The lost years
Five years after the Covid lockdown, Catherine Carr reveals the impact on children who missed the end of primary school
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- Anna Jones
Lockdown's Legacy: the Children is on Radio 4 at 4pm on Monday. Add it to your collection now
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"We were like ten-year-olds trapped in 13-year-olds’ bodies,” says a teenager from Northern Ireland. Now in Year 11 and preparing for his GCSEs, he’s reflecting upon being part of the swathe of children who never experienced their final months at primary school because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Five years on from the first UK lockdown, which was imposed on 23 March 2020, a new Radio 4 series highlights the impact upon three groups of people: children, teachers and medics. Catherine Carr narrates the episodes and also conducted interviews with the teenagers. She has form in creating audio that allows people to tell their stories in their own way, including Where Are You Going?, which was named as RT’s Podcast of the Year in 2023, and last year’s Radio 4 series About the Boys on the challenges facing young men.
She and the production team are not making a sweeping generalisation that these then Year 6 children were the most badly affected group in the country, but there is a logic in selecting them: “They really had a formative part of adolescence hollowed out. All those experiences like texting your mate and meeting them in town; learning to use the bus; having your first crush and acting on it. Their confidence and social skills were marked and it’s definitely something they’re talking about here.”
Catherine Carr.
Before any cynical adults default to that pejorative word “snowflake”, consider this. Professor Lucy Easthope, who specialises in emergency planning, risk and hazard, noted that it’s as if they have been through a natural disaster and we haven’t given them the time to tell us how they feel.
Their opportunity has come now, though, and Carr has been blown away by what they have shared. This is a richly textured piece of audio, including extracts from home videos taken in lockdown. “This might include learning to ride a unicycle, getting into birdwatching, having terrible haircuts, being made-over by their sisters because they were so bored, or one boy standing in his sitting room pretending to swim because he missed swimming. It pulls you back to that weird time,” she explains.
She was also struck by the language that they use to describe lockdown. “Don’t forget these Year 6s, now Year 11s, are TikTok natives. They self-diagnose and co-opt phrases like, ‘Yeah, I’ve got social anxiety.’ And maybe they did, but they’re fluent in that. It’s part of living on your phone during lockdown.”
They haven't yet made sense of it – it breaks my heart
But she was equally struck by the deep fear that they all shared, especially about their family members dying. “We mustn’t forget that kids went through what adults went through. A lot of them said they were frightened by what they saw online. I asked them if they’d expressed that they were frightened and they said, ‘No, because I didn’t want anyone to worry.’”
Even now, five years on, they can still recite the public-health messaging off pat. “What’s unsettling to me as an adult,” says Carr, “is hearing this generation so fluent in the lockdown language of distancing and masks and vulnerability, and all those other words that we never knew before. That’s part of their native language.”
Amid reflections on the shared fear, however, came some truly uplifting narratives – such as the girl who kept a diary and wrote a letter to her future self (pictured above left) that ends with the simple statement of “appreciate people and being able to leave the house”, or the young lad who ran away from home and got into trouble with the police. He tells Carr how he found his salvation through art, and he now plans to become a graphic designer, has a successful Instagram account and already does work for people on commission.
So, what does Carr predict for the future of these children? “I’m not a psychologist, but I do wonder if, in a few years’ time, there’s another wave of upset coming when they put things together – same for those who were freshers or taking A-levels [in lockdown]. As adults, we should be mindful that they haven’t yet made sense of it and they’re trying to, and that breaks my heart.”
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Radio 4’s Lockdown’s Legacy season begins with Waiting for Covid (Sat 8.00pm) and continues on Monday with lockdown-focused programming throughout the day
Authors
Anna Jones
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