Page 10 - Luce 2021

I nternational Perspectives

A Journal of Two Plague Years

The allusion in my title is to Daniel a consequence has been stressful and
Defoe’s classic account of the trying. As I have often reflected ruefully,
devastating outbreak of plague in the timing of my tenure as a head of
London in 1665-6 written from the department has been less than ideal!
perspective of an eyewitness. First
published in 1722, it drew less on I remember well the snap decision to
Defoe’s own experiences as a five-year- close the university a few days before
old child than on the diaries of his uncle, the first national lockdown and the
a Whitechapel saddler. It was a creative frantic scramble to put the Faculty
mosaic of personal, inherited and social building in mothballs and to distribute IT
memory. The same will be true of the equipment to enable administrative staff
memoirs that emerge from the current to work from home. Naïvely, we thought
pandemic of COVID-19. Whether this would be reversed in a matter of
written now or at some point in the weeks: for some those changed patterns
future, they too will be a mixture of fact of activity have now settled into semi-
and fiction, selective recollection and permanency. Since then, my colleagues
strategic forgetting. and I have navigated a dizzying series
of instructions from the university and
As an academic historian, it has been government. We have become, of bracing ourselves for the next wave and
both intriguing and sobering to watch necessity, experts in crisis management wondering how much havoc Omicron
how people in Britain, Australia and and risk assessment. Never has change will wreak to our hard-won and recently
around the world have responded to happened so fast in an eight hundred- regained freedoms. By the time this
the events of the last two difficult years. year-old institution! appears in print, that question will
My observations have reminded me of a already have been answered.
seminar class on the Black Death which We have learnt to turn on a sixpence
I taught dozens of times as part of an with each new and unpredictable twist In the ever-turning kaleidoscope, some
outline course on medieval and early in this virus’s history. We have adapted images and experiences have left a
modern Europe during my fourteen years to shifting requirements about social lasting impression. Eerily deserted
at the University of Exeter. This revolved distancing and ventilation and reinvented streets in the centre of Cambridge that
around a series of documents that wheels on teaching and examinations, are normally teeming with tourists.
provided insight into the varied reactions moving them online and then adjusting Supermarket shelves cleared of flour,
of contemporaries to the mysterious their formats back to in-person delivery. pasta, soap and toilet paper by panic
disease that ravaged communities in We have transferred the majority of buyers. PhD supervisions conducted
Italy and Germany in the middle years of meetings to the ubiquitous Zoom. under trees and in the course of brisk
the fourteenth century, from morbid fear Many of these have been punctuated walks along the Backs and around
to patient hope and fatalistic resignation. by the constant refrain of our age Parker’s Piece. The weekly Thursday
(‘you are mute’) and enlivened by the evening ‘clap for carers’ on doorsteps
These documents cast light on the interruptions of attention-seeking pets during the first lockdown. Television
competing theories of causation that – in my case a mischievous tabby cat footage of the vaccination clinics set
circulated, the quarantine measures returning home with a mouse or hunting up in the aisles of Salisbury’s and
towns and cities introduced to paper clips among the documents and Chester’s magnificent cathedrals. In
combat the spread of infection, and files on the floor of my study. disappointing contrast, my first two jabs
the ingenious array of remedies and were delivered in a local pharmacy. But
protective devices adopted by the In the midst of all this, students my recent booster injection was given
populace, from smoke to posies of and staff have shown extraordinary by a woman wearing reindeer horns in
sweet-smelling herbs. Little did I or my reserves of stamina, adaptability and a leisure centre brilliantly run by a team
students imagine that we would live resilience, even as they have also faced of dedicated volunteers who managed to
through something similar in our own unprecedented levels of uncertainty and make it feel like a festive occasion.
lifetimes. This was an aspect of the past isolation, and, unsurprisingly, shown
that we believed to be firmly behind us. signs of anxiety and strain. The autumn The bereaved families of the millions
Instead, it turns out, it would come back term 2021 brought a tantalising glimpse who have died and the people on the
to bite us. of the Cambridge we thought we had medical frontline have been through
lost: classrooms full of students relishing much more harrowing times. Another
For me, these twenty-four months the opportunity to debate and discuss; of the dark undersides of COVID-19
have been challenging ones. The college occasions and dinners; concerts, is divorce and domestic abuse, while
pandemic has coincided with my chapel services, sporting fixtures, and the hidden psychological cost of so
three-year term as Chair of the Faculty early morning rowing crews in training much enforced loneliness and so
of History at Cambridge and the range on the misty river. But, as I write, just many blighted childhoods has yet to
of responsibilities I have acquired as two days before Christmas, we are be counted. Perhaps it is inevitable
10 LUCE Number 20 2021