Michael Gove: Swine flu adds a new dimension to a father's fear

Published on Saturday 18 July 2009 19:47

I watch the children for every stray snuffle, cough or hint of feverishness

NEVER mind H1N1, do you remember Y2K? The original bug that would paralyse Britain? In the months before the millennium dawned, the newspapers were full of portents of apocalypse just around the corner. The finest minds in computer science were warning us that the world would grind to a halt as we switched from 1999 to 2000 and everything digital went phut. So millions were spent, government was mobilised, toolkits and taskforces were assembled. And what happened?

The square root of diddly squat. The only thing that went wrong as the millennium dawned was the Prime Minister grabbing the wrong hand when he tried to get the Queen to join in Auld Lang Syne at the Dome. Not a single computer, not even my grandad's Sinclair ZX80, malfunctioned on the big night. The scientists', and government's, portents of doom came to nothing. And ever since then I've been inoculated against media scare stories about bugs that would bring Britain to a halt.

Whether it was SARS or bird flu, necrotising fascitis or neuroticising columnitis, every time there's been a medical scare, and a consequent run on facemasks and Tamiflu, I've just responded by swallowing none of it.

Until now. The current swine flu epidemic has, I have to admit, for the first time in a decade, inclined me to question my own bravado. There's a flip and cynical media reason for that. In the past, the experts seemed to have an interest in talking up the threat, whether because they wanted money for more research, or were just covering themselves. So I, in my contrarian way, discounted the danger. But now that the establishment experts are queuing up to tell us that everything's going to be all right my suspicions are automatically aroused. If they are trying so hard to reassure then there really must be something to worry about.

But, deeper than any reaction provoked by old-fashioned journalistic scepticism, comes the fear that springs from fatherhood. What is distinctive, and deeply unsettling, about swine flu is the specific danger it poses to children. My children.

The establishment experts say that the thousands who may die as a result of this epidemic need to be seen in the context of the thousands who die every winter as a result of seasonal flu. Every death is a tragedy, but flu is an annual generator of thousands of tragedies and we must not get this outbreak out of proportion.

The words are designed to reassure, and there is nothing ignoble in that. But they ignore one inconvenient truth. Those whom flu normally claims every winter are those already frail and aged. Those who have already made old bones and sense their vulnerability with every new winter's onset. Swine flu is different. Its victims are younger. Much younger.

Earlier this week, on Wednesday morning, my wife and I gazed at the picture of the six year old girl who had died after contracting swine flu and thought of our own six year old girl. Hours later my wife was complaining of aches, pains, a sore throat and general grottiness. Only 24 hours later the diagnosis was confirmed. She had swine flu, and the disease which we know, despite every official reassurance, can claim children's lives was just one bedroom door away from our own children.

Since then, we have been watching and waiting. Our worries have not been eased by the terrible reaction my wife has had to the Tamiflu and the fact there's been no slackening in the intensity of her symptoms. I watch the children for every stray snuffle, cough or hint of feverishness, my worries a total antidote to the media-bred cynicism which I used to suffer from.

And in that sense my worries are healthy. Because the cynicism I used to affect was a way of trying to shut suffering out of my life. And that is something you simply can't do as a parent. Fatherhood is about fear.

The worries that swine flu provoke in my mind are the worries that every parent has, magnified and given a national, even international, media profile. From the moment your children are born, and certainly from the moment they develop a life, and mind, of their own, worry is your constant companion. Nothing compares to the sensation in the pit of your stomach that comes when you lose sight of them in the park or supermarket and fear that you have lost them for ever. The chance they have really disappeared, let alone come to any harm, is, of course, vanishingly small. Just as the chance of swine flu leaving our children with more than a few days of grottiness is tiny.

But that isn't the point. This isn't about statistics, epidemiology or pandemic planning. Its about the fear every parent has that the worst thing that could ever befall any parent will befall them. The loss of their child. It doesn't matter how small the risk of such an event happening may be. The consequences are so catastrophic that this not a risk we ever want to contemplate running.

Call it an over-reaction if you like, clinginess, wrapping our kids in cotton wool, whatever. And worry, as you are entitled to, that parental concern on this level will force the state to act, and spend, on a major scale to allay our worries. But if you try to argue us logically out of our fears, we parents will respond that there is nothing logical about what we feel for our children. It is the fierce protectiveness of instinct. And that, at its heart, is more powerful than any virus, because it is what binds families, societies, and civilisation together.