As a writer, I spend much of my time socially distanced and locked down at my laptop anyway, so when Covid-19 struck in March, life should have carried on as usual, except that it didn’t.
The Golden Maid
I missed my weekly stint volunteering at the village shop and visiting family and friends. Trips out for coffee or to buy produce from the local market were replaced by a compulsion to watch the daily coronavirus briefings and every news update that was available. Plans for travelling to London to lunch with my agent and editor were shelved, although I’d been lucky in that I’d made an essential research trip to Deal in Kent before lockdown, so I had plenty of material for The Golden Maid, my latest novel.
However, the restrictions created by the pandemic were not all bad. The peace and quiet that came with the reduction in traffic and near absence of planes in the skies above encouraged the wildlife to emerge – either that, or life had slowed down enough for me to take notice of it. While walking the dog, I saw woodpeckers, nuthatches, dormice, newts and hedgehogs. The air seemed fresh and clean.
I had a go at recording an author vlog, something that did not come naturally to me at all – regular vloggers make their videos appear effortless, but I have a renewed respect for them, having discovered how much you have to think about camera angles, background noise and the clothes you are wearing. The lockdown hairstyle didn’t help!
Like many others, I started growing some veggies – the slugs got the beans and the tomato plants withered, but the pumpkins are doing well, making me wonder how much pumpkin soup I’ll be making in the autumn.
I also turned to baking and cooking from scratch, making panettone, bread rolls and boiled fruit cake, clearing up my long-held misunderstanding that you boil the fruit, not the cake itself.
When I was writing about Winnie, a smuggler’s daughter in The Golden Maid, I pictured her wearing an apron and stirring a pot over a fire in the family kitchen, and smoking herring in the hang.
This homely image contrasted with the difficult circumstances that forced her to join her family’s escapades, smuggling gold, contraband and despatches across the English Channel between Deal and Gravelines in France. I wondered how she and the boatmen, their wives and children who lived along the spit in Deal during the Napoleonic Wars would have coped with the pandemic and lockdown.
Winnie would have been used to cooking with locally sourced and seasonal ingredients and would not have let anything go to waste: for example, she would have used every part of a pig except for its squeak. Her community would have risen to the challenge of Covid-19, uniting to look after each other, just as they cooperated while going out to rescue passengers and crew from foundering ships, and while taking part in what was known as the ‘free trade’.
I believe that lockdown gave me a real appreciation of the resourcefulness and generosity of the human spirit, and a renewed interest in the natural world.
For more from Evie Grace on Female First click HERE
