I am one of those extremely fortunate people for whom the time of Covid is now a fading memory, a temporary disruption of everyday life which was easily weathered with “a garden and a library.” Retired, mortgage paid off, with no dependants, no relatives in hospitals or care homes, and living in the countryside, I could not have been in a more privileged position.
My memories of the first lockdown which began in the spring of 2020, are of early morning walks under a cerulean sky, banks of primroses, and the scent of wild garlic. From the fields the skylarks rose on a cloud of song. Bluetits and sparrows squabbled noisily over the bird bath. The blackbird sang his heart out from daybreak to twilight, and later the baby blackbirds made the garden their playpen, weaving a path between the rosemary bush and the lavender, opening their beaks wide when they thought their parents might be in the offing but at other times quite capable of grubbing around for themselves. The swifts arrived early and every evening there was a magnificently choreographed ballet in the sky. By day, the house martins dipped and swooped.
Cherry blossom vied with the froth of forget me nots, and flax-blue fields. I revived a school days interest in botany, identifying gloriously named wildflowers: campion, tufted vetch, hedge parsley, stitchwort, speedwell, woundwort, cranesbill, bugle, notch leaf scorpion weed, birds foot trefoil, orange hawkweed, lady’s bed straw, bachelor’s buttons, ox-eye daisies…I watched the barley grow from tender young shoots to the proud, golden stalks harvested in July .
I thought often of my grandparents, for the peaceful countryside, without cars or planes, must have resemble life in their day. Wild animals grew tamer: I met deer and hares no longer hiding in the woods and fields but ambling along the lanes stopping only a few feet away, staring a while, before turning unhurriedly away.
Only the ambulances made an occasional wild, screaming passage through the village and the air ambulances hung ominously in the sky. Aware of their good fortune villagers displayed rainbows in their windows, taped thank-you notes to their refuse bins, and set up roadside placards thanking all key workers. I read a backlog of books from my shelves and renewed old friendships as emails spread like ripples in a pond. Someone taught me to use WhatsApp, though I failed to graduate to Zoom. I tidied cupboards and polished floors.
As lockdown regulations eased, we marvelled at the still almost empty buses passing through the village towards Bath, ghostly presences out of an Edward Hopper painting. We made short car journeys for walks and picnics in the neighbouring county and joined socially distancing but ebullient queues for our first Covid inoculations.
But it was not so easy for everyone. Some people were isolated and lonely; others confined to overcrowded inner-city flats. Domestic violence increased. Education was disrupted. Hospital patients and care home residents died alone and confused as visits were prohibited. Funerals were curtailed.
By 2025 Covid had caused more than seven million confirmed deaths worldwide, with estimates suggesting more than five times that number. It was ranked as the fifth deadliest pandemic in history. *
In the United Kingdom alone by May 2023 227,000 deaths had been recorded as caused by Covid. Yet not all of those deaths were inevitable. In 2015 the government National Risk Register had calculated that there was between a one in twenty and a one in two risk of pandemic flu in the UK within five years, but there had been no investment in masks, ventilators, or gowns. Instead, NHS spending had been run down.
Following the first outbreaks of Covid, The World Health Organisation declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in January 2020, but in Britain the government response was slow and ineffectual. It did not participate in the EU scheme for bulk buying ventilators, relying instead, and against specialist advice, on the ill understood principle of herd immunity. In April government ministers took the decision to remove older people from ventilators if the supply ran out, providing them only for those more likely to survive. When they finally ordered more, the supplies which they procured from non-specialist producers proved unsuitable for patients in intensive care and were withdrawn from use following feedback from clinicians.
After a similar initial failure to combat the shortage of personal protective equipment, leaving NHS staff exposed and in danger, controversial contracts were hastily established with inflated prices paid to middlemen. Those with contacts in the Commons and Lords could make applications via a favoured VIP lane to supply PPE. Money went to people with no experience in the field, newly established companies made high profits…and many of the gowns, gloves and masks supplied, after considerable delays, failed to comply with health care standards. Clothing which had cost £4 billion had to be burned because it was useless being of inferior quality and not sterile.
Care workers were overstretched and vulnerable. In some care homes dedicated staff were living in to avoid spreading Covid, and working twelve hour shifts seven days a week. Yet despite advice from the WHO government ministers were slow to introduce test and trace measures. Too late, and in a now a familiar pattern, £ 33.5 million was finally spent on inaccurate anti-body tests which were shown to return false negatives.
Meanwhile government ministers and their staff broke lock down rules, travelling, socialising and even holding parties at Downing Street during the lockdown period.
Families for Justice, a support group for bereaved families, began to push for a public inquiry into preventable deaths from Covid. ** At the same time the campaign group Led by Donkeys*** were pursuing the government’s mishandling of the Covid crisis, and the lack of transparency over the procurement of equipment.
The two groups came together in 2021 to create a memorial for those who had died of Covid. This was to be created by the bereaved themselves, and as well as an act of remembrance, it was to serve as an instrument of rebuke.
Following discussions and searches the participants chose a site and a symbol. A long concrete wall borders the footpath on the south bank of the Thames between Lambeth bridge and Westminster bridge. It stretches for five hundred meters and faces directly onto the Houses of Parliament on the opposite bank. On this wall they decided to paint red hearts, each one representing someone who had died because of Covid.
The work looks spontaneous, but the planning was meticulous involving testing different paints and pens and using computer modelling to determine the size of the hearts. As a grass roots, people led initiative, calling the government to account, it was important that the site was claimed without any attempt to seek official permission. The wall was listed, painting hearts on it was technically criminal damage, the volunteers who painted the first hearts knew that they risked arrest. To minimise the chances of this, they made their activities look as official as possible: setting up A-boards explaining that this was the National Covid Memorial Wall, volunteers wore matching tabards bearing the insignia NCMW. They gambled on the hope that once the first hearts were on the wall, and the atmosphere clearly one of respect, it would be difficult to oppose their activities.
In the early morning of March 29th, 2021, socially distanced volunteers, most of them from bereaved families, painted the first hearts on the wall. An appeal to the public for help swelled the number of volunteers to 1,500, and over ten days they painted 150,000**** hearts working shifts of two or three hours.
At first there were just the hearts, then people began to write names in the hearts. As news of the wall spread, the group received requests from people unable to visit themselves and added more names on their behalf.
There never was any police intervention. It would have been hard for the police to stop them, from the beginning their position was unassailable. There was a moment of concern when one of a group of police waiting for their Covid inoculations at St. Thomas hospital lent over the wall, but it was only to request a heart for a neighbour who had died.
Working quickly, quietly, and respectfully the volunteers completed their Wall of Grief and Love. It is a perfect location, a quiet, pedestrian path lined with plane trees, beside the river in central London. Today the hand drawn hearts with their poignant contents, are a permanent memorial for the individuals who died, a reminder of the scale of the pandemic, and a place for community reflection.
The Friends of the Wall are volunteers who repaint and rewrite the hearts and their contents as they fade and remove any graffiti. For there is no need for any further political statement: from the terraces of the Houses of Parliament the view across the river is of the wall, and the red hearts of remembrance reproach and shame a government whose cavalier attitude cost so many lives.
*Wikipedia – List of epidemics and pandemics.
**The group was to be instrumental in securing the UK Covid-19 Inquiry.
***Led by Donkeys is a campaign group established in 2018 and initially involved in campaigning against Brexit. The day before we left the EU, they projected a video onto the white cliffs of Dover showing two veterans of World War II talking of the EU as a peace project, their sadness at leaving, and their hope that one day we would rejoin. At midnight they projected the EU flag, and as midnight passed this disappeared leaving a solitary star facing Europe across the Channel with the message “This is our star. Look after it for us.”
Led by Donkeys’ focus is on holding government to account, drawing attention to lies and hypocrisy, pushing progressive ideas, and helping groups with less campaign experience. They take their name from a phrase originally attributed to Chabrias in classical antiquity but popularised in Britain during World War I to describe soldiers led by incompetent and indifferent leaders as “Lions led by donkeys.”
****Later extended to 250,000
