Thoughts From a Coronavirus Prisoner. By George Evans

Local historian and author George Evans has asked me to help him by publishing a very timely article on what it feels like to be a Coronavirus Prisoner on a somewhat underused blog of mine. 

I am honoured to help my former geography teacher.  

Here are a few odd thoughts that have occurred to me while the crisis has been on.

I thought they might interest other people I decided to send them to my old friend Martin to pass on if he wished.

My family and I are glad to have my good friends Phoenix Care looking after me. They have been caring for me ever since I came out of hospital over three years ago and I’m very grateful for their work feeding and cheering me up.

The Government doesn’t seem to know about carers who look after ancient people in their own homes and haven’t yet got round to testing them, even though they all visit several people a day. I watch the other key workers being clapped at 8pm on Thursdays but have my own way of thanking mine.

Every time they come to me, that’s three or four times every day, I clap them in. It shows my appreciation and I get a little shy embarrassed smile in return. If you think that’s a good idea, why not copy it?

We hear about very little else these days but Coronavirus; it’s as though nothing else is happening in the rest of the world.

A few days ago, on 15th April, it was the anniversary of the day Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated by 11 th Armoured Division which included the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry and the Herefordshire Regiment (including me).

If you have any idea of how dreadful Nazi concentration camps were you would realise that the present catastrophe is quite a small thing compared with the Last World War. I was there and I remember seeing through the barbed wire the skeletons in their striped pyjamas, the walking dead, and the foul stench of burnt, rotten human meat and rotting excrement.

Don’t say it didn’t happen – I saw it and smelt it myself. They weren’t all Jews, there were also Gypsies, German homosexuals, Black people and any anti-Nazi they could catch.

All this makes Coronavirus look like a rather odd holiday for many people, horrible though it is.

Let’s finish with something much nicer; hasn’t it been a lovely bright shining spring? Not all the time of course, but sometimes I wonder if I have seen any better spring days in my 96 years than some of the ones this year.

I sit in my front garden, watching the birds and shouting “Hello” to my neighbours. Then I pop out for a little walk in the sunshine, first to where I can see The Wrekin, then to the end of the road. It is, perhaps, only three hundred yards or so, but it’s a bit of exercise and does me good.

In the meantime, here’s wishing health, peace and happiness to Martin Scholes and success to his blog or whatever it’s called. (I’m only semi-literate in computers.) Also, to All Friends Round The Wrekin, all the very best.

© George Evans. Wellington, The Wrekin.


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