When Dr Rachel Clarke first started writing down her experiences of working on a Covid-19 ward, she never meant to make them public. Scribbled at her kitchen table, mostly in the middle of the night when she was too stressed to sleep, her notes were originally intended as a kind of private therapy: a place to process all the horrors she felt she couldn’t talk about, or not to anyone who hadn’t been there.
It was only after the news of Dominic Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle broke – exposing the shocking disparity between the sacrifices ordinary people were being asked to make and the way people in government felt entitled to behave – that she became angry enough to turn those notes into the memoir that ultimately became this week’s ITV drama Breathtaking.
