Tom had always wondered how he would respond in a time of national emergency. What he had never anticipated was that he would be called upon to do absolutely nothing. Or that, since his field of disengagement would be the domestic one, his Commanding Officer would be his wife.
In the Coronavirus Crisis the battle is not of Loos but loo rolls. There is no cavalry charge; there are just silent queues. There are sieges, millions of them simultaneously, but since he is himself besieged by the same invisible foe Tom can do nothing to relieve them. He’s confined to his own remote outpost, receiving orders to engage in pointless administrative chores. So what if he forgot to start the dishwasher? People are dying. But such mutiny creates a chill, and his fellow family subordinates fail to stand by him, firstly because they are both only ten and secondly because in order to attract their attention he would first have to amputate their games consoles and this would not be conducive to generating esprit de corps.
Tom takes refuge in his shed. Here he finds Manly things to do. He tidies his tools. He finds a tin of creosote and spends several contented hours painting the garden fence, satisfying a primeval defensive urge to secure his perimeter and ignoring the little voice in his head telling him that a fence, however well creosoted, can’t keep out a virus.
When Tom finds some dusty seed packets in a dark corner of his sanctuary he’s struck with the inspiration that in a post-Covidian world vegetables may be hard to come by. He renews his efforts to lure his boys outside but they only want to help if they can grow Pringles trees and Ketchup bushes. They find this hilarious. ‘But growing vegetables is a survival skill,’ he bleats. ‘It’s what Bear Grylls would do.’ They contradict him firmly: Bear Grylls would dig up grubs and spiders because Bear Grylls is Cool and Hard. Tom longs to tell them that Bear Grylls only pretends to live on grubs and spiders and that as soon as the cameras stop rolling he heads for the nearest hotel. But he’s bigger than that. From his trusty shed he extracts their old tent and that night his boys abandon their consoles to camp out with him in the garden and eat fried earthworms under the stars. With Pringles and Ketchup. It may be a modest victory in Tom’s coronavirus war but it’s one his sons will always remember.
© C P Jenkinson 22/04/2020
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