When Miss Rona Came To Town
I woke up later than usual today. I’ve been a lot more tired recently than I was before it happened, but that’s okay because there is barely any traffic anymore so the drive to school takes half the time it did a few days ago.
It has two names, the thing that’s caused all the traffic to disappear, and everyone around the world knows them by now so calling it by its real name is entirely unnecessary. At school everyone simply says “any more news on what they’re doing about it?” Everyone knows what it is. Either that or they call it a pet name, simply a shortened version of its full name, like a nickname I guess. Not that what we call it will matter much anymore. We’ll all be in isolation soon. The Prime Minister announced that closure off all schools in the UK yesterday, well, all the ones that didn’t already have confirmed cases. I watched the live feed on my phone with my mum as we made dinner. People had been calling for schools to close for weeks anyway so we weren’t really surprised when the decision was announced. The issue was more a matter of ‘when’ than ‘if’. My mum didn’t entirely understand why they needed to close though.
“You young people can’t get it so I don’t see why schools need to close.” Of course she wasn’t completely wrong, but she wasn’t entirely right either.
“What about the teachers mum?” I’d asked her. “What about them?” She didn’t reply to that. I had more points but I knew better than to say anything. She never liked being wrong.
There was a power cut last night too. My sister was in the bathroom when the lights went out and she screamed which made me jump as well. She doesn’t like the dark so she stayed in my room until the lights came back on. My friends from school two towns over said that they had one about the same time. The WiFi went down for a few minutes as well. We all knew that it wasn’t what had caused the power to go out or the WiFi to go down. We made an educated guess, not that an educated guess from us would be worth much with our GCSEs and quarter of an A-Level. Either way we guessed that the power went out because of the effects of it. The lack of workers. The constant checking of the live death count online and then the checking it again. Nobody could tell for sure though, apart from maybe the government and the power companies. But they wouldn’t tell us.
We are just year twelves.
I arrived at school at about that same time that I always do and met with my friends at the top of the Sixth Form Center. We spoke about the Prime Minister’s speech. Everyone had watched the Prime Minister’s speech. For some reason, we kept talking about what we would do if we had some power in all of this. As if we though we knew how we could fix everything. We all knew that we couldn’t. We aren’t quite that ignorant to think we know everything that is at stake here. I don’t think the Prime Minister himself even knows everything that’s at stake here, even though we’d like to think he does.
After that, we dispersed across the school to go to our form. That’s when our tutor announced that all of the year thirteens would have no lessons and had to clear out their lockers so they could leave after break. All of their lessons were cancelled and their school year was over. No one had expected that. No one I knew at least.
For most of them it didn’t sink in. Or they didn’t believe it. Or they didn’t want to believe it. Their reactions were difficult to read. They ranged from stunned silence to loud complaints. For them, that email meant a year and a half of their lives wasted. What made it even worse was that they had no idea how this would affect their applications for university or apprenticeships. The uncertainty made some people cry.
Then two free periods of wasted time, no one did their work. Most people were dashing around the room saying their rushed last goodbyes to the friends they had made in their one and a half years of wasted time. There was a person in the corner crying out that they would have tired harder in their mock exams if they knew the it was going to be the mock results that they would need for their application. Their friends were there too, trying to reassure them that the teachers would put in a good word, of course, they didn’t know if it was true or not, they were just pretty sure.
At break, everyone was saying their final goodbyes. I wrote in some leavers books, although you could hardly call them that. The books were actually ‘Top 100 Graduate Employers: 20th Edition’ by The Times newspaper because the school had ordered double the amount that they had actually needed for the school’s post-18 programme, which would now be simultaneously a lot more and a lot less applicable because of it. The school hadn’t even put together the yearbooks yet, so there was no way the students were getting them now. All of the companies involved in the printing process were probably already closed down already anyway.
English Literature was next. Our teacher did the same as our form tutor but with slightly more information. New emails sent out every minute. We were supposed to do a new Keats poem although we made the silent unanimous decision that reading Keats’ work wouldn’t do anything to brighten the mood. Duffy wouldn’t either. So we just talked for the entire hour about the effects that it would have and how we would do our lessons while in isolation. There were some jokes passed around about how our teacher, Mr Wilson, should keep safe because he was one of the ‘vulnerable few’ but in all reality, it wasn’t a joke. We all knew that.
We also knew that Mr Wilson was one of the ‘vulnerable few’ however he didn’t seem like the kind of person who would leave his house on a regular basis anyway. We could all imagine the stacks of books that he would be reading. Between the jokes there were questions. Too many to count. The answer to all was the same.
“I don’t know.” His words were repeated like a solemn mantra that only brought more dread every time it was repeated.
Politics was the opposite. There was a total of five unanswerable questions before the teacher dismissed them all with a swipe of his hand and a single shout. He pretended that it didn’t exist after that. As if everything was fine and the world wasn’t burning to ashes around us.
From all of that I concluded that they didn’t know. I checked with the others. None of their teachers knew. But how could they not know? They were teachers. Teachers knew everything. Well, teachers used to know everything. They don’t anymore.
All mass gatherings had been ‘advised against’ by the government since last week, but Headmaster Rhodes was determined to give year eleven a “proper send-off” as he called it. I caught a glimpse of the assembly hall. The chairs were all arranged an arm’s length apart. As if that would do anything to stop it.
I checked the death toll in the car on the way home. The numbers rose by forty people today.
It was getting quicker. It was getting too quick.
“Have you heard about the rivers in Italy?” My mum was sitting in the driver’s seat navigating her way through the near-empty roads.
“I haven’t.” I glanced up from my phone and turned towards her.
“They’re blue again. They were green, you know that ones in Venice?” I nodded. “Well, they’ve turned blue again. There’s even some fish in them. People thought all the fish had died years ago, but just this morning there were reports of fish.” She smiled sporadically and then bit her lip nervously and her face grew back into a harrowing stare.
“At least some good has come out of it.” I replied, turning back to my phone.
Maybe it could be the start of a new era. Who knows. All I know is if this is the transition from one era to another then it’s dangerous, terrifying, and full of uncertainty.
