Growing Up in Quarantineland

I remember the polio epidemic. As a child, we weren't allowed in public swimming pools and I didn't have swimming lessons until I was almost a teen, after a vaccine was developed. School was a breeding ground for "childhood diseases" like chicken pox, mumps, and measles. Those of you who grew up later in the age of vaccination won't have those memories, but your children will, thanks to COVID-19.

Margaret Atwood remembers quarantines during her childhood and writes about them in the Globe and Mail.

You were absolutely not supposed to go to public swimming pools in the summer, we were told, because there might be an outbreak of polio. Carnivals then had freak shows, and quite often one of the attractions would be The Girl in the Iron Lung, who was stuck inside a metallic tube and who could not move, even to breathe: the Iron Lung did her breathing for her, with a gasping sound that was amplified over the P.A. system.

As for lesser diseases such as chicken pox, tonsillitis, mumps and the common kind of measles, kids were just expected to get them, and they did. When you were ill you were, of necessity, at home and in bed, and when you were recovering you risked boredom. No TV or video games; what you were given instead, in addition to the ginger ale and grape juice, was a pile of old magazines, a scrapbook, and scissors and paste. You cut out the more interesting pictures and pasted them into the scrapbook. One Lysol ad showed a woman up to her waist in water labelled Doubt, Inhibitions, Ignorance, and Misgivings, with the caption: Too Late to Cry Out in Anguish!

Despite the current conditions, she remains an optimist.

So plaster a virtual quarantine sign on your door, don’t let strangers in, consider yourself a potential plague vector, watch The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (again) or The Seventh Seal (again). And get out the scissors and paste, analogue or digital, or the pen and paper, ditto. If you yourself are not ill, the pandemic may have given you a gift! That gift is time. Always meant to write a novel or take up clog-dancing? Now’s your chance.

And take heart! Humanity’s been through it before. There will be an Other Side, eventually. We just need to make it through this part, between Before and After. As novelists know, the middle section is the hardest to figure out. But it can be done.