Exaggerated barriers

Those of us who have been cautious have now been locked down for some four months. With the compulsory introduction of facemasks in shops and similar internal public spaces, as from yesterday, the whole spectacle of viral infection becomes more sinister, more alien, more gloomy, with no definite end in sight. Already it seems to have been going on for an eternity. Remember those sunny Thursday evenings of neighbourly solidarity when we would go out into the street, clap, and catch up on what we’d all been doing? It seems such a long while ago.

When, finally, this calamity ends, and we look back, will it, I wonder, seem such a long period? In retrospect, how will we judge the lockdown? What will its popular name become? Will we define and label our recent pasts with terms like “before the pandemic”, “during the lockdown” and “since corona”? Will the whole dreadful episode feel like a major barrier in our lives, one that we have somehow or other survived and emerged out of, blinking, on the other side, or will it, as normal life continues, slink back into the forgotten ignominy it so richly deserves?

Barriers in time are unusual; spatial barriers are more noticeable and tangible, though not always so. In the late 1970s, David Canter, who later went on to specialise in the controversial area of “offender profiling”, wrote about the psychology of architecture and place, including the effect of psychological barriers upon perception of distance. These might be discrete physical obstacles like canals, motorways or railway lines, or they could be less obvious, like dense and confusing  areas of cities through which it was difficult to visualise a route. Canter suggested that where there was a psychological barrier of some kind the perceived distance would be greater than otherwise. Sadly, he wasn’t able to perform before-and-after studies on the Berlin Wall, or on the English Channel pre and post Tunnel, but he did offer an example from central London. The distance from Trafalgar Square to Waterloo is roughly the same as from Trafalgar Square to Oxford Street, but the former journey apparently appears longer because it includes the physical – and psychological – barrier of the River Thames.

While I understand this supposed result, I’m not convinced, for there are many other confounding factors. For instance, I find that even thinking about Charing Cross Road makes me feel tired long before I’ve mentally got anywhere near Oxford Street, and that’s even without the detour required in recent times to avoid the Crossrail hole (remember Crossrail?). However, as a general finding, it does suggest that in place, as well as in time, there can be psychological entities that cause perceived extent to be exaggerated or otherwise distorted. I think that, simply, where there is more information to be attended to, or where it is encountered during a time of anxiety or other stress, more is made of it than might otherwise be the case. The density of significant intervening information is somehow relevant to the effect, but it’s complicated and, in the nature of subjective phenomena, unpredictable.

Nothing in relatively recent history was more stressful than World War Two. When I was growing up, parents and others who had lived and fought through it readily classified happenings as “before the war”, “during the war” and “after the war”. From my perspective of the 1950s, the Thirties were an unimaginably long time ago; something very big and unpleasant had clearly happened since, something that I’d just missed, but which to the older people around me was immense and significant. The war was fundamental to the accounts of their lives, to their personal chronology, and it had seriously got in the way of the normal passage of time. During the early years of my childhood, “before the war” was another world; those six years of hostility remaining as a profound psychological wall. Only six years?

Fast forward most of my life. The other day, unexpectedly, I found myself on that generally very useful website called Ancestry.com, currently freely available via my local library service during the lockdown, and offering its vast collection of genealogical data which, I’ve realised, has to be treated extremely cautiously. The official documents are reliable, the navigation can be irritating as can the defaults to American data, some of the submitted homemade family trees are iffy to the nth, but mostly it’s fascinating. I found myself looking at the 1939 Register for England and Wales - an extremely valuable document - and at the data on the inhabitants of the road in which I spent my earliest years.

I was astonished. My road (we didn’t have streets round our way). So many familiar names from the Fifties, and to think that they were already there in 1939. As though the war hadn’t happened, they had sailed through that almost impassable barrier, into the early years of my childhood.  Those people had been there before the war, a possibility that had never occurred to me before, but there they were, in the Register. Sure enough, there were our neighbours, Mr and Mrs K, a nice old couple, he with torticollis and a strange way of walking, half looking backwards all the while like some dogs do; she with a fondness for nattering over the fence. Surprisingly, that wasn’t given as her occupation. At the corner house, old Mrs. C, from whose front room window my mother and I once witnessed a scary dog fight in the middle of the crossroads. Next door but one Mrs. N, who apparently was born in 1875, which explains why she was very old, but not why her house always smelled of gas. Mr. and  Mrs. W were listed, though not their fat grey cat Smoky, who was more significant in my early life. No. 111 was unoccupied.

Across the road, Miss L, who took me – shaking with fear - to my first Sunday School, and was listed as a shorthand typist. Also her mother, Mrs L, who my dad nicknamed The Fritter. My dad was left handed and a genius and therefore sometimes thought in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. The Fritter looked neurotic, harried, and we would see her nipping up and down the road, going to the shops, coming back, going out again. I’m afraid we mocked her silently from the safety of the net curtains. And further up the road, old Mr A, who had to be avoided on the way home, because you could never get away from him and his endless guff about his son in the South of France, and about his pleurisy attacks from which he annoyingly never ever died while your tea was going cold. And most unexpected, further up the road, Mr Cheeseman. I’d completely forgotten about him; he looked exactly as his name implied – like Stanley Baxter but with more cheese.

So long ago, and so suddenly into the present, frozen. One aspect of more general phenomena, evidently - various types of compression of time and place, expansion and collapse, warps in the fabric of whatsisname. Time flies when you’re having fun, goes slowly when you’re bored or anxious, but whatever you’ve been doing, when you look back, it’s gone too soon, and there’s little left.

They’re all gone now. All dead.

But to think of it, I mean, I can’t quite get my head round it. Those quiet people just carrying on in their semi-detached suburban anonymity, putting out the washing, watering the rhubarb, painting the shed, like nothing had happened from decade to decade. The Blitz, Belsen, the Bomb, and all the time The Fritter was tripping back and forth to the shops, frittering away her life, untouched by the central horrors of the twentieth century. Although to be fair to her, she had absolutely no idea that one day she would be immortalised on a blog page - as The Fritter.