Emma Zeth - The Lucky Prepper - A Gardener's Story of Surviving a Pandemic

Thursday I was supposed to go to school. I didn’t. I called in at seven and left a message, adding a few extra coughs and sneezes for effect. The school hated anyone taking the day off, but I felt pretty awful; tired and aching, with a scratchy throat that was threatening to turn into a full blown, jelly-and-ice-cream-only affair. I staggered into the kitchen and switched on my computer. Then I put on the kettle. I grated some ginger into a mug, added a spoonful of honey, and poured in the boiling water. Stirring the steaming liquid, I sat at my desk and cobbled together some lesson plans for my head of department.

Thursday was a good day to get ill, only four lessons and two of them were A-level Biology, with students who could cope with a bit of independent study. If it had been Friday, I would have stumbled in, just to avoid giving anyone my year 11 class. Twenty-eight stroppy teenagers; they were okay with me, but would do nothing for a cover teacher, and their exams were coming up fast. I made some activity sheets for my year 9 group, squinting at the screen and catching, at the last minute, a spelling mistake that turned a perfectly innocent word into something highly inappropriate. Then I switched off the computer, went to the bathroom, and staggered back to bed.

I could have gone to work really, but taking a single day off, right at the start, was much better than waiting until I was dying on the job, and then having to take a week off to recover. Whenever I caught an infection, I would go straight to bed and give my immune system a chance to fight, let my white blood cells do their work, raise my body temperature, and destroy the pathogen before it had multiplied. No paracetamol or ibuprofen, just lots of fluids and sleep.

A couple of hours later, when I woke up again, I had three text messages, the first sent at around break time at school. They were all from Katy, who taught chemistry in the classroom opposite. ‘Where r u?’ she had texted, ‘16 staff off today, also 300 kids, mostly year 8, r u ok?’ and then, a bit later, ‘P4 class cancelled!’ The message ended with a load of party emojis.

I ran my hands through my tangled hair. I felt a little groggy, maybe I’d read it wrong, but nope, 300 students were off ill. One of the teaching assistants, Gabby, had been sneezing and coughing during the year 8 assembly on Tuesday… surely she couldn’t have given her bug to that many people? But it had been so hot that we had the fan going at the back of the hall… and she had been standing right beside it. I taught science, I knew that a single sneeze could contain over 100,000 germs. Even so… infection rates for the flu were only about 5%. For 300 kids to be ill, the bug had to be incredibly contagious. I meant to text her back, but I fell asleep again on that thought.

I snuggled up in bed all day, periodically getting up for salt gargles and raw ginger tea. Towards the evening, I could feel the sore throat starting to give up against the bombardment of astringent salt and fiery ginger. The next morning I blearily opened my eyes as the alarm went off and dragged myself out of bed. I made myself a large flask of honey and lemon, and went back to school. It was Friday and I wanted to give my year 11 class one last revision session before their exam. I knew it was clutching at straws for some of them, but I couldn’t help myself. My poor students… they would be lucky to be able to answer even a quarter of the exam paper; they tried so hard in class, but very little stuck from week to week.

I walked in, smiling at the kids and sniffling into a tissue whenever I saw management. I was feeling better, but that evaporated when I looked at my first email of the day; it was from the cover supervisor, taking my only free period. Morning briefing was a car crash; there were only twenty-three teachers present of about eighty. At thirty-four, I was one of the more experienced members of staff, and I knew I would be roped in to do extra duty. I sighed in resignation as I ditched my plan of eating a healthy snack from the canteen; it would be a bar from the chocolate box again. There was some talk of closing the school, but it was too late, half the parents would have been on their way to work already; they’d have slaughtered us if we rang them up to send the kids back home.

Sure enough, on my way out of the meeting, my head of year grabbed me to double up my form class and cover break duty in the playground. As I walked up to the science department, I passed by the staffroom. Usually it was empty in the morning, as teachers scrambled to get themselves organised for the chaos ahead, but today there was a distinct murmur of voices that made me pause. I did an about-turn and stuck my head around the door. There was a gang of teachers crowded round one of the work computers, staring at something on screen, I wandered closer; what had caught their attention so thoroughly? I was surprised to see the familiar colours of BBC news.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

‘Hey Zoe,’ replied one of the English teachers, ‘Do you know anything about this new virus?’

I peered over her shoulder and scanned the page; an article on a possible new virus with flu-like symptoms. It was short and had remarkably few real facts, but there were lots of colourful pictures of viruses. ‘Nope.’ I replied, ‘But at least it’s not the vomiting bug that was going round last year’

Up in the science department we were so short staffed that I ended up teaching multiple classes all crammed together in the same room. My year eleven students were glad to see me at least, and we went over as much as we could of the GCSE biology syllabus; cells, enzymes, the heart… I could see the lack of knowledge in their desperate faces when I asked quick-fire questions at the end. No matter how hard I tried to motivate them, they always left the revision until the last minute. They should have started back in January if they really wanted to do well. It was impossible to learn it all in just the few short weeks they gave themselves. I handed out some last minute cram sheets and wished them good luck for their exam on Tuesday. Just before period four, management sent out an email closing the school and we all went home.

After changing into a comfortable cotton skirt, which suited my slightly chubby figure better than my work suits, I went out into the garden. I walked down the concrete path and into my new cedar greenhouse, to water the seedlings. It was the start of May and we were in the middle of a heatwave. I was so tempted to plant all my seedlings out into the ground; let them spread their roots and enjoy the sun, but a cold night could stop growth for weeks, and a deadly frost was not impossible. So even though it was twenty-three degrees, and felt like summer, I left everything crammed inside.

I plucked a couple of weeds from the raised beds on either side of the path and checked the fruit trees that lined the brick wall on the left side of the garden. I had hand-pollinated the flowers in March, using an artist’s paintbrush to dab pollen from flower to flower, and hundreds of tiny little apples and pears now covered the miniature trees. I never saw the point of growing normal sized fruit trees; I was only five foot two; normal trees were just too tall for me to harvest and impossible to prune without a ladder. I grew fourteen different varieties on dwarfing rootstock, and had an abundance of fresh fruit in autumn that I could pluck straight from the tree and eat whenever I wanted.

I checked for the fluffy white spots of woolly-aphid, and sprayed a couple of tiny infestations, then I lay in my hammock and called home.