Lockdown

When coronavirus restrictions were imposed six weeks ago and we began adjusting to life under lockdown, a memory started to tug at my mind. It was the memory of reading about another kind of lockdown, in a children’s story by Laura Ingalls Wilder called The Long Winter.

As a child growing up in Australia, I loved Wilder’s ‘Little House’ books, which are set in various locations on the American frontier during the late nineteenth century. I loved them passionately, in the way that children adore their very favourite books. I was the proud owner of a boxed set of the paperbacks issued by Puffin Books, and I read them all multiple times, from the first in the set, Little House in the Big Woods, to the final one, Little Town on the Prairie.

Wilder’s stories were first published in the 1930s and 40s, but recounted experiences from the author’s childhood in a pioneer family in America in the 1870s and 80s. I read them in the early 1970s. Now here we are in 2020 and I find myself pulling the little boxed set from the bookshelf and carefully – because the old paperbacks have stuck together with time – extracting a book I haven’t looked at for nearly fifty years.

The Long Winter must have made a great impression on me, because I found myself thinking of it almost as we started to find the shape of our days under the new COVID-19 restrictions. No travel. No leaving the house except for essential purposes. No meetings with anyone outside the household. The restlessness of being cooped up. Tensions flaring within the family. A growing sense of isolation from the rest of society. I’d encountered it all before, in Wilder’s book.

The lockdown described in The Long Winter was not a response to disease, but the result of extreme weather conditions. It wasn’t mandated by law, but necessitated by physical survival. During an especially harsh winter that lasted nearly seven months, Laura and her family were confined to their prairie home in the Dakota Territory by an almost unbroken series of violent blizzards. The Long Winter tells how they survived.

At a practical level, the challenges the Ingalls family faced were beyond anything we pampered moderns can imagine. The struggle to stay warm and fed – or, at least, reasonably warm and somewhat fed – became a fulltime job involving the whole family. When their coal ran out, they had to twist strands of hay into sticks to feed the stove, and when their flour ran out, they had to mill wheat in a coffee grinder so that bread could be baked. Eventually, both the hay-twisting and the wheat-grinding became tasks that consumed the whole day, with mother, father and the three older daughters taking turns at each in rotation. Oh, and some basic home-schooling had to be fitted in there too.

Of course, there are lessons for us in this – about patience, and endurance, and doing what needs to be done. But the chasm in material conditions between the Ingalls’ lockdown and our own is too great for us to be able to identify with their ordeal in any practical sense. It’s at a psychological level that the story rings true to our experiences. 

As Wilder’s story shows, without school and work and shopping and visitors, all the incidental movement and social contacts of normal life drop away, and there’s little left to make one day different from another. Get up, feed the fire, do the housework, prepare and eat meals, try to keep entertained with music and stories – the family is locked in a minimal and seemingly endless routine. ‘Laura felt that it was the same day over again’, and again ‘Another day was the same.’ 

The monotony is compounded by there being no end in sight. Blizzard follows blizzard. Things get worse before they get better. The horizon of hope recedes. Rumours that spring is coming, that the train bringing supplies to the town can finally get through the snow-filled passes, prove false. ‘Laura seemed to have forgotten summer; she could not believe it would ever come again.’

As the unprecedented becomes the new normal, old ways of life – going to school, visiting with friends – start to feel unreal. There seems something uncanny about those days, just before the shutdown, when nobody knew what was coming and all went unthinkingly about their ordinary lives. Those times of freedom and movement and connection seem ‘very far away and long ago’, as the circle of interest and activity shrinks, finally, to the single room they can heat.

There’s a lot in The Long Winter about discouragement in such circumstances and the need to fight against it, every day. One way that Laura and siblings are able to escape from their confined existence is through literature that transports them imaginatively to other places. At one point, in a chapter titled ‘Cold and Dark’, Laura and her younger sister Carrie recite Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem ‘The Swan’s Nest’, which creates a mental image of a beautiful riverside scene completely different from the actual physical environment of their house. ‘The air was warm and quiet there, the grass was warm in the sunshine, the clear water sang its song to itself, and the leaves softly murmured. The meadow’s insects drowsily hummed. While they were there with little Ellie, Laura and Carrie almost forgot the cold.’

As we make our way through this lockdown, there are plenty of ways for us to find a similar sense of being elsewhere, in imagination. Armchair travel, whether through fiction, non-fiction, books or film, is a powerful tool for fighting boredom and discouragement. And when we do return to travelling in the real world, I think we’re going to appreciate every single journey, however small or humble. Any change of scene will feel good; just to be in motion will be a blessing. In The Long Winter, when the cold weather finally ends, Laura makes a tiny journey, as far as the front room – the one they couldn’t use all winter because they weren’t able to heat it:

‘The May morning was warm and the wind from the prairie smelled of springtime. Doors were open and both rooms could be used once more. Going in and out of the large front room whenever she wanted to gave Laura a spacious and rested feeling, as if she could never be cross again.’