Free the young: End lockdown for youths and maybe even the middle aged

“There’s one spoiled spring to scant out mortal lot,
One season ruined of our little store.
May will be fine next year as like as not:
Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.”

There must be many, some way either side, even quite a long side, of twenty-four who find themselves echoing Housman’s lines, or at least , if they don’t know his words, share the feeling he expressed. Their Spring has certainly been spoiled, their season ruined. If they are fortunate enough to have a room with a view they may have been able to look out and see the cherry trees in bloom or, as Housman put it, in another poem, “hung with snow”. But many will have not even that consolation.

The next verse might appeal to them more.

“We for a certainty are not the first
Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness and cursed
Whatever brute or blackguard made the world.”

Except of course that the tavern door is barred. They are denied even that consolation.

When the current epidemic struck, there was much talk of “the spirit of the blitz” and, as a rallying cry, this was fair enough. But the blitz year was also a time of comradeship. Many love affairs started from chance meetings and fond embraces in the black-out, while the comradeship of the pubs played an important part in keeping morale high.

Of course there was an essential difference. The Luftwaffe was a visible and audible enemy as Coronavirus isn’t. That is the frightening thing about it. It is what justified the lockdown, the imposition of what amounts to house-arrest on millions.

It was probably the right thing to do. Certainly that has been the judgement of political leaders almost everywhere. The politicians who imposed it cannot reasonably be called brutes and blackguards. Whatever damage has been done to individual interests, they were acting in what they perceived, probably rightly, to be the general interest.

But – there is always a but – and this time there are two buts.

First, what was suspected has been confirmed. Covid-19 is much more dangerous to the old than the young. Most of those who have contracted it and died have been in the sixth or seventh of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man. Younger people who have been infected have almost all recovered, some after experiencing only mild illness.

Meanwhile, millions – I have no idea of the exact figure and I doubt if anyone has – have been working as usual, certainly while taking such precautions as are deemed wise. Some whose work takes them into the open air, not only country-dwellers, even find that their life is not greatly different from what it was before.

This suggests that it would be reasonable to relax the temporary laws which confine millions of young and middle-aged people to their homes.The economic case for doing this is obvious.

Then one comes to my second “but”. Restrictions have been accepted in the general interest, but what about the interests of individuals? The lockdown has been accepted as necessary for social health, but what damage has it done, is it doing, and will, if maintained, continue to do, to individuals’ mental and moral health?

Here one can only speculate. There is, however, some evidence of an increase in reported cases of domestic abuse and suicide or suicidal attempts. There is no way of measuring the degree of frustration or lapses into depression, but you would have to be very dull of imagination not to suppose that many are now living on a dangerous edge and that many more feel cheated of the life and experiences to which they quite reasonably and naturally feel entitled.

I think particularly of the young who are not only deprived of the satisfaction of work, a satisfaction that derives from the feeling of independence and self-reliance, of the consciousness that they are making their way in the world. They are also, in their condition of house-arrest, deprived of the ordinary and natural pleasures of youth: time spent with boyfriends or girlfriends, or with groups of friends – and one should remember that friendship, time with your mates, means more to the young than it does to the middle-aged and old (though it may still mean a lot to us too).

Locked up as they are the young are denied the most ordinary of pleasures – sport, going to the pub, eating together, engaging in long hours of conversation about every subject under the sun.

It is time to relax the lock-up for the young – and, I would say, for the middle –aged too.

I try to recall how it was for me when I was 24 – to take the age Housman offers in this poem. It is difficult, but I remember the sense of freedom, the awareness of the possibilities life had to offer. I remember long passages of time which felt like a summer afternoon, and I think with sympathy and dismay of the confinement now imposed and, at this stage in the progress of this wretched epidemic, seemingly no longer necessarily imposed, on the young today. Housman again:

“It is in truth iniquity on high
To cheat our sentenced souls of aught thy crave,
And mar our merriment as you and I
Fare on our long fool’s-errand to the grave.”

The Prime Minister has never given the impression of being a man who cheated himself of aught he craved. So let him open the doors and throw away the key – for the young and middle-aged now, if not yet for those of us further advanced on that “long fools’-errand”.