast, most of them were good to me, looked at me in a stylish mint and said, what’s that mean? And I said, I don’t think we are going to be able to do the play up to stop. And I remember there was one of them who is a dear friend of mine, but she, she laughed and she was making fun of me. She said, Oh, she didn’t use the term fake news, but she implied, but somehow or other, I was believing rubbish.

And I said, no, that this virus is real. And we are going to have to be careful. It seems to be particularly difficult for older people. So Richard and I started our, it’s self isolation more or less from that point, everything got canceled. I remember we had one last lunch with some very dear friends with us and socially distanced ourselves. And it felt very peculiar. It, we kept thinking, are we making too much of this? Are we being too fussy? But the stories we were reading were so scary. And so, so life changed enormously. I have to say that the first lockdown was probably, it was a roller coaster because people, people were becoming ill, including Richard’s [Richard is her husband and my step grandfather] Richard’s brother-in-law Collin who became ill very near the beginning of the lockdown and was very, very ill. And with, we thought we were going to lose him. He was in hospital, he was on the ventilator. Fortunately he came through, but he is still affected by it, by the virus. So there were these terrible moments of real drama and fear but our lives generally, not that difficult.

We, you know, you live in a nice place. You live in a nice house. We’ve got friends around us. Certainly we could have, we went back to having a lots of things, delivered, something that we used to do in the olden days. I can remember my mother used to have lots of deliberate deliveries to that. Suddenly we were doing the same thing. We found a milkman who would deliver, we found a baker who would deliver, we got, we’re getting vegetables sent from local farms with an eggs and things, but actually it was quite exciting. I think the novelty was okay. There were great things on television. Television has been a lifeline. It really has. We were very anxious to work out how we could stream things. I kept hearing about how you could stream things. And I nagged to grandfather and said, we’ve got to be able to stream things. So we changed our television, we got sky plus plus or whatever it’s called. And I was determined to see the stream version of [the musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda] Hamilton. And I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t just shut up about it until I saw it. During that lockdown we were still able to sort of see people that sort of garden meetings.

And I do remember, I think my daughter obviously loves you, you know, and Amy and they did sort of come round and we sort of met in the garden [CD lives in the same neighborhood as her daughter and her grandchildren. It allows her to see them often in times where Covid is not a factor]. And a couple of times I can’t remember exactly when that was, but we weren’t completely shut off in that. Then with then we all discovered zoom and we started having families zoom meetings. So it, as I said it was a roller coaster. It was horrible things happening. And then things which were almost life-affirming we in, in this country, because we have the national health service, which provides all the medical care.

I don’t know if you understand how the national health service works, do you? Well, we pay for it through our taxes, but we, but there it is free at the point of delivery. So if anybody is ill, they can just go along to a hospital. They can go along to a doctor and receive it. Nobody has to get a credit card out before you you’re treated. And our national health service, I think is one of the greatest things about this country. And it has, it has actually proved itself over and over and over again, over the last year, the doctors and nurses have just the heroes are heroes. They really are. They have been, it hasn’t been so hard for them. And I’m sure it’s been hard for the doctors, nurses in America too, but we have become, so we were also grateful for during the first lockdown. Somebody suggested that we show our gratitude by every Thursday evening at eight, o’clock going outside onto our doorsteps and clapping for, for the doctors and nurses at BNHS [British National Health Service]. And that was incredibly moving. We saw it being done. I think it, first of all, we saw it in Italy. They were doing it for their doctors and nurses, but we went outside they would make noise. We had metal spoons on source pan, and I found a little bell and I rang, rang the bell, and everybody gets on their doorsteps and it may just go out and, you know, socially distanced, but we’re all very careful about that. We talked to our neighbors on Thursday evenings. And I’m sorry that we didn’t continue with that. I think it’s, it went on for about three months at that, during that first awful spike of, of the virus when so many people were dying, it died off during the summer, during the summer with the lockdown. And we were able to move about a bit more and meet people, but we were, we did go out a bit more. Um, it was, it got rather worrying then because people were so glad to, to get out of lock down that some of them were people who, who didn’t feel that they were in much danger from the virus, you know, young and younger people, really flocked to, to beaches and flocked to places where they, you know, beauty spots and then really did look, it looked very dangerous the way that they were behaving. I don’t know that it actually was. I think there’s been some research recently, which showed that very few cases of Corona virus actually stemmed from any kind of outside meeting, because they were out in the open air.

It probably wasn’t as dangerous. I said, look, there was no social distancing going on. And we, we weren’t at that point, whether the need to wear masks, we government was very slow to bring in masks. And I think that that would have helped. I mean, I think the thing people started wearing masks themselves more, more quickly than the government, but we always, the government always seemed to be behind the curve. It was too slow to do things. It was too slow to stop people coming into the country from other places where the virus was, was prevalent. And I don’t know why this, I think there was a lot of feeling among the government and its supporters that they mustn’t curtail people’s personal freedom.

PM (11:43):

Okay. With you saying that, I want to ask this question. Are there any changes to how you would have maybe your own government, how you wish they would have handled lockdown?

CD (11:54):

Well, lots of changes I wouldn’t have had the same government for a start. The government was a lot of politics here. My opinion, of course, but you know, I do read, I read the newspapers very carefully, which was reelected just before the vote that this crisis was all was made, mainly made up of people who wanted Brexit, who wanted us to leave the EU. And they were given the jobs in the cabinet because they were Brexit supporters. Not because they were effective, not because they were intelligent, not because they were good administrators who knew how to make things happen in government. Most of them are anything, but those things, they were just Brexit supporters. And Boris Johnson [Boris Johnson is the current Prime Minister] wanted them in his government because he thought that they would support him. But his one thing that he wanted to do is make Brexit happen. So we have some pretty incompetent government, they, that should now, because of course, a lot of people that he’s got he’s realized that he needed better people around him. And he got rid of some of the very, totally useless ones. And since in the last few months things have improved enormously, but they didn’t…they weren’t thinking ahead. And they were giving huge contracts to people who weren’t very often there. I mean, I, I don’t think it was necessarily totally corrupt, but it was, you know, they were in such a panic. They bought a lot of, do you know what I mean about PPE [personal protective equipment]? You have PPE you would know what people, it’s the, the masks that the doctors and nurses need. And they were buying them from somewhere spending billions of pounds on it. And it was useless. It was money wasted. An awful lot of money was wasted because they weren’t listening. They weren’t listening to the people who knew they weren’t listening to the scientists. And that’s the thing. Now, I think everybody now has so much more respect for the scientists. We listened to them. We don’t go rushing around doing stupid things. We respect the science and we respect the…we, people are, are being much more sensible. We’ve learned those lessons, but we were so late to bringing in masks, stopping people coming from abroad. Um, our test and trace was ridiculous. It was the cost there’s it’s it’s in that paper today cost billions of pounds to set up and it’s hardly saved any money or any lives. I think the person the woman who runs it, it was called Dido Harding. Um, she was a friend of the prime ministers and just didn’t do a good job at all. So there were lots and lots of mistakes that were made. And I think we have not learned from them. And I noticed that Boris Johnson, with this new lockdown that we’re in, he’s only, he’s being much more cautious. And of course he himself was ill with it and was very ill. And I think then it began to realize how serious it was. So yeah, there were lots of mistakes made.

PM (15:45):

Yeah. I can agree with that. And I see that in a lot of other governments, maybe too. So I was hoping since I know that we’re most likely having completely different pandemic experiences, you being in England, me being in the US that we will go into that maybe a little bit more. I know you’ve mentioned how all restaurants are shut down. Police can give out fines to anyone who breaks the COVID restriction. But then I know from my experience in the US. I don’t have any of that.

CD (16:24):

I’m asking if in the us, there is no fines from, for, for traveling outside your area or anything like that.

PM (16:35):

It varies state by state, I think might be one of the biggest things to maybe why we’re so different. I wanted to go into and see what cultural differences do you see in the US how the US is handling lockdown compared to how England is handling it?

[CD and myself find ourselves having very different pandemic experiences due to the differences in restrictions our two countries have. CD finds herself to be in much heavier lockdown]

CD (16:52):

Well, I can, I, cause I don’t really know what lockdown is this been like for you, but certainly this last lockdown, it has been much stricter. We are not supposed to go anywhere. I’ve sought out a local area, but the trouble is people don’t always know what they look like. There is something on Facebook this week about people asking if they could go from here from, from our little town to a place called Wallington hall, which is a national trust property. And somebody said it was, “uh, no, that that’s okay. I went there, I took my grandchildren there last week and that was fine. We could go around the garden.”  That’s when somebody else said, “Oh, well, we went to a place that was nearer and we got fined a thousand pounds.”

PM (17:41):

Oh, wow.

CD (17:44):

There’s an awful lot of chatter going on, on social media, about what we’re up. We we have neighbors who have just driven all the way to Nottingham and back to see their daughter because they are in a, or they’re in a bubble with her. She’s a single person. And, and she was having some mental health issues, I think. And they weren’t stopped at all, but there are other people who’ve been, who’ve just gone for a little drive somewhere and been stopped by the police and fined. So it’s a bit hit and miss. So, you, you’re never quite sure, but we know we’re not supposed to. And we suddenly realized we’d been talking to somebody on our drive who wanted to know the size of the boots of our car, or we made us the fact, actually, we probably shouldn’t have been talking to you. And that was your, that was your uncle Graham. Okay. We have nobody, the neighbors are not going to report us.

PM (18:50):

That that is, I would say very different from my experience in the U S with I’ve never seen or heard or been fined, and I often can, and then am allowed to go to restaurants. So I think there’s a big difference between the two countries.

CD (19:09):

Now the AHS are all closed, that they were closed during the first lockdown. Then they opened; there was a, there was a little bit of opening up during the summer holidays. And in fact that the chance of the Exchequer was encouraging people to go and eat. They were offering sort of cut price meals. I can’t remember what was the, what, they’ve called the program, but lots of people were going out to eat in restaurants, Richard, and I didn’t do that because we still didn’t feel safe to be perfectly honest. We don’t really feel safe having takeaway meals delivered or anything. So I just, we just cook our own food. Lots of other people have gone. I think, I think my generation, our generation, the older people are not going out as much.

CD (20:05):

It’s just the younger people who feel that they can’t bear being in the house any longer and want to go out, but restaurants and pubs cafes are all closed. They’re all, a lot of them are doing takeaway coffees, takeaway meals or a Sunday lunch. You can go and, but you have to order it. You can’t just turn up, you’ve got to let them know you’re coming, because that would be against the regulations. So it will be, we are all looking forward very much indeed, to be able to do, you know, our father really wants to do, he wants to just be able to go out in the car, go for a drive, stop somewhere and have a, have a coffee, not very ambitious. And that would be really nice.

PM (21:03):

So with that in mind, how has getting the vaccine changed your outlook on COVID-19? Has that changed any of your day-to-day life? Maybe. Can you do more?

CD (21:16):

Well, because we’ve had, well, we’ve had the first shots of the vaccine. We have to wait until…I wait for 12 weeks. Richard had his on January the ninth. I had mine on January the 16th, and apparently we will have our second shots about the end of March, but the end of this month, and we are looking forward to that because I still don’t, it’s taken away the dread, I mean, the fear of catching the virus and what it would do to both of us at our age, but particularly, um, to Richard. I think men do seem to, to suffer more from it than women, I believe. So that has taken away the fear that the virus, the vaccine protects us against the serious for the COVID and death, but you can still, you can still catch it. You can still I had somebody who had the vaccine and three weeks later, she, her husband and child all caught COVID, but at least they weren’t really, really ill with it, but they,  you are infectious, you can’t leave home.

So, you know, I think it could be a long time before we, we can stop living in this very, very careful way. I mean, we spray everything that comes into the house with, I have a bucket in, in the utility room with a diluted bleach and I, I fill two sprays with it and we get through, you know, those every week, cause we spray, we spray our posts, we spray any, when we bring food, anything home from the supermarket or have it delivered, it gets sprayed. We wash our hands constantly. We wear masks. We’ve actually had some building work done in the house and the builders were very, very careful, very respectful, but after they went, I went around disinfecting everything in sight. We’ve got people working at the back of the house at the moment. We’re extending the living area. And that, I mean, normally I would take them cups of coffee and biscuits and, you know, look after them and I can’t do any of that. And that feels very strange. So there’s all sorts of things that are out of the we’ve got so used to them. I can’t even think, well, they all are now, but you know, we, we just not, not hugging each other is one of the biggest challenges. I’m very grateful that I’ve got Richard here so I can practice hugging on him. But the nice thing is that we have been allowed to go for a walk with somebody with one other person outside. So Liz and I meet every once a week. It was a Thursday and now it’s changed to a Friday because she’s doing so much volunteer, voluntary work, and we can, we walk for about an hour and we have a real catch-up. I don’t really, I haven’t done that with other, but she was, she does walk with other friends as well from time to time. But I haven’t done that really. Perhaps I should be more friendly and outgoing on my dwell, too. As things ease up, I will try and get to see other people. All my communication, is done on zoom. I’ve never heard the word zoom before and now we talk about zoom all the time. So I do a keep fit class on zoom. And I have a wonderful teacher who she does about five classes a week and you can drop into any that you wanted. And she’s another one of our local heroes because she she’s done such great work and kept us all, you know, we’re, we’re moving.

PM (25:52):

That’s great that you can get out and still see one person. That makes the biggest difference.

CD (25:59):

It does. It does.

PM (26:02):

So seeing that really life hasn’t changed too much. And you would predict that it probably will take awhile for life to be completely normal.

CD (26:14):

I think it’s because we we’ve learned so much,

PM (26:19):

We’ve adjusted to a new lifestyle.

CD (26:21):

Yeah. I mean, it’s amazing how quickly we adjusted to it and I hope we can quickly adjust out it, but I don’t, but I don’t know if we will, I don’t know if we will be running to hug at people all the time.

PM (26:36):

It’s impossible to predict. Yeah, I would call this pandemic like an aspect of social change. Maybe has your, have you changed your perspective on just overall social change, like how do you think you’ll view this pandemic in the future once all has passed, will this be a permanent part of our lives? Has social change affected you overall really yet?

CD (27:14):

Gosh, there’s so much there. That’s why I sent you that article, which I read this morning, because I thought he put it really well [CD here is referring to an article written about the future effects this pandemic will have on society]. That if you live a comfortable life, if you’re not in, in great needs, um, it just hasn’t been too bad for you. You, you know, people have been talking about how the hobbies that they’ve developed or they’ve learned to speak Italian, or they’ve learned to cook banana bread or, you know, they’ve written books or they’ve done amazing things because they have the, you know, then that they’re not worried about money. An interesting fact is that a lot of people have saved a lot of money because they’ve not been spending it. And so there’s quite a lot of money built up in people’s bank accounts, waiting for them to go out, to put it into the economy. I thought his last sentence was interesting. If you get a chance to read the whole thing, he says a new division will emerge between those whom it choose to remember the pandemic. It suits to misremember the pandemic and those who, so it’s true face and can never forget. And those people who’ve lost…people have been in hospital themselves, but really suffered and, and don’t live in, you know, who, who live in cramped conditions, where they can’t get away from each other. And, you know, I think that, I mean, let’s see some of that in, when she’s doing the volunteering, she goes, she’s an NHS [National Health Service] volunteer. And she takes, lunches to people who live in the very poor parts of our area. I think she would be an interesting person for you to talk to at some point she and does their shopping for them. And she sees a very, very different side of our society. So, you know there is there is enormous need and that’s why we have to have food. And we are, we are all collecting for the food banks and we have constant being asked for more and more because the need is so great. Liz went, did she and Amy drove over to, I don’t know, drove over to,  Gates, take consignment. They need that. There’s desperate need over there. Because people have lost their jobs, you know, that all or they’ve been, if, you know, there are people who tested positive and they’ve still gone out to work because they can’t afford not to work. And you know that there are such social divides in our country. And they’re always there have been for a long time, but the pandemic has exacerbated them. And I don’t know, I don’t know how long it’ll take to heal that.

PM (30:37):

Wow. Your perspective is, it’s very interesting,

CD (30:44):

But isn’t that the same in your country too?

PM (30:48):

Yeah. There’s extremes. There’s people who are just at home working from home. It’s all, I’m sure that everyone has a different perspective on this pandemic, but it’ll the last with everyone to, through the rest of their life.

CD (31:04):

Well, we’re not going to forget it. We’re all going to talk, you know we’ll tell you what I did in the park. What did you do in the war? Daddy? What did you do to help? Pretty much, except if you could give lots of food to the food banks. And I think that the difficulty for our generation is that we would just know. We must not go out. We must be careful. I am so, so grateful to the scientists and to the people who volunteer to have the vaccine tested on them before. I think, though, they were there more heroes as well, because they didn’t know what it was going to do to them. The people who I get very angry with, there’ll be the people who spread false rumors so that people have too frightened to have the vaccine. And there are lots of people in our country, and until we can persuade more people that it’s safe to do it, we don’t go into to get that herd immunity. That is the only thing that’s going to protect us really, as a society gets us out of this. And I don’t know, I, I wonder if we have learned to not to prevent another bundle.

PM (32:43):

That’s, that’s very interesting to think about. I’m not sure if we have.

CD (32:50):

I bet we’ll make all the same mistakes. I don’t think people know unless we have a..I think you’ve got a government now, which is doing the right things. I mean, routing out the vaccine and getting people to wear masks and doing all the things that we should have been doing so much earlier. Um, so good. Good for Joe.

PM (33:21):

I’m a supporter of Joe. Well, thank you so much for your time and for doing this interview.

CD (33:31):

I hope I made a bit of sense. Very great. It’s been lovely to see you. Happy birthday.

PM (33:39):

I’m just going to stop recording. We don’t have to hang up. All right. Stop.

 

Research

I want to provide deep context into what life looks like for CD as a resident of the UK and as a woman. The current United Kingdom government enforced Covid-19 restrictions include the following: no option to meet friends or family indoors but able to gather a group of up to six people outdoors. If these rules are broken, the police can and will take action against you. There are several “Stay Local” requirement enforced in England which keep people from leaving their towns. Travelling internationally is not allowed unless provided with a valid reason.

There is a new variant of Covid-19 which started in the UK which has led to multiple mutations of the virus. Research is leading scientists to believe this variant is more deadly than the original Covid-19 virus. This variant is associated with increased risk of transmissibility.

Studies on the Covid-19 virus have shown a higher mortality rate caused by the virus in men over 50 versus the mortality rate of women over 50 who have caught the virus. The difference in hormones in men and women has shown linkage as to why the previous statement is true. In this way, CD worries more about her husband than herself in the case of the virus entering their home.

Bibliography

“National Lockdown: Stay at Home.” GOV.UK, www.gov.uk/guidance/national-lockdown-stay-at-home.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, www.cdc.gov/.

Evett, Meg. “Age, Gender and COVID-19: A Complex, Hormone-Driven Interplay.” UVA Today, 3 Dec. 2020, news.virginia.edu/content/age-gender-and-covid-19-complex-hormone-driven-interplay.

Follow Up Commentary

There was a follow up conversation with CD on March 27, 2021. No changes were requested and CD is pleased with the interview.

How the Interview was Recorded

The interview was done over zoom on March 10, 2021. The interview was converted into a mp3 audio format and entered into an online transcription site called Temi and edited the transcript manually.

Transcription Process

This transcription was done with the Columbia University Oral History Transcription Style Guideline. I manually edited the transcription done by Temi. I fixed punctuation and improper transcribed words, took out filler words and took away any words repeated multiple times. I followed Columbia’s guideline thoroughly but strayed from its advice in order to leave in some false starts. I often deleted most false starts but felt some were needed to show that even though CD was talking about her own country, she sometimes didn’t know exactly what the facts were.