M. L. E. Brown
‘Community transmission’ is a term the entire world will be much more familiar with after the Covid-19 pandemic. In medical parlance, the term refers to the apparent absence of epidemiological link within a community beyond its confirmed cases. It might also be applied in a holistic sense, when the reach of mass catastrophe seeps into cultural and emotional memory.
My parents were older than those of my schoolmates. Born in 1913 and 1918 respectively, they were middle-aged by the time I was born in 1966. Theirs was the generation of New Zealand infants who started life scarred by the immediate effects of World War One. My mother was a wonderful sick-nurse. I remember an occasion when my elderly aunt and uncle caught a serious ‘flu. I recall myself in my mid-teens, hovering in the kitchen of their villa while my mother swept upstairs bearing reheated lunches she had pre-cooked at our place; and then downstairs again with linen and towels to be flung in my aunt’s ancient washing machine.
I wasn’t allowed upstairs. “Don’t eat that!” my mother snapped as I picked up a malt biscuit left over from my uncle’s barely-touched tray. She, who could never abide waste of any sort, scraped all the untouched food onto a tin plate and marched it out to the compost. She gave me some rubber gloves and told me to do the dishes and scrub the bench thoroughly with hot water and Vim. Afterwards, I mopped the kitchen and laundry floors with even hotter water and Janola while she returned upstairs to help the afflicted pair from their chairs back to the master bed she had already re-made with clean linen.
My mother approached influenza with the same fear and loathing my classmates’ much younger mothers reserved for rubella. She had lived through the polio epidemic of 1937 and afterwards trained as a nurse aide at the outbreak of the Second World War. While these experiences accounted for much of her technical efficiency and skill in a sickroom, it wasn’t until recently that I realised her near-obsession with ‘flu itself must have come from transmitted impressions of the infamous epidemic which swept the world in the year of her birth.
I once read an account taken from an interview with an old woman, a ten-year-old girl living in Onehunga with her family at that time. The woman described how the town’s populace barely noticed the war’s end, preoccupied as it was with the grimly silent never-ending procession of funeral carts ferrying the Spanish Influenza victims to Waikaraka Cemetery week after week. Whole families succumbed to the disease, which preferred the young and strong over the elderly. I think of my mother’s mother, struggling with four young children elsewhere in Auckland at the same time. Trapped in a house with a mother-in-law still grieving for lost soldier sons, little money, and Spanish Flu sweeping the country. Multiply one family by thousands and you have a mass memory, less celebrated than the ANZAC sacrifice, but no less part of our national sub-conscious.
There are many things I inherited from my older-than-average parents. Possibly the most valuable legacy now – as I languish on a couch in 2020 while Covid-19 stalks every dermal layer of civilisation outside – is their body memory of a time largely lost to living memory. I was taught how to house-keep without waste, to save without hoarding, to nurse with rigour but also with kindness; to garden as much as a means of exercise and political independence as to secure a source of good healthy food.
Viewed holistically, one might equate Covid-19’s symptomatic trajectory through the body to 21st-century societal ailments. The fevered hectic pulse of consumerism for its own sake; the body-aching grind of the automaton constantly working for less pay and for an increasingly dubious outcome; the gradual asphyxiation of warring motor systems, each trying to assert some Darwinian authority over the other, when in truth The Whole must reconcile to be sustainable and productive.
Our greatest gain, then, would surely be an acknowledgment of which aspects of ‘normal’ are worth retrieving once the emergency is over. Like scarred lung tissue that nevertheless functions enough to breathe another season, the unspoken lore of trauma serves The Whole, keeping the good things, the tried-and-true alongside the memory of what works and what failed. Sub-conscious memory is always the legacy of pandemics. Hopefully, within our particular nightmare we will also find the necessary sources of immunity and a lasting improvement. Let this be the most powerful community transmission of all.
M. L. E. Brown is an Auckland-based novelist, poet, essayist, and photographer. She was one of two 2019 Emerging Pasifika Resident Writers at the Michael King Writer’s Centre and has had poems published in Tahakē Magazine and Cauldron Anthology. Her interests include humanities, sustainable economics, and the working relationship between allopathic and complementary medicines.
The world goes through cycles as generational wisdom earned through collective suffering is forgotten and new generations repeat the same mistakes. Your article articulates well the oft overlooked value our older generations.
I share your hope that we will learn difficult lessons from this pandemic rather than waiting for something even worse to rediscover the wisdom of your mother.
Thank you for your comments, Ryno Steyn. It isn’t just the virus is it? – it’s how we handle things, what we prioritise along the way, what we’re forgetting, and how that forgetting affects what we build. Awful as it is, there are great learning opportunities to be had here. I hope we don’t miss them.
Thank you, Reyno. Yes, we need our mothers’ wisdom.
Kia ora. Your words touched a truth with me, as a girl born in 1955 to parents who had endured the Great Depression, and WW2. My parents knew the value of things, and so did we. There were no overseas holidays, takeaways or restaurants. We saved string and brown paper. We were raised with hard-won basics, grew most of our fruit, vegetables, eggs and chickens. Had one pair of shoes, home made clothes, (right down to the undies) handknits, homemade furniture, home-baking, bottling, jams and pickles. There was a large cane basket for produce (who created all this plastic waste anyway?) We had the only phone in the street, and that was because Dad was on call at the County Council. Not for actually calling our friends for a chat. Where did all this consumerism come from, and the high-stress, high pace of people’s frantic lives? Yes these are very frightening times, but we can manage with less, do more for ourself and our family, and communicate more. The saddest thing must be the people who can’t grieve for their dead, nurture their sick or elderly whanau in care or hospital, celebrate weddings, or hold their grandchildren. Kia kaha.
Kia ora, Susan,
I’m glad you were able to relate to the piece and thank you for your comments. Yes, I agree, I think the absence of hugs and family ritual is the cruellest thing for all of us, the constant threat that our very presence is the biggest liability of all to our loved ones. But yes, we will get through this – hopefully with some necessary tweaks as to what we seem ‘essential’ going forward in our everyday living and values.
Stay well!
Kia Ora Makereta,
Thank you for sharing your mother’s story of nursing influenza patients at home. It resonated strongly because I’ve spent the last two weeks nursing my daughter who caught covid-19. My medical training was less use in preparing me for this experience, than the time I spent working as a cleaner in a psychiatric hospital in the UK – but even that hasn’t been particularly relevant in caring for a loved one with an infectious disease in the community (a role so often performed by mothers, as you point out).
One day, when we are through this (and I’m not so busy cleaning!) I’ll write my covid-19 story in more detail, but just to say, the first challenge was obtaining viricidal cleaning materials, gloves and masks to care for my daughter at home: the supermarkets had sold out due to panic buying and the public health teams calling us to check on symptoms seemed baffled by my requests for help.
I’m pleased to report that my daughter has now recovered, but I am still cleaning, sterilising and doing laundry….and waking at three a.m. every morning wondering if I have done enough to prevent spread of covid-19 to other members of our household….
A timely piece. What will happen when this is all over? Will we return to the rampant consumerism and me,me,me society that greedy businessmen have convinced so many is the only way to live? I too have a mother and fondly remembered gran who also taught me the value of what we had. I too know how to stock to survive the winter in case of bad weather or sickness. The present generation are too used too 24/7 everything. Run out? Just nip down to the nearest 24 hr supermarket. Panic buying is a reaction to “OMG! What do we need to survive for three weeks?” They don’t know how. Perhaps that is also my generations fault as we came into a time when basically nothing was unavailable if you knew how to work for it. We didn’t really have to plan and budget quite as hard as the generation before.
I have, noticed though, that in the time that we go out for the allotted daily exercise that people are slower, more accommodating and pleasant than before. In the supermarket queues, although longer, are more pleasant as we converse from the 2m specified distance. Perhaps if this lasts long enough those traits will enter our collective psyche and just perhaps we will realise that our earth and family truly are all we really need. Thank you Makereta x
Thanks so much, Christine.
I do hope our society is able to take advantage of this opportunity to reconsider our priorities and the way we do things.
I’m delighted to hear your daughter is recovering, Mira – such a relief for you. All the Best – your experience will certainly be something to write about once the dust has settled.
Thank you.
Thank you for writing this Makereta -it made for absorbing reading at a time when I have been thinking about my late mother and her family and how they coped with the 1918 epidemic. My mother was born on 06.08.1918 and at the time she was born, her mother already had three children under the age of 5. Mum often said she didn’t know how her family got through that time, let alone to go on and have more children! Like the other correspondents who have commented, am so very glad Mira’s daughter is on the road to recovery. Like Susan I was also born in 1955 and was brought up to ‘waste not, want not’. I would like to think lessons will be learnt from COVID19 that will stay with us and not be forgotten when brighter times arrive. The lessons I learned from going through all the Christchurch earthquakes will stay with me for the rest of my life, so perhaps this will be life changing for many people. And if people remember nothing else, I’d be happy if they remember Jacinda’s “Be Kind” and remember to put it into practice.
Thank you for those remarks, Heather. I am finding the whole ‘Be Kind’ thing the most powerful current running through the collective experience. I’ve been saddened on the one hand because apparently it actually has needed to be said and repeated. And yet I’m also heartened because though as a society we have lost so much kindness due to the way the economy defines our values, there still seems to be so much of it out there. Reading of everyone’s experiences and perspectives, even just here, I am hopeful of a change in general consciousness going forward. I do believe a few priorities need to be re-ordered.
Thanks again!
Dear Makereta,
Thank you for this wise and thoughtful piece and for highlighting how the experience of lock down might inspire greater focus on resilience and sustainability. Many market gardens and vegetable and fruit growing areas in New Zealand have recently been under threat, or replaced, by urban developments. Among the positives to emerge from the Covid 19 experience, let’s hope an emphasis on local self sufficiency and sustainable food production will be one of them. Thanks for sharing your story.
Sophia
Thanks, Sophia! Yes, let’s hope sustainability will rank a bit higher in the scheme of things from now on. It’s clear it surely needs to.