Easter Snow by Sheena Wilkinson

Like many others, I’ve been struggling to know what to write for ABBA this month. Should I aim for upbeat and distracting? Hmm, tough when you’re not feeling it, and what if readers wanted to kill me?

I always smiled at Nancy's pumpkin face

Should I look into classic children’s literature and go for something about the opportunities and challenges afforded by quarantine of one sort or another? I got as far as thinking of Winter Holiday when Nancy’s mumps give all the children an extra month of – well, the clue’s in the title. 

life was always harsher on the prairie 

And more than once Enid Blyton used quarantine, and the subsequent late return to St Clare’s or Malory Towers to explore friendship issues. And then there’s The Long Winter, a different kind of lockdown – at least I am not twisting hay with frozen fingers and waiting for Christmas in May. But such a post would involve research and the very thought of it made me want to lie down and eat twenty cream eggs.

Should I confess about the fact that I haven’t made sourdough, that I haven’t done a massive spring clean – because, with the recycling centres and charity shops closed, where would all the crap go? That in fact, apart from long walks (part of my usual routine anyway) I’ve mostly been watching Malory Towers on CBBC to try to keep anxiety at bay? But that’s not very original – so many people have already confessed to being human, much more wittily than I could manage right now. 

I know, I thought, I’ll see what others have been posting – maybe I’ll get inspiration from my peers. I normally do follow the blog, but like many others I have been avoiding the online world recently, in order to avoid too much reality. So I was a bit behind. And of course, the wonderful writers of An Awfully Big Blog Adventure came to my rescue. 

A few days ago we had some lovely pictures instead of the usual post, reminding me that if I couldn’t come up with anything, nobody in our community would judge me. 

obligatory walk picture -- all from my own road

Then there was Anne Rooney’s post about her novel set during the plague in Venice in 1576, and about pandemic literature in general and the ethics surrounding writing about traumatic times in history.  Like Anne, I wrote about a pandemic a few years ago, in my case the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918/19. Sadly, my agent couldn’t sell the novel, and I was gutted. However, I was able to use much of my extensive research for 2017’s Star by Star. Although Star by Star is ‘about’ the 1918 election, that happened right in the middle of that terrible pandemic so I couldn’t avoid it if I had wanted to. I wonder if now might be a time to reconsider it?   Maybe I should revise it, with the personal experience of living through a pandemic to add something to that might have been missing from the original? I wouldn’t want to read about a pandemic now, but it’s clear from the trends in book-buying and film/TV streaming that many disagree. As some commenting on Anne’s post pointed out, there could be comfort in knowing that as a society we have lived through, and recovered from, such things before. But when I went back to read the MS, I found that I didn’t want to re-enter that nightmare world, when it was too close to what is happening here and now. 

Keren David’s thought-provoking post on Passover reminded me that this Easter in lockdown will be so different from Easters past. In 2013, in my part of Northern Ireland, we had very heavy snow over Easter. I was snowed in for a week, surrounded by scenes of the most surreal beauty – long light evenings with the sun setting on the snow after eight o’clock. It felt so unnatural, a clash of seasons. I fretted at being confined to my own tiny village for a week – a whole week! – but I was mindful of the farmers who had lost young stock and whose livelihoods were threatened. 

This Easter too, though like most writers I have lost a lot of income from cancelled events, I am grateful for how lucky I am, to have some savings, and a garden and access to miles of empty beautiful roads, and like Keren can only hope to be celebrating this important time of year in better circumstances next year. I remember Easter 2014, seeing the daffodils bloom, not to be blasted by blizzard, and the lambs in the fields gambolling, not to be blinded and drowned in snow like the previous year. I’ve always found Easter a very hopeful time of year, but in 2014 it seemed miraculous that spring had come, and stayed. 

So, writing friends, thank you for reminding me, simply through your own efforts to keep the blog going, that we are all struggling with our own Easter blizzards, but, like the Ingallses in The Long Winter, we can look forward to spring. Even if it comes in autumn.