On finishing my novel (spoiler: it's set during a pandemic)

Last week I finished the novel that I started in December 2013. Six and a bit years of ups and downs, loss of confidence, moments of great happiness in writing, and finally a manuscript that I've placed in a folder called FINAL.

Trigger warning: this isn't one of my blogs about walking in the fields. My novel is set during a modern viral pandemic.

Seven years ago I had my appendix out and was pretty ill for a while. I was thoughtful about mortality. I read Pepys's diaries in bed each night and was mesmerised by his telling of living through the Plague in London in 1665.  It first appears there on 7 June:

"This day, much against my Will, I did in Drury lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and 'Lord have mercy upon us' writ there - which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind that to my remembrance I ever saw."

I'd read Camus's La Peste as a student and the diary brought it back. Camus's telling of a town locked down in desperation sits deep in my subconscious even if I no longer remember it in detail. It's one of those books that changes you invisibly.

How would we respond now to such a plague, I wondered?

My characters were clear in my mind from the start: a mother and her 19-year-old daughter who live on the road in their van. The mother is absolutely sure in her convictions, fuelled by anger about modern society. She rejects it all, refuses to engage with anyone except her daughter. I find such people mesmerising and terrifying: I don't know how to handle such righteous rage and tend to hide from it. I wondered what it would be like to be her daughter, trapped in a van in a wood in winter with love and anger.

I read Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, and my heart travelled with the people who had nowhere to go but were forced to wander from town to town hoping that someone would leave supplies out for them: no one would let them in.

If such an infectious and fatal illness struck us now, how would the people I live among behave? Would they allow my child to come home, possibly bringing sickness and death? Who would I open my door to?

What would happen to my characters, out on the road? So free and yet so vulnerable?

I began to research plagues and pandemics. I filled notebooks and folders. My shelves filled with jolly titles like The New Plagues.

By 2016 I was wading through papers by virologists and epidemiologists.

They had titles like, 'World invests too little and is underprepared for disease outbreak' (BMJ, 2016; 352: i225).

And, 'Seven reasons we're at more risk than ever of a global pandemic' (CNN, 2016).

And, 'The Threat of Pandemic Influenza: Are We Ready?' (National Academies Press, 2005). (The answer is a resounding no.)

I downloaded the UK's public health plans for a flu pandemic. They never seemed to consider a non-flu pandemic in their planning.

At the top of one set of plans I scribbled: 'BUT IS THIS AN UNDERESTIMATE?'

It was utterly plain to me - with my O level in Biology and a degree in French - that our government was horrifically unprepared for a pandemic, even though it identified a flu pandemic as the number one threat to our country, far above terrorism.

Politics kept winning over science. Our politicians didn't want to invest in public health, or strong infrastructure, or relieving poverty so that people and communities were healthier. They shouted about crime and foreigners and scroungers, and they cut funding to hospitals and social care, and they pushed more and more people into poverty.

Pandemic? Who cares, they effectively said. They ignored what scientists had been telling them for years because it would have meant spending money on things they didn't value.

So when the news came from Wuhan at the start of this year, I knew what was coming. I couldn't do anything about it. I felt helpless. Weeks before widespread panic buying I bought flour, pasta, coffee, oil, tinned tomatoes and chocolate and put them in a box under the stairs. I remembered reading a US epidemiologist who said he had two months' supplies at home and was planning to hide out with his family for as long as it took. Now, of course, two months seems laughable.

I watched the news and kept writing. I was in the revisions by now, sorting out plot quirks and clunky dialogue.

By the time we were locked down, I had an almost final version. One of my lovely readers sat with it in the middle of the night while feeding his baby, waking each morning unsure what was real - my book or the news on the radio.

Last week I read it through one last time.

'My' virus is far nastier than COVID-19. It spreads faster and kills more people. It's carried initially by domestic cats, and it starts right here in the UK. It's entirely plausible and judging by the way our government has responded to COVID-19 - and is still responding right now - we'd be utterly devastated by it.

I'm angry. We knew this was coming. No one can 'beat' a virus, but we could have been prepared. We could have saved so many lives and we still need to.

I'm afraid too. My parents are in their 80s. Their domiciliary carers have no PPE (not necessary, says government advice, though one of the carers is off sick with COVID-19). My son is in the shielded group because he has an underlying health condition. It doesn't make him any less my son, any less valuable. If he catches COVID-19 I may never see him again.

This has been such a strange time. People keep saying that, and it has become a cliche, but it is no less true. I have been happy writing and I am proud of my novel. It's about so much more than the facts of pandemics and viruses: it's about people and how they live together even in the strangest times, and it's about trust and hope.

Hope isn't enough to keep us safe, but it's so important. Here's hoping for better times.

Pepys

 Old St Pauls, destroyed by the Fire of London, by Thomas Wyck c 1673

I've been reading The Shorter Pepys for years - it sits beside my bed and I read it a month at at time, with gaps where something else takes my fancy. The diaries begin in 1660, just as Charles II comes to the throne after Cromwell's rule - frightening times, where anyone in public life would have good reason to tread carefully. Yet Pepys rarely alludes to the underlying tensions directly, instead describing the daily life of a hard working public servant whose main task is to provision the navy as it fights the Dutch. He never seems secure, and his life is a non-stop circuit of meetings and machinations in Whitehall, at his office, in Greenwich and Deptford, in people's houses and in coaches between the meetings: I long ago forgot who is who and have no idea whom he trusts and whom he doesn't.

Not that it matters - I love him for his unabashed desire to make money - you never know what might be round the corner - and to be well-regarded at court, and for his constant pleasure in friends, good food, music, books and the theatre.

Anyway, I've finally reached 1666. The plague has been running through London for months, ebbing and flowing, sometimes worrying Pepys, sometimes going unmentioned. So I knew the Great Fire must be on its way, but when? Finally, this week:

September

2 Lords Day. Some of our maids sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast today. Jane called up, about 3 in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City...

It's here! And Pepys gives a wonderful first hand account of the disorder, the fear, the speed of the spread of the flames:

... walked along Watling Street as well I could, every creature coming away laden with goods to save - and here and there sick people carried away in beds. Extraordinary good goods carried in carts and on backs. At last met my Lord Mayor in Canning Streete, like a man spent, with a handkerchief about his neck. To the King's message, he cried like a fainting woman, "Lord. what can I do? I am spent! People will not obey me. I have been pulling down  houses. But the fire overtakes us faster then we can do it."

He goes out in a boat on the Thames to see the fire better, and notes that among the boats carrying people's possessions, one in three has a virginall or two in it. He believes at first that his house - which he is the the middle of doing up, thoroughly modern man that he is - is safe, but then realises how far and fast the fire is spreading. So he moves most of his furniture to a friend's house away from the fire, and then - best touch of all, returns to bury in the garden his wine, his papers, and his parmesan.

Wonderful stuff!

For a quick daily Pepys fix try http://www.pepysdiary.com/