Nuclear Dread and The Art of The Present Tense

Monday morning and the world is ending again. Or possibly not. Probably not, if you put down the phone and consult something other than the part of your brain that has been running scenarios since before you were fully conscious. But possibly, and it’s the possibly that does it. Gets into everything. Flavours the tea. Follows you from room to room. 

I don’t think war is imminent. I want to say that upfront, because this isn’t that kind of post. I have never done politics here and that will never change. But I do think we are in a time when war feels possible in a way it hasn’t for most of our lives, and that possible is a different thing from probable, but it turns out to be quite bad enough on its own. Possible gets into your sleep. Possible has you looking up from whatever you’re reading to read something appalling out loud. Possible is the word that sits at the kitchen table with you at seven in the morning, and has you sending out soundbites over Whatsapp to all those you know will share your outrage.

I worry. I worry out loud. To Ben and Finn and finally to my Dad, who is in his late seventies, and he listens and then goes quiet, and says with the particular gentleness he uses when he thinks I am being a bit much: it has always been so.

And then: you know too much now. That’s the trouble. You know far too much and most of it is designed to frighten you, and instead of living your lives you’re frightening yourselves.

I keep turning that over. Because he isn’t wrong, is he? Not entirely. The Cold War lasted for decades and people lived their lives inside it, not around it, not despite it, but actually inside it, and the bread rose and the children grew and the diaries were written and the runner beans came up in June. They just didn’t have X. They didn’t have the push notification and the algorithm that has learned, with genuinely terrifying precision, exactly which story will make you click. We are not necessarily living in more dangerous times than our parents. We are living in more visible times. Everything frightening is now immediately, unfilterably, in our hands, in our beds, in the six minutes between waking up and getting up.

My dad’s generation got the news twice a day. They had time, in between, to forget to be afraid.

We have to construct that time ourselves now. Nobody gives it to us.

All of which said, I don’t want to dismiss the fear. That would be its own dishonesty, and I am bored of the kind of essay that arrives at it’ll be fine through the back door of it’s always been this way. The language of nuclear deterrence is back in the mouths of people with the actual weapons. War is closer to European and American soil than it has been in most of our lifetimes. My dad is right that it has always been possible. Gradations of possible exist, though. And I don’t think we are imagining the gradient we’re on are we?

What I’m trying to find, what I think we are all groping for on the Monday mornings with the phones we already know we shouldn’t have picked up, is the way to hold both things. To be honestly, non-hysterically afraid AND informed. And to live. To fully, committedly, and actually, live.

The women of the last century’s wars managed it and I keep going back to those women, because should push come to shove I do believe they will be my entire coping strategy.

Because I have spent an embarrassing and wholly unrepentant proportion of my adult life reading wartime fiction written almost exclusively for and by women who found the whole catastrophic business, the documented, civilian-casualty, bomb-in-the-next-street reality of it, somehow also the occasion for the most vivid living they had ever done.

Rumer Godden. Elizabeth Jane Howard. Mollie Panter-Downes. The entire Cazalet Chronicles, read four times and likely to be read again the next time the news gets bad enough. Noel Streatfeild writing about theatres in the Blitz. Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, every page carrying that specific strange charge of life lived in the knowledge that the building you’re standing in might not exist tomorrow.

And Mrs Miniver. Jan Struther’s Mrs Miniver, who I want to talk about properly, because she is one of the most underappreciated documents of what it means to be a woman alive during frightening times, and also, quietly, one of the best arguments I know for the thing I am trying to say.

Mrs Miniver appeared first as a newspaper column, small sketches of an ordinary English woman’s domestic life, written for The Times in the late 1930s as Europe slid toward catastrophe. Jan Struther wrote her with an almost aggressive ordinariness. Mrs Miniver buys a new car. Mrs Miniver gets the Christmas decorations down from the attic. Mrs Miniver sits in her garden thinking about happiness. The war comes closer and closer in the background, like weather moving in across a view, and Mrs Miniver continues, not in denial, not in ignorance, but in the full and conscious insistence that the ordinary things are not lesser things. That the ordinary things matter because the life being defended and the life being lived are the same life, so to abandon the second in fear of losing it is to hand it over without a fight. The small pleasures are not compensation for the larger fears. Not the consolation prize. The substance itself.

Mollie Panter-Downes wrote her London dispatches to the New Yorker throughout the whole war and what gets me every time, returning to them, is the tone. Wry and precise and deeply human, never falsely reassuring, but not once hopeless. Bombed streets, government incompetence, food shortages, years of exhaustion, and underneath all of it this steady current of love for ordinary English life. The way people kept going to work and having opinions and noticing the weather and falling in love and making jokes. She wasn’t being naively optimistic. She was being accurate.

This is what people do. This is what women especially do: they keep the thread, and this is I thinkwhere those women meet the Stoics, which is an unlikely meeting but, when you think about it, inevitable.

Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus were not, as popularly imagined, cold men advocating the suppression of feeling. They were saying something practical: locate, with precision, what is in your hands. And tend it. Regardless of whatever else is happening. Do it anyway. Do it because life speaks for itself and we should not seek to dampen it by buying fright, before the ownership of it is a necessary evil.

The wartime women did exactly this. Clara Milburn kept a diary throughout the whole war. A private diary, full of the garden and what she cooked and whether the runner beans were coming up. Alongside entries about the bombing raids. Alongside years of terror for her son, a prisoner of war. Runner beans and prisoner of war on adjacent pages, same notebook, same handwriting, same care. Not because the runner beans mattered more. Because they also mattered. Because attending to them was the act available to her, the small daily refusal to let the outside world have every inch of the inside one.

The Stoics would have recognised her without needing an introduction.

Premeditatio malorum, the premeditation of evils, is the practice of sitting with the worst case. Not circling it, not refreshing it, but looking at it directly and asking: and then what? How would I bear it? The point isn’t to rehearse catastrophe. It’s that the circling makes the fear louder at 3am, and it has never once made it quieter, has it? But the looking-at it makes it smaller. Not insignificant. Mere examination will not shrink reality, but making sense of it by not avoiding it, makes it feel smaller, and more survivable, at least in the imagination, which turns out to be somewhere to start, because while it doesn’t do to poke the bear, at fifty and frightened, we bring some history to that same fright that can help us make sense of it regardless.

At twenty, existential dread has a glamour. You read Camus, you wear black, you feel the void and it feels almost interesting. You haven’t yet accumulated evidence of your own impermanence. Haven’t yet sat with someone dying. Haven’t watched things end that you were certain couldn’t…

At fifty you’ve done all of that. You know what ending looks like. You’ve collected losses the way other people collect, I don’t know, Burleigh pottery. Carefully. The dread better researched now. Worse, in that way.

But here is the other side of it: age provides evidence. Actual, physical, lived evidence that you have already survived the unsurvivable things? That morning still came after the worst of nights. You are, demonstrably, still at the kitchen table. Still watching the birds go about their business. Still here.

Your fear comes with a footnote now. A small asterisk: and yet.

There are women living inside what I’m only afraid of. Ukrainian women. Gazan women. Women in Sudan, in the DRC, in every place the news visits briefly and then leaves. Places we are not, only for the grace of God. Doing what women have always done when the world behaves atrociously, keeping the children fed, keeping the record, keeping some version of the home alive where ever humanly possible. Not always because they have a choice. But because the keeping of it is itself a form of dignity. A refusal and always an insistence that ordinary human life, tender and domestic and specific and irreplaceable, is worth something against every single despicable force that would reduce it to rubble or a statistic.

We are all, those of us tucked up safely in our beds and those of us in places I cannot imagine, the same lineage. Women in the world as it is, not as it should be, making from it what can be made. That is what I feel when I read Mrs Miniver. Not: they were braver, not: we should stop complaining. But: we know this. We have always known this. And here is what we do with that knowing now.

We turn homewards.

The place I actually want to live, in all my writing and in general.

Sanctuary is the wrong word for it, or rather I think it is being used wrong. Too often said as retreat, or a turning away, something slightly apologetic we feel mild shame for needing. Sanctuary as consolation prize, maybe?

But the wartime women knew differently. Their homes were positions. Held positions. The women who swept plaster dust off the kitchen table after the bomb in the next street and made breakfast were not in shock, not failing to grasp the situation. They were making a statement the situation couldn’t answer. The table is still standing. We are still here. Breakfast is happening, regardless.

Because every domestic act in bad times carries this charge, if you will let it. Not performed for anyone, not content, not the curated aesthetic of a woman with a ring light and a content calendar. The private, daily, entirely serious business of maintaining conditions for human life, which is also, always, a political act, even when it looks like nothing more than putting flowers on the table.

Yes, especially the flowers. Even the supermarket ones. Even past their best, in a jug because the vase is in a box somewhere. Elizabeth David had perpetually dying flowers and considered them essential. Vita Sackville-West grew them in such quantities that Sissinghurst was never without them in any season. They say: beauty is temporary and I am attending to it anyway. And by my reckoning, that was Mrs Miniver’s whole argument. Clara Milburn’s runner beans. We are still here and we are still paying attention to growing things, and that small fact, held up to the light, contains a philosophy we need to hook our asterisk, our and yet*

*The candle lit because it is Monday and every Monday deserves it. Not saved for a special occasion. This is the occasion, being here, now, because this specific Monday which won’t come again.

*The good china/underwear/perfume on ordinary days. Use it because was made to be used. The ordinary days ARE the days. There are not other days, secretly more deserving.

*The corner of the sitting room made as right as you can make it. The right lamp, the book within reach, somewhere for the eye to land that isn’t the news. Not a vignette. Not a moment. An act of care for the self who will sit there later and need it.

*Warmth and weight. The heavy blanket, the hot water bottle, the jumper washed enough times that it has become the textile equivalent of being hugged. Your nervous system responds to these exactly as a child’s does and there is no embarrassment in that, it is intelligence. The wartime women knew this: the cup of tea as genuine intervention, the bath drawn with intention, the deliberate construction of a small warm enclosed world, as a message the nervous system understands before the brain has had time to argue with it. All the old, familiar reassurances, re-occuring and creating a rhythm to nurture on the days when fury has nowhere else to go.

*Cook something. Not from hunger, though you probably are. But because cooking assumes a future in which the food will be eaten, by people who will still be there to eat it. Elizabeth David, writing about food during rationing, during her own displacement, was never writing merely about food. She was writing about standards. The keeping of standards. Good olive oil, decent bread, the effort of a proper meal or the best version of one that the circumstances allow. Worth it, she was saying. Always worth it. Especially now.

*The right book. Not improving reading, not the book you feel you ought to get to. The one that is specifically medicine. Mine, as I’ve now confessed at considerable length, is the wartime women. Yours will be something else and you know what it is. The book that holds out a hand. That says: someone else was here, in something like this, and they wrote it down, and here you are reading it in the luxury of decent cotton sheets, and the thread runs between you across decades. That thread is real.

*The diary. A few lines. What you ate, what you noticed, what frightened you in the news, what the garden is doing. Clara Milburn wrote hers for herself. The diary insists that what happened today was real and worth recording, and that insistence is more radical than it sounds when the forces making us anxious are also, always, forces of unreality. The speculative, the catastrophic, the not-yet-happened. The diary plants you squarely in what is, forces you to stay present and reflective.

Go outside. Study his specific sky, this exact English white-grey or surprising blue. Look at the vastness. Let yourself feel awe for a sky so much bigger than our lives ever will be.

One true conversation. With someone who knows you, not about the news, or not only about the news. About the actual texture of being alive right now. Mrs Miniver had those conversations with her husband, the kind where something shifts and you go to bed understanding something you didn’t before. Find your confidante, he or she who will hold your fears gently and help you rationalise both fright and rage.

Simone Weil wrote, during another terrible time, and women have always been making tea during terrible times, this is not new, we are not special for living in one, that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Not attention to the catastrophe. The other kind. The slow, quiet, directed attention to what is actually here. The steam from the cup. The light on the wall. The cat meditatively washing her tiny little orange face. The sound of someone moving upstairs. The irreplaceable Monday-ness of this Monday, which is still, right now, still yours.

My dad says we know too much and he’s right about the mechanism if not entirely the danger. We are being spoon fed trauma, drama and dread by very clever people with strong financial reasons: to keep us in a state of activated alarm, because fear engages and dread clicks. The low hum of existential anxiety is extraordinarily good for someone’s quarterly numbers and that should sicken us: not because the things we fear aren’t real, but because our fear is being amplified beyond what is either accurate or bearable, then sold back to us and our response to that doesn’t have to be avoidance or denial, but it does have to be discernment and it has to be given its rightful place in the warp and weft of our days.

So the response has to be this: what Mrs Miniver did. What Clara Milburn did. What the women sweeping plaster dust off their kitchen tables did. The deliberate, daily, non-negotiable construction of the interior life as the other side of the scale. Not escapism. Both things real and equally deserving of attention. The catastrophe and the runner beans, on adjacent pages, in the same notebook, with equal care.

I keep coming back to my dad’s wisdom, as I do on all that matters to me. It has always been so.

He’s right. It has always been frightening. The century before this contained two world wars and a cold war and the women who wrote inside those times wrote from moments that felt, to them, exactly as unprecedented and vast as ours feels to us now. And they kept going. They kept the diaries and made the dinners and wrote the novels and tended the gardens and loved the people they loved as hard as they could for as long as they had them.

The world will be what it will be. The Monday morning will keep arriving. The phone will be there, with the news on it, and the amygdala will do what it does, and the dread will pull up its chair.

And you can let it seep into the joists of the whole house or you can reel yourself back and simply light the candle.

Because the runner beans will still grow regardless.

The kettle will boil in two and a half minutes, and there will be always another cup of tea. Thank God.

That person you love will carry on driving you nuts which means alive, present, and still yours to be driven nuts by. So fleeting thoughts of punching their lights out? Merely proof that all is well, and life is going on.

And behind you, further back than you can see, beyond your dad’s generation, and his mothers’ generation, and all the women writing and cooking and tending and keeping the thread going in times that were trying very hard to cut it, they are all making the same argument.

Wipe down the table, build time into your day to forget the dread, light the candle and know this: dread is just love with nowhere to land. So treat it like you might a child. Nurture it, feed it, and let the ordinary be the reassurance you need to offer it a place at the table, without making it guest of honour in your day.