It’s five years since I spoke to Rodrick Silva, the son of Rudi, an Only Fools and Horses fan who drove the 37 bus through the part of London where I live. Rudi had recently died of something called the Coronavirus.
“He had no mask, no gloves,” Rodrick told me. “People were still using the entrance next to the driver.” He sent me a picture of the foul toilet at the bus drivers’ break points that his father had sent him in distress. “The toilets at the drivers’ stop points were disgusting,” Rodrick said. “They were filthy. How was he supposed to keep clean?”
Today, [Sunday 9 March] is a Day of Reflection across the UK for the COVID-19 pandemic – ahead of the fifth anniversary on Tuesday of the moment the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a global pandemic. It’s a day I’ll be thinking of Rudi and all the other heroes of the pandemic.
The men and women who kept our country going while many of us stayed safely indoors. The care workers and cleaners, the bus-drivers and fruit-pickers, the delivery drivers and nurses, the hospital porters and posties. Millions of working-class people – thousands of whom paid with their lives.
When we talk about the Mirror’s coverage of the pandemic, many will think of our award-winning investigation into the Partygate scandal that brought a government crashing down. But the human stories of those who gave their lives to keep others safe is the flipside of that story.
The people who isolated from their own families, slept in the bathroom, worked 20- hour shifts, never saw their friends, whose masks cut into their skin, whose dreams were filled with the dying, who held hands with strangers as they slipped into the next world.
The people who lived through a devastating and disproportionately dangerous version of the virus on all of our behalf, while other people were sick up a wall on a famous street off Whitehall.
As the Wigan poet Carla Mellor wrote in a poem called ‘A Kingdom United’ we helped make into a short film during the pandemic: “2020 heroes don’t wear capes – They stack supermarket shelves.”
The Mirror’s job was to investigate the parties and the corrupt PPE deals, the fraudulent eye tests and the yacht-loving recipients of lucrative contracts. But it was also to try to tell the stories of these heroes. Because a clap was never enough.
Speaking to Rodrick was one of first the times I fully understood how we weren’t “all in this together”. A message we would hear from bereaved relatives again and again.
I’ll never forget the words of Francesca Michaels, who lost her disabled mum Billie. “Real working-class people might just be numbers, just labour, to them,” she said. “But we all leave ripples, and we all affect someone else.”
Throughout the pandemic, our Real Britain column tried to report on those who weren’t furloughed and couldn’t work from home – because their work was keeping others alive, fed and connected – and to tell the stories of the bereaved.
“My father slept in the living room by himself so as not to infect the rest of the family with Covid,” Lobby Akinnola told me. “That is love.” But his dad Femi was a care worker. Aged just 60, he died the night before the “cheese and wine’ party inside No 10 exposed by the Mirror.
“The next day there was a party in Downing Street,” Lobby told me quietly, “while we were isolated, locked inside, unable to see friends and family. We couldn’t take part in any of the rituals that usually follow a person’s death.”
Father-of-five Femi was buried in his jeans and T-shirt because the funeral directors were not allowed to touch him. “Throughout the Covid pandemic, the Prime Minister would tell us, “We are all in this together,” Lobby said. “But nothing could be further from the truth.
“Covid poured down the channels that society built.” At the Mirror we faced the same barriers as anyone trying to work at that time. We had to operate by zoom, phone call and social distancing when allowed. We all caught Covid multiple times despite vaccinations. I had a confirmed case four times, and at least one more likely infection. Sometimes we were the only people on the empty streets, below the jet-free skies and loud birdsong.
In March 2021, I heard about an extraordinary Memorial Wall that had been created on the south side of the river facing the Houses of Parliament. It was a guerilla memorial, created by the families of bereaved people. The Conservative government had failed to provide an official one, mired by now in PPE and other scandals.
It’s hard to explain how incredibly moving the wall was – and remains. Even then there were thousands upon thousands of hand-drawn hearts stretching like a red wall into the distance along the quiet river. Each one had been inked by hand over a 10-day period by a group calling themselves Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice. Assisted by the protest group Led by Donkeys, the families had made themselves look so official in hi-vis and hard hats that everyone assumed they’d been asked to do it by someone in authority.
Once up, Lambeth Council, the Mayor of London and St Thomas’ Hospital, who owned the wall allowed it to remain. After all, many NHS and patient lives had been lost the other side of that wall too. It was an extraordinarily dignified and beautiful way to mark the thousands upon thousands of lives lost – and a vermillion rebuke to those working on the other side of the river in Parliament.
I visited the wall with Matt Fowler, the young man who had inked the very first heart in memory of his “five-foot-nothing superhero” car-worker dad, Ian, and Hannah Brady, who said that every time she visited the Wall, she felt like she had been “punched in the stomach”.
She had two hearts on the wall – one for her dad, Shaun who died after likely contracting Covid on his way to work at the Heinz factory in Wigan, and one for her nan who caught it in a care home. “My nan was just a bed-blocker to someone like Boris Johnson,” she told me.
In September 2021, after the Covid-19 Bereaved Families had had their application to attend Conservative Party Conference turned down, we invited them to Brighton, to the Labour Conference, turning over our Real Britain fringe event to a platform for the families to speak. There was barely a dry eye in the room as Hannah and Matt spoke proudly of their key worker parents.
Working with all the other Covid bereaved families, Hannah and Matt, eventually won an independent public inquiry into the UK’s response to and the impact of the pandemic.
Public hearings began in June 2023 and continue to this day. And the families are still fighting to be heard in the inquiry. They will never give up. Today, I will be thinking of so many others we have spoken to over the last five years in the very worst of circumstances, many of them children.
Brandon and Liliana Toni are still haunted by having to say goodbye to their dad, Nick over facetime. They were just 10 and 13 when Nick, a 61-year-old former RAF police officer and guide dog instructor, died.
“They have night terrors from seeing their father on life support on Facetime,” their mum, Sarah, 41, from Telford, Shropshire, told me. “They suffer constant anxiety, particularly when anyone in our family feels unwell. They worry that I too will die and leave them all alone.”
So, yes, today is a day for quiet reflection, as we remember those we loved and lost, and how life changed for every single one of us during the pandemic.
The silent and shuttered streets, the first time we saw our parents on zoom, the first time we had to hold a maths lesson in the kitchen. Our permitted exercise routes and the weekly clap for carers.
But we also remember all those many thousands of people who are still waiting for some kind of justice for their loved ones. Who can’t move on because they still await the outcome of the inquiry and for someone in power to show how things have changed.
We thank them for trusting us with their stories. And we remember the quiet heroes of the pandemic – those who cared for us, collected our bins, and held our hands.
