Story: March 2020

Anonymous was a Woman

Pandemic Memory

During the Pandemic, anxiety, naturally, ran very high. Our future suddenly became very uncertain. I can remember feeling very sobered by the knowledge that the whole world was united in suffering and anxiety. The pace of life slowed as movement and activity was curbed, it felt like living under water, everything was arduous, painstaking care had to be taken with everything; the notion of kindness arose, meaning consideration for the well being of others as well as one's own. This was good, but it heightened one's awareness to the point of fear and imbued every day with a sense of trepidation. Sleep was no longer as restful as it had been.

I read somewhere some time before about people dividing sleeping into two halves in Medieval times. The first sleep, around 9 o'clock, probably linked to natural tiredness, or exhaustion, according to your standing in society, lasted for a couple of hours, after which, there followed a period of wakefulness, called The Watch.

During this short interval, people would do all kinds of things, some rather surprising like visiting friends in other houses apparently, according to research by the historian Roger Ekirch, others nefarious, like stealing or even committing murders, though thankfully more commonly, people would spend it in much more productive ways like attending to bread making, beer brewing and other preparations for the following day, or simply having sex, which is probably the reason most of us are here.

I came across this rather lovely piece which I read as a poem but later discovered was an aire written by John Dowland, Court Musician to Elizabeth 1 and it evokes the care and worry one might have about someone one loves in wakeful, fretful dark hours of the night. An exquisite lullaby, a musical spell with the intention of bestowing restful sleep on the person in receipt of it. It can be read, I think, both as a gift from John Dowland to his beloved benefactor, in the certain knowledge that she was unwell and likely to die soon, ( for she did indeed die soon after he wrote it ), but also as something Queen Bess might want to gift someone who she knows would be missing in her absence;

Anonymous was a Woman

I reimagined it to be written by a woman, or at least, imagined a woman, ( perhaps Queen Bess ? ) lying awake, unable to sleep for worrying about her lover and how lost he will feel without her;

In 1603 she

wrote a poesy;

Anonymous, a woman awake

in the watches of the night,

worrying, wanting

comfort

for someone she's thinking of.

As the wolf time arrives,

she has dispelled the

uht-cearu

with her patch of a poem,

and perhaps her sunne rise

saw a secret smile upon

her lips.

-

Home - a lipogram

The sun fluttered on the leaves of the trees that formed the boundary of the garden. Name not known,
unnecessary to the beauty, Gustav's Beech Grove would not serve the memory well, yet the
bark of those ones she came upon much later would very well serve the memory.

The hours up to noon were spent at play when the house would become full of characters and
spaces to explore opened.

The afternoon was spent underneath the blackcurrant bushes or on the garden brush, a horse, of course.
Or, treasure was dug. Holes not too deep. The wash pole marked one spot. One shell marked another.

Each day revealed the colours there; the whole palette, the broadest bow that moves from place to place
the weather moves the spectrum the greyest shades belong to the densest cloud.

Those days when her sky was a flat grey, no sun to seek out depth on the pavement, or soften the rough
red walls of the houses, nor the sharp edged dark green hedges.

The black square of our front room looms as we push open the dark green gate. Only the faded
pastels of the Hydrangea's old flower heads lend a gentle tone to the suburban drab of our

late March afternoon.

Shouldn't

You shouldn't have

If you hadn't

I wouldn't have

I didn't

You did

I did not

Oh yes you did

I didn't mean

You did

not

did

not

did

you

DID

YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE

YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE

YOU SHOULDN'T

YOU SHOULDN'T

DONT

DONT

NO MORE

🌈

The pandemic was a difficult time for everyone in the world. Very few escaped its consequences. Here in the UK during lockdowns, people in care homes, flats without outdoor spaces and those in prisons, including young offenders institutions, must have felt the restrictions particularly acutely. At its nadir, I think we were only allowed out once a day for exercise and were not allowed to sit on benches in the park or lie on the grass in the summer. Children's playgrounds were taped off.

It was a terrible thing to hear and read that domestic violence and in particular, violence against children, had increased.

Even those of us lucky enough to live in places where we had enough rooms to be separate and on our own should we need to, with an outdoor space or garden to go and breathe fresh air should we long to, got very sad, even depressed and the relentless daily reporting by the government on the daily death toll added to this general mood of depression I remember.

🌈