Returning to Normal or Escaping from It?

What is your normal? Are you living it now? Do you want to escape from it or preserve it?

As more of us get vaccinated we can start looking forward to returning to normal. That idea made me think about other occasions when people celebrated a potential return to normal. Like the end of war in Europe in May of 1945. I’m not old enough to remember — I was 3 years old at the time — but, like you, I’ve seen the photographs and the newsreel footage. People went wild with joy at the ending of almost six years of warfare and the possibility of life returning to something resembling what they thought of as normal.

But for many, of course, there could be no such return to normal. Tens of thousands of fathers, brothers, uncles and sons would not return to their families, including my own father. For others the home in which they had grown up had become a heap of rubble flanked by a broken wall, shreds of wallpaper flapping in the summer breeze.

For my own mother, who grew up in London between the wars where the normal included restaurants, cinemas and dance halls, her new life in a sparsely populated corner of rural England, lacking such facilities, was destined to become permanent. More permanent conditions than she could ever have imagined in the summer of 1941, when she chose to leave the city for the safety of the countryside whilst pregnant with me. Her old normal was unattainable. Mothers were not expected to work. The absence of child care and a desperate shortage of housing made a return to the capital impractical. She would have been heavily dependent upon the kindness of relatives, most of whom had difficulties of their own to contend with.

And yet my normal, throughout childhood, was that sparsely populated farming community. Hills and streams, stone built cottages lacking amenities others took for granted, orchards and hay meadows, were all I knew. As a result I have never felt comfortable in cities or suburbs.

Thirty years ago I chose to leave the suburbs and move to a rural area. I am once more surrounded by farms and animals. I can observe the passage of the seasons as crops are sown, mature and are harvested. Trees lose their leaves, green shoots appear in spring, foliage changes colour…

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