Five years on from lockdown, five writers recall their memories of the day we were all instructed to stay at home – and the weeks that followed
Esther Walker, 44, London
All I remember is the feeling: total horror. The government announcement was bad enough but when I read out the email from my children’s school shortly after, saying it would be closed until further notice, I had to lie down in shock, while they ran about whooping. My husband, delighted by any drama, hurried to the shops to stockpile dried chickpeas and pasta flour.
I love my family. My husband and two children, now 11 and 14, back then six and nine, are my main source of joy. But I don’t want to be locked up with them 24 hours a day. Even now my children are older, weekends can still feel like hard work, with the endless catering and cries of boredom.
I need some time completely on my own or I feel really quite crazy. Like most parents I rely on the school day for this. So I found that first lockdown, which everyone loved so much because it was sunny, very bad. I was anxious about the world – at that time we had no idea how it was all going to play out – and unable to find any positives. I kept making lists, trying to order my disordered thoughts. I found one the other day, it read, ‘Printer paper, vitamins?? wine’.
Piccadilly Circus, 7 April 2020
The online offering from school was one long infuriating tech-fail, endless printouts and rebellious children. We quickly abandoned it and made up ‘homeschool’ as we went along. But my children heckled me non-stop during my fascinating lectures on oxbow lakes or adverbs, so I regularly stomped out to the doorstep to sulk.
My husband’s gonzo ‘Daddy school’, on the other hand, was a hit. All I heard from the kitchen, as I folded laundry, were gales of laughter. Galling.
Compared with the nightmare of homeschooling, I found the daily grind of housework, meal planning and queueing for the supermarket practically a treat. But I really hated it. All of it, from beginning to end.
Now I’m wondering whatever happened to all those dried chickpeas and the pasta flour. We definitely never used them.
Lady Anne Glenconner, 92, Norfolk
I think I heard about lockdown from my son-in-law, who is always hooked up to the news. I don’t even have a mobile – or, rather, I have a mobile, but I keep it in the car. So probably my son-in-law rang the landline to tell me because he realised that I wouldn’t know. That generation all know everything at once as they keep in touch with each other.
At the time I just wondered what ‘lockdown’ actually meant. How long would it last? How would I do my shopping? I was in my lovely house in a village in Norfolk. Lockdown must have been dreadful for many, especially those in small flats with children, but I was fortunate and adored it.
I had a real clearout. I went through all my cupboards and drawers and put things in bags to send to the charity shop when everything came to an end. I watched Joe Wicks, who had one or two exercises for old people, and the conferences on television each evening. Everyone was so kind to old people like me. Homemade bread and cakes were put outside my front door and the most charming little girl on a pink tricycle used to ring my doorbell then scoot away, leaving a pizza her mother had made.
I love living alone, and friends had so much more time for lengthy telephone calls. I always knew exactly where they were: at home! The other great thing was that, normally, one thinks, ‘Oh, I haven’t been asked to that party’, or, ‘What’s going on there?’ Well, in lockdown, there were no parties, so one didn’t have that worry. One wasn’t missing anything social at all.
Regent Street, 6 January 2021
My son Christopher lives near me and we would walk each week. He is very disabled following an accident when he was 19. Because I lived alone I was allowed two people in my bubble; he was one and the other was my great friend, who is nearby. But I didn’t see the rest of my family or get to see my great-grandchildren walk or crawl.
I lived through the Second World War, which was much worse. I was without my parents for three years! My sister and I were sent up to Scotland, with a cruel governess, to stay with an aunt. There was rationing and always the fear of being bombed. Covid was nothing like that.
By December, you were allowed to be with a few more people. So for Christmas I hired a blow-heater for a small barn I had decorated with holly and candles. I told everyone to dress warmly – some very old fur coats appeared – and we had drinks outside. It was one of the most enjoyable Christmases I’ve ever had.
Victoria Hislop, 65, Kent
Even before the announcement I expected lockdown and actually hoped it would happen.
As always, I had one eye on the situation in Greece [Victoria has a second home in Crete], where they had locked down at least a week earlier and I was massively vexed that we hadn’t done the same here. I wondered if I should be buying catering packs of loo roll or flour but, instead, on the morning of the 23rd, I went for a blowdry to distract myself, wondering if it might be the last for a while. As my hairdresser was washing out the shampoo my phone rang. It was my mother’s residential home in Suffolk. My beloved 92-year-old mother had died suddenly just one hour earlier. I had kissed her goodbye on a visit the previous week, just before the home had locked out all visitors, something she laughingly called a ‘fiasco’ when we had spoken on the previous day.
It was a numbing moment – part of what felt like the crumbling of normality. Within a few hours many more in her care home had departed, too. But I held on to the fact that my mother had been spared the isolation and confusion of the pandemic. She had led a long and very rich life. We had said everything to each other that had needed to be said, and she knew how much she was loved.
‘Old age’ appeared as the cause of death, but we knew it wasn’t, and the speed and timing of the departure of her entire circle in the home was hardly coincidental. Our immediate family gathered and then the announcement of lockdown took place. What a day. Looking back, I realise how absurd my coiffed hair must have seemed.
Then Prime Minister Boris Johnson places the UK in lockdown, 23 March 2020
We held a ‘Zoom-eral’ for my mother shortly afterwards, and then began a period of virtual connections with friends: online bridge playing, online quizzes and distanced walks – the absence of planes meant that we even heard birdsong. There was good fortune in having a working life that could still continue and over the next few months I managed to write a book, One August Night, at record speed for me.
Perhaps because of my mother’s death, or because of the death of physical freedom to travel, I retreated into my imagination. And the resulting novel, of course, was dedicated to my mother.
It was a sequel to the first one I wrote, The Island, which had also been dedicated to her. She had taught me so much, including that even from adversity, something good can come. And lockdown confirmed it to be true.
Sarah Standing, 65, London
When we were solemnly instructed to ‘stay at home’, while it was a peacetime order, it was unequivocal. Married to a husband of 86, who was already shielding, and having just become a grandmother for a second time two weeks earlier, I had semi-preempted the order.
I wanted to protect the two most vulnerable members of my family – the eldest and the youngest. So in mid-March I rented a small house in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, near the sea. I thought I was giving us the best chance of staying safe.
On 22 March, my husband, myself, our son Archie, his partner Nisha and their two-week-old baby Billy arrived at the rental. I welcomed our confinement – embraced it, even. I scurried like a rabbit into a burrow.
We spent one night in the Aldeburgh rental before the landlady politely kicked us out, arguing that Londoners should return whence they came. Fair point. So we packed up, drove back and hunkered down.
I spent that first lockdown glued to the five o’clock news like a coffin chaser. I was terrified. I felt I was living through a war that deployed no tanks, no rifles, no fighter planes. Our only weapons were flimsy masks, rubber gloves and plastic visors. We were all metaphorically out on the battlefield, yet our only command as foot soldiers against the enemy was to retreat. Not from the enemy, but from those we loved and cherished.
Shoreditch, East London, 27 April 2020
I dreaded anything happening to my husband and mother, who both belonged to the age bracket that was being picked off by the sniper of disease. I lay awake at night imagining the unthinkable. In the event neither got Covid that first lockdown, unlike my youngest daughter Tilly. Locked down with friends in South London, she was pretty ropey for four days and I was beside myself with worry. But she was young and healthy and recovered with no lasting effects. Still, I will never forget that space invader of fear – or take simple pleasures like carefree hugs, kisses and human contact for granted again.
Sachin Kureishi, 31, London
With memory so fickle, it’s a miracle we now have our entire photographic history in the palm of our hand. I’m thumbing back rapidly through my phone’s camera roll, my time machine, when I crash-land on 25 March 2020: my then-girlfriend staring out at me from her bedroom window, the closest she and I were allowed to be. That single frame is the opening scene of our great collective separation. At that moment the idea of lockdown felt novel, dangerous and exciting.
It was the Saturday before, however, that I’ll always remember.
I went on a bike ride with my dad [the novelist and playwright Hanif Kureishi] and my twin brother, travelling from our West London neighbourhood of Shepherd’s Bush into central London. The day had that eerie pre-storm quality, with dismal, battleship-grey skies. By this point, you might recall, plenty of people were already self-imposing lockdown, having watched much of Europe succumb to it first.
I filmed it all, our ride from Hyde Park into the city centre, which by then had been completely abandoned, just the three of us, claiming Oxford Street as our own personal velodrome.
Taking full advantage of the vast open boulevard, we zigzagged wildly across its width, slaloming between lanes, racing each other towards Niketown. I’m looking now at videos of Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square and Carnaby Street, all transformed into vacant film sets. Storefronts glowed but there was no one inside.
Brighton Pier, 22 March 2020
It felt like a strange privilege to see London like that, despite its chilling doomsday resonance. I remember feeling that my shaky phone footage was capturing something important; that either peril or opportunity awaited. I was an archaeologist of the present, documenting this strange intermission before the world plunged.
Racing forward now through the bright, hot spring that followed, I seem to have spent most of my time taking pictures of my golden retriever digging up my mum’s flowerbeds at her home in West London.
I wonder now if I could have spent that time more wisely. For many who avoided tragedy, this collective pause allowed them to reimagine their lives. I could have built a business or turned my retriever into an Instagram sensation. But the truth is, those balmy afternoons watching him systematically dismantle my mother’s prized dahlias are some of my most precious memories. I wouldn’t change a thing – except buy Bitcoin.
