No comparison between war and Covid-19 says man who lived through Second World War

The NHS are the new military, risking their lives in the face of a deadly virus. Huge resources are being mobilised to create Nightingale hospitals, and to keep the economy alive.

Traditional political ideologies have fallen by the wayside, with Conservative Chancellors wiping off billions of pounds NHS debt, and praising trade union leaders.

At an everyday level, people’s freedom has been meaningfully restricted for the first time since Blitz blackouts were in force. Shopping regulations are not as strict as wartime rationing, but their existence puts us all in unknown territory for the first time in generations.

And, one Birchwood man says there is “no comparison” between living through today’s pandemic restrictions and growing up during the Second World War.

“During the war, you could walk out. You could go shopping, there would be little small holdings”, said a Mr Edwards – who likes to be known as Redwood.

“You’d queue up at a little small holding, there was one called Coburn’s near Stockport Road, with lots of greenhouses. All the mothers used to queue up down the path.”

It may be easy to then liken the sight of long, 2 metre-spaced-out queues for supermarkets – images which are fast-becoming a regular occurrence on our screens – when you hear Redwood’s words.

However, to do so would also ignore some of the finer details of wartime life, as Edwards – who now lives in Locking Stumps, Birchwood – details them.

As he and his mother would queue for groceries, he would see “German prisoners of war labouring [to put] new drains in the street.”

Years later, they would discover an unexploded bomb on the other side of the small holding, which he jokes “was just sat there quietly”.

Nightly bombing raids also paint a starker picture of wartime and lockdown Britain. Although there’s no longer the ability to walk out of your door as you please in April 2020, the motivation for doing so is far less terrifying than in April 1944.

Today, staying inside is to stop a virus. 80 years ago, it wasn’t a matter of staying inside. It was a matter of staying in an air-raid shelter to avoid enemy bombs: “There must have been [fear] with the parents,” but they “would tell you [the raid] was a practice.

“‘We’re going for a practice!’ they would say, and you’d be carried out to the particular shelter we used to go in. It was a bit of a dugout really, two pieces of concrete sewer pipe, six foot in diameter, pushed together.”

And perhaps that tells you the story of comparing Covid-19 and the Second World War. Both are huge challenges to British society, and many questions are still unresolved on how the UK will deal with the aftermath of the virus – but the threat posed by the Second World War was more uncertain, and its effects more immediate.