On the third day of a Covid infection, I have a very vivid dream. In it, I am being pushed in a wheelchair down a long windowless corridor. Above my head is a string of oblong fluorescent lights and, as I move through their weak circles of illumination, I’m disconcerted to find that I’m wearing a particular purple dressing gown, about which everything is familiar: the row of pearlised buttons, its fuzzy nap, each ribbed cuff. I know where I am: the basement of a hospital in which I spent a long time as a child while incapacitated by viral encephalitis. In the dream, however, I am definitely an adult, but the hated garment has somehow stretched to fit. I wake with a lurch, to find myself in my bedroom, the plumes of steam from the atomiser reminding me that I am in bed with Covid.
There are times when your body knows something before you do. When I reach for my watch, to see what time it is, I find it hard to move my arm; when I try to move aside the duvet, my fingers refuse to grip. I decide to get out of bed but when my feet hit the floor, my legs crumple beneath me, just as they did back in 1980 when, aged eight, encephalitis was eating its way through my synapses.
A&E in the throes of a pandemic is an extraordinary environment: stuffed to capacity, understaffed, overwhelmed, with desperate people sitting on floors or in doorways or lying on gurneys. Everyone is masked, watchful and tense. When an inebriated man with a clinking bag of bottles pulls down his mask to cough, several people shriek and try to move away. But there is nowhere to move to.
I am taken from the waiting room quite quickly, to a cubicle, where the weary doctor seems to suspect I’ve suffered a stroke. I shake my head. This is no stroke, I say. The way I feel is horribly familiar: the ataxic trembling, the muscular weakness, the lack of grip. It feels like the return of old symptoms, like coming face to face with a long-lost adversary. I don’t mention my dream; this doctor has a pandemic on his hands, after all, and doesn’t require ramblings about prophetic visions.
A wheelchair – naturally – is summoned to take me to a ward housing a miscellany of Covid patients. Not the ones with the expected symptoms of breathing difficulties or sky-rocketing temperatures but those with atypical reactions to the virus: there is an extremely pale woman with purple-black stains on her fingertips, and one poor soul who is writhing in agony with abdominal pain but nobody can understand the language he is speaking.
The night wears on. Nurses circle us. More patients arrive; doctors disappear and reappear. A translator is found for the writhing man and pain relief is given. My shaking intensifies and a nurse comes and watches me, thoughtfully, before going off to make a phone call. I begin to listen to an audiobook: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. It’s a book I’ve read many times. I attended lectures on it at university; I know passages almost by heart. Elements of it surge through my head as I lie there: the impending party, Clarissa’s loves both lost and unrealised, Septimus’s alienation, the sparrows singing in Greek, the intriguing act of removing doors from their hinges.
One detail, however, keeps catching my attention, rising up from the text to hook its claws into me. Clarissa Dalloway is described by her neighbour as having “a touch of the bird about her … vivacious, though she was over 50, and grown very white since her illness”. The illness is, of course, influenza, the most feared disease of the time, and in naming it Woolf makes her heroine a survivor of the deadliest pandemic of the 20th century.
Woolf herself suffered multiple bouts of influenza; she writes about it almost elegiacally in her essay On Being Ill. Mrs Dalloway is set in 1923, five years on from the Spanish flu pandemic that killed 50 million people – double the number…