One of the conversations I had with my mum on one of our visits to ‘Clacton pier’, before she fell asleep and I was left looking at all the other patients, filled with life and hope and comparing them to mum’s lack of life and misplaced hope, was about mask wearing. The conversation keeps coming back to me because no one in the UK wore masks then.
“What do you think?” she asked as a little Asian man shuffled onto the ward, wearing a surgical mask.
He wasn’t a doctor. If he had been, we’d have thought nothing. No one wants doctors breathing their germs into their patient’s open wounds.
“Do you think it helps?” she added.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I suppose it depends on what you are trying to protect against. I can’t imagine it’s very good for your own lung health to keep breathing in and out the same stale air but if you thought you were protecting other people I can understand it.”
“Isn’t it to protect themselves?”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” I said, “I always thought it was to protect other people. I remember having to wear them when you brought my sister home from hospital.”
“Do you remember that?”
She seemed surprised but continued, “But they all wear them.”
“I suppose if they come from a country that had SARS then they might still be a bit scared. Who knows what an epidemic might make you scared of. Do you think you’d ever wear one?”
I asked but she was asleep and so I watched the Asian man chatting to his wife and working on the crossword puzzle together and listened to the business man on the phone say, “Yes, yes, sorry about the noise. I’m on Clacton Pier.”
With the messaging around this virus being so confused and frequently changing, who knows what behaviours we will cling onto or how long they might last. Will our grandchildren still wear masks in public without really knowing why? Will our great grandchildren still leap into bushes when someone passes them on the street? Will people, three generations down the line still be rushing to douse themselves in antibac whenever they touch something?
Music teachers are still posting on social media to ask whether singing is safe and the guidance has been that children should sing in school for ages now. The research concluded that singing was no less safe than speaking and it was actually more safe than shouting, in terms of droplet spread. It takes people a long time to catch up and when advice changes so frequently there will probably still be people who think you can catch it from stroking the neighbours cat (that suggestion lasted about 48 hours).
I recently had a conversation about whether it was possible to sit on fabric chairs in a shared space because they couldn’t be wiped down after and I was suddenly reminded about how women of my mum’s generation were taught to hover to pee in public toilets.
Most of them didn’t know why they were doing it. It was a hangover prom previous generations but my mum had asked and when she tried to persuade me to adopt the same practice I asked too.
“So you don’t catch Syphilis.”
Mum greeted the news with an accepting duty. Syphilis, being a disease of war, was very much present in the community still in the early fifties. By the time I was learning to pee in public bathrooms it was only a disease of prostitutes and so the practice seemed unnecessary. Also, I didn’t have the muscle strength for the hover.
Maybe that is my mum’s legacy. I think she taught me to question and then allowed me to refuse to so anyrgng I didn’t have the muscle strength for.
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