My First Lockdown by Philip Temple

​Philip lives in Dunedin with his wife, author Diane Brown. He has written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, and some have won awards and fellowships. He has been a member of NZSA (PEN) for 50 years and fulfilled many roles, especially in the promotion of the Public Lending Right. Philip completed the second volume of his biography of Maurice Shadbolt, ‘Life As A Novel’, during lockdown. Although used to working at home, he found, like many writers, that news of what was happening to the world out there was a continuous pressure and distraction. In practical ways, it was not a problem. He had been in lockdowns before (see Diane Brown’s contribution) and wrote this short piece about the first one.
 
I was woken by the bangs, the screaming and the bellowing. Woken into a room so dark that I could not tell if the bedlam was within or without. I yelled and burst into tears, bawling, hysterical by the time my mother rushed into the room with a torch, plucked me from my cot and held me close, jiggling me up and down as she told me everything was all right, everything was all right, but then she dropped the torch and I could sense the doubt in her. Until the noise ceased suddenly and there was only a distant groaning. It’s just the cows, she said, just the cows. She put me back in the cot with soothing sounds, promising me warm milk. Soon all was dark and silent again.
 
In the morning she held me against her shoulder while she pulled back the blackout curtains. The sun streamed in on another warm autumn day. Everything outside seemed the way it had been the day before and the day before that. But I could not see the cows standing in the fields beyond. She told me they had been taken away now and there would be no more noises like the night before. I was not to worry.
 
Much later, when I could understand, she told me that the guns, the anti-aircraft guns, had been firing at the German bombers and pieces of falling shells, the shrapnel, had cut and wounded the cows. Some of them had died, and because of that they did not keep cows in those fields any more.