How a year of pandemic brought out best in us

AS Boris Johnson instigated the first national lockdown, people were already thinking about how the restrictions would hit the most vulnerable in society.

With elderly people needing to shield, their neighbours and volunteers became a vital part of their everyday life.

Henley Mutual Aid had more than 300 people registered at the height of the pandemic.

Emma Taylor, 46, a co-ordinator for the group, said: “It felt like the whole town was pulling together. There is something very special about a community that will hear a call and everybody steps up.

“We’d never been through anything like this before and there was the potential for some people to feel quite isolated but there were all these people working away desperately helping each other.”

Residents were assigned patches to co-ordinate the volunteers, who would then do shopping, collect prescriptions or drive people to doctors’ appointments.

Mrs Taylor, who lives in Western Avenue with her husband Andy, a telecommunications manager, and their children Lilia, 11, and Gabriel, six, said that after the initial demand, the helpers and the helped settled into a routine.

She said: “People were organising things through their neighbours and didn’t need to come through us.

“People are still being helped now but it is because those communities and networks are now in place when they weren’t before. That is one of the only positives to come out of it.

“All of those connections were built in the early months when everyone was a bit shell-shocked. With enough time distance, I think people will be able to look back on it fondly, in the same way that when the older generation look back on the war there’s a real sense of pride.”

When shops and other non-essential businesses were forced to close, Henley tailors Collier & Robinson stepped up to help with the shortage of personal protective equipment.

Kristie Shemilt, who founded the business with her husband Mark in 2002, raised £8,500 in three days to help fund materials that would be made into surgical scrubs for staff at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading.

This allowed her and a team of volunteers to make 700 sets of scrubs, using medical grade fabric. She said: “Friends and friends of family who were working for the NHS were contacting me saying they couldn’t get scrubs. I thought it was ridiculous that it was coming up so much.

“I was dealing directly with the Royal Berks with the covid-19 procurement team and they were absolutely desperate.

“I had a workshop sitting empty and so I started the crowdfunding page. People in Henley were absolutely amazing and we went way over the £8,500 and actually made double the amount of sets.”

Two months later, the operation had expanded to a team of 100 volunteers making surgical gowns in the riverside pavilion at Phyllis Court Club in Henley.

Mrs Shemilt received a £27,000 contribution from the Royal Berks’ League of Friends group to help pay for the materials. She said: “I was contacted again because the Royal Berks was desperate for these gowns. I thought ‘How on earth am I going to do this?’ and the only way was to set up a production line. It became a military operation.

“We ended up making over 5,000 gowns, which is enough for six months’ supply. One of the surgeons on quality control said they were the best gowns he’d ever seen.

“Some of the ladies were out of work and what came out of it was the huge community aspect. We were working together for this common goal and a couple of them said they didn’t know how they would have got through it mentally if they’d been unable to help.

“It was quite amazing really and it showed what the community can do when you pull together.”

The pandemic has been a particularly challenging time for children, with home-schooling replacing normal lessons and summer exams being cancelled.

At Shiplake College, staff and pupils were busy making face shields when supplies of PPE were running low nationally.

The independent school’s design technology laboratory was able to produce more than 100 shields a day, while surplus supplies of masks were also donated.

Teachers Mike Whitfield, Tom Bayley and Sally Satch made hundreds of visors with the help of student volunteers and these were sent to local care homes, hospitals, funeral homes and schools.

Headmaster Tyrone Howe said: “I can remember the last day before we went into lockdown very clearly and there were pupils in tears saying goodbye to each other.

“At the time it felt slightly surreal and nobody knew what lay ahead. Thank goodness we didn’t know it was going to last as long as it has done because I think that would have been very difficult to process.

“We are blessed with very good facilities and we had a stock of surplus medical equipment.

“It was a way of keeping our school community together. It felt like a good thing to do and the right thing to do.

“We are duty bound to do what we can and you’d always love to do more but you do as much as you can within your control.”

Rugby player George Primett, 28, would normally be working at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in Oxford as a physiotherapist but he spent several weeks working in the intensive care unit at the John Radcliffe Hospital instead.

Mr Primett, who has played for Henley for the last six years, was part of a team that helped to turn patients on to their fronts to alleviate the build-up of fluid in the lungs, a process known as proning.

This was particularly important as patients on a ventilator could not move themselves and it required a team of six or seven people to do.

Mr Primett said: “My work as a physio came to a halt and we were looking for things to do. It was a case of all hands on deck and I just put my hand up straight away.

“It was a bit daunting, but we all came together and that was really nice. Obviously, we saw some people pass after treating them for days and weeks. It was traumatic from that point of view and it was quite a thing to go through with the number of deaths.

“It was not all doom and gloom and the team camaraderie was very positive and we were always optimistic. We never had a shortage of PPE either, so we were well prepared. I felt a duty of care — everybody who works in the NHS is there for the patients and we just did everything we could to get the best outcomes. I do look back with pride. I’m fortunate to be young and healthy and privileged to have been able to help.”

The impact on the hospitality industry was huge. Being closed for the best part of a year, many pubs and restaurants offered takeaways or became community shops, especially during the first lockdown when essential food supplies were short and panic buying set in.

Dan Redfern, who runs the Cherry Tree in Stoke Row, helped by cooking and distributing 1,450 free two-course meals to families in need. He said: “One of my regulars came to me and asked about free school meals during the half-term when we were in the second lockdown. There wasn’t much uptake because people might have been a bit embarrassed and this is quite an affluent area.

“We gave it another go and pledged to provide as many two-course meals as possible during the November lockdown. The Cherry Tree paid half and my regular did the rest.

“We had an amazing uptake and heard stories about strong people struggling so it was a very positive thing to do. We had a team of chefs who were furloughed so we did something that was not about making profit and helped people going through a tough time.”

The only way to ease restrictions and eventually return to a more normal life was the approval of a vaccination, which the UK was the first to do with the development of the Pfizer vaccine.

The first jab was given at the beginning of December and the Oxford/AstraZeneca version was approved just before the new year.

The experience of flu jab clinics helped but the logistical challenge of delivering thousands of vaccinations every week required more help from the community. Volunteers signed up to help marshal car parks and help with administrative duties at local surgeries, relieving the workload on the healthcare workers who they had clapped for months earlier.

Dr Will Hearsey, a partner at the Hart Surgery in Henley, said: “We have been inundated with offers of help, so everyone has pulled together under difficult circumstances. The extra help at different stages of the pandemic has helped us hugely.

“The vaccination take-up has been very impressive. There has been criticism of the Government but the number that we have already vaccinated speaks for itself.” Despite the success of the vaccination programme so far, Dr Hearsey says the impact of the pandemic will continue to be felt.

He said: “One of our biggest concerns is that people have not been contacting us when they should be for things like chest pains and signs of cancer. We were seeing early signs of that last year, with fewer people getting in touch.

“The impact on mental health is also quite an important thing to remember. A lot more people are struggling now and a lot of what we are dealing with as GPs is a spike in depression and anxiety.

“Covid will be with us for the long-term now — much like the flu — so I suspect we will be rolling out vaccinations every year for the foreseeable future.”