My son thinks that children were evacuated during the pandemic

[Jourdain11]

Today my DS7 was learning about World War 2 in 'topic' and they covered evacuees. Apparently he stuck his hand up, "Oh, so they were sent away from London to the country to keep them safe? Just like we were in the lockdown?"

The teacher said that, no, children were not evacuated during lockdown. And he was quite incredulous that neither his teacher, nor any of his classmates, could remember this mass evacuation.

I have explained that he was not evacuated - he stayed with his grandparents for around a month (not in the country). But he is sure in his own mind that he was in fact evacuated for the duration. "Maybe for about a year."

I suppose he was only 4 at the time. But it got me to thinking that a lot of youngish children must have some fairly weird memories of Lockdown Britain!

I guess for your son it felt like he was evacuated? Did he spend a month without you at his grandparents' house? I would just re-state what really happened each time it's brought up.

I guess for your son it felt like he was evacuated? Did he spend a month without you at his grandparents' house?
This was my point earlier, from.a being 7 years old and sent away to live with grandparents for. a month (which is how it came across in OP) I can see why thought it was comparable as would have been from their point of view!
Hasn't been acknowledged so far though as I can see so see if you get a reply 🙂

It’s all so odd now, for sure. I never stopped working (at a liquor store, God forbid we close 🙄) but it seems so strange that the children were home for so long.

I’m in the rural US and people around reacted quite badly and I don’t know if I’ll ever feel “at home” again, really.

An emerging Mandela Effect?

I was reading a detective story, set in the first few weeks of lockdown. Seems really strange now that it actually happened.

To be honest OP there seems to be a collective issue with remembering the worst days of the pandemic - people still talk about what a bad couple of years it was being locked in, how we've only just come out of restrictions so are still getting used to it and the like.

Given we went into lockdown in March '20 and all restrictions were lifted in July '21 (Yeah we had a bit of faffing with jabs/passports for a few months but it wasn't that painful) I find it odd that people still talk about it ending as a very recent thing and about it as being over a longer period of time than it actually was - when really, we had 16 months of restrictions where for about 6 of them we were locked down.

Please watch this
www.channel4.com/programmes/help

I was so bored in lock down. I live alone and didn't see anyone. I hated all the jolly news stories of people cozily working at home together and doing crafts. I used to go running for hours in the local hills (No I didn't drive to get there, yes it was probably breaking the rules). But I would run up fells for three hours a day for something to do and make myself tired so I could sleep to pass the dreadful boring time.

Really cute !

He is right in a way. He had to stay away from his immediate family for a month which to a 4 year old would seem longer.

I have positive memories of the first 2020 Spring/Summer one...a real life pause button being pressed, family time, wfh, peaceful, lovely weather, nature, farm shop & local foods, saving money , box sets, not knowing anyone close to us being ill..

Second one January - April 2021 really negative...not seen family at Christmas, dark, kid confused with home schooling which was badly organised, work getting arsey about wfh, worries about parents, government getting worse and more incompetent by the day, people flouting rules and bizarrely questioning the vaccine..

Just a tale of two lockdowns really.

My children were 8&2 when we went into lockdown. Shortly after lockdown started, my daughter and I got COVID, but didn't know it was that because our symptoms were atypical (at that time at least!) She was seriously ill, had long lasting side effects and their dad and I were both keyworkers, with all that entailed...my children's abiding memory of lockdown is waving to lorries from the bridge over the main road and wild ducks coming to visit us and feeding them!!! It's strange how children's minds work!

Your son wasn’t far wrong if you sent him away at that time. He just got the length of time that he was away wrong, to a child a month would probably feel like a year. I recall many things that happened in childhood, yet when discussing with my mother she’d say it only happened on one occasion rather than several that I remembered. So I was never sure if it was her memory or mine.

I can’t believe that people would forget it so easily. It was so sad, yet different to anything we’d ever experienced before. The supermarket queues were horrendous, not that I spent much time in them as I began shopping online for food & have continued to do so. Embarrassingly enough I became the “You are going the wrong way”police. When they removed the arrows & all the tape from the supermarkets I didn’t know which way to go. I wasn’t at all bored, & loved that no one would come knocking the door, & it was sooooo peaceful, so not all bad for me. Yet an absolute mare for people with kids, or those that don’t enjoy their own company.

You're not hearing those of us who are telling you it was all bad for many.

I was made redundant on the 20th March (we all knew the lockdown was coming by then and my company was up for sale - the sale got cancelled, understandably). Looking after a 1 year old while trying to claim JSA and job hunt, in a time before they cancelled the requirement to attend meetings, was fun. The woman from the Job Centre rang me from her house and we agreed she'd just tick some boxes - how can you jobseek when childcare is illegal!

I did find a job in August in a key worker industry, thank fuck. I had an office to go to 3 days a week and it saved my mental health. DH was largely unaffected as he had been working remotely for 2 years anyway.

One of the things that really pissed me off was some posters' insistence on here that struggling to WFH with children was the parents' fault for not having "robust childcare" in place. When it was illegal to see anyone. How obtuse can you get.

I probably made that sound very wrong. I meant the weather was fabulous, we had a nice spring and summer. Not the year itself.

Home schooling and going to work, yes I did that too. Just like many others.

Many died but the death toll is arguable because many of these people had covid put on their death certificates, even though they were elderly and ill anyway. But that’s another story. Let’s not get into that.

I simply meant that as time goes on, the lockdowns will be put into the back of many people’s minds.

Remember people clapping for frontline staff and people being generally kinder to eachother?

Didn’t last long did it and hear we are three years on and the world is severely fucked up.

Many died but the death toll is arguable because many of these people had covid put on their death certificates, even though they were elderly and ill anyway. But that’s another story. Let’s not get into that.

Yes, let's not. I think you'll be given short shrift.

I spent the whole time feeling really anxious, had to start a new job and didn't get a proper induction which hampered me for years. Couldn't see my poor DM with dementia for ages as she lived 300 miles away. Had youngest dc stuck in India during his gap year and had to be repatriated. It was scary and I know many many people were in much worse situations.

Not sure about dc but dh and I laughed at some of the things we remembered from pandemic the other day

Seems so strange

Like us all I have very different memories of different periods during that time.

most of my colleagues were furloughed. I got to stay at work, but with a 20 per cent pay cut - I still think I was the lucky one, I didn’t lose skills, was “key” and when inevitable cuts came down the line I felt slightly more job secure. Not sure if that played out in reality for others, but I survived various redundancy culls.

Driving to my mum’s to fix her iPad - she was isolating in a vulnerable group, hadn’t left the house in months, and her FaceTime chats - plus the chance to use video streaming for things like church services - was a lifeline. I classed it as a vital journey, and drove along deserted motorways, very worried that police might not view it as vital if stopped. She cleaned her iPad, passed it through her window to me I. The garden. I did the (very simple when you are not 85) fix and handed it back through the window. I was holding back tears as I left thinking that might be the last time I saw her in person, as at that point a dose of Covid might well have been life threatening for her.

missing a family wedding after I caught Covid - I got dressed up, fascinator and all - and joined via FaceTime.

my daughter working in a care home - she felt absolutely battered by it all. She was relatively inexperienced at the time and her horror in having to hold the hands of people while they died haunts her now. One of her jobs, as inexperienced staff, was to hold a woman’s hand and keep check of her pulse while more experienced staff did more vital things. But most importantly it was to hand hold. I am so proud of her, and proud of that nursing home’s policy, that if they suspected someone was dying, Covid or otherwise, they made sure a member of staff stayed with them, holding their hand, as they passed.

My husband being in a vulnerable group and crying at the thought of mixing again, not from relief but the fear of being exposed to germs.

and on a lighter note, I did more physical exercise as I walked at least an hour every day, and appreciate nature minus traffic noise in a way I’ve never done before or since.

But it took a lot longer than that for many of us to fully relax, my mental health declined horrifically to the point that I made a suicide attempt towards the end of the 3rd lockdown because I didn't know when it was going to end, there wasn't any mental health support anywhere (it still isn't available even now) and I genuinely couldn't cope with it or the uncertainty of when it would end. People mention lockdowns and school shutting now for things and even if they are in jest I have panic attacks and am petrified that it could happen. I found some pictures taken during lockdown recently and even seeing those made me feel a bit sick and anxious. Restrictions may not have lasted all that long but the impact of them is still going on now for a lot of us.

There was also the issue that whenever we talk about lockdowns people assume that either you did an important job and had to be in work and so should be proud of your job, or you were on furlough. I worked in a takeaway, receiving endless abuse, one our delivery drivers died of covid and we couldn't get furlough or sick pay but none of us wanted to be there. We were worried, some of us has health conditions that made us more vulnerable or lived with people who did and we were treated as expendable. Not key workers - just not important enough to protect.

During the beginning of the pandemic we lived outside the UK as crown servants abroad in a country with an OK is medical system but not many intensive care beds. I got a phone call from our medical team one afternoon about 2 weeks in saying that our DD as a severe asthmatic, had been identified as vulnerable and did we want to be shipped back to the UK for the duration of the pandemic - just me and her, not DH. They didn’t know where we would be placed to live and for how long - and I needed to make a choice there and then as the flight was leaving that night. They couldn’t guarantee that DD would be able to have treatment if she had an attack.

split second choice - I said no so we could stay together as a family. I spent weeks fretting that choice (although it turned out to be the correct one as DD didn’t need treatment as still somehow hasn’t caught covid).

horrible situation though, as we had no flights back to the UK for months and I couldn’t have got her home if we’d needed to.

i still remember the surreal panic of those first few weeks, putting a brave face on for DD (who was 7 at the time) whilst wondering if / when we would see family back in the UK again, if we would get sick, if I’d made the wrong choice which would lead to us losing DD. Occasionally I still get nightmares about that phone call…

I remember the (understandable) bitterness of my friends who had to keep working when I was home with the kids and on furlough, after one month of furlough I lost my job but you couldn't complain about being left destitute because .....key workers were in a worse position than anyone! It did piss me off, kind of like this thread where you were only really allowed to complain if you had seen someone die or went to work every day

I’ll always think those who forced dc out of schools for two terms were buggers and got it wrong but stuff like queueing around the car park due to SD or being alerted as a contact now strike me as absurd.

We were lucky in that we didn’t lose anyone to Covid and our two girls seem to have come through it relatively unscathed (they were 5 and 3 at the time).

But the experience of working full time from home in a very intense job with the two of them at home - no allowances made - will never leave me. It was horrendous. Rightly or wrongly I’m still bitter that people were furloughed. Not so much the industries that had to close down. But the many people (for example) in my workplace who were put on furlough because they weren’t trusted to work from home. They had a lovely time of it. Rewarded for poor performance. My organisation wasn’t alone in that.

The funny thing is that i kept a photo diary for the kids during the first lockdown and my eldest looks back at it and says it was a happy time. That makes me feel like the extreme stress and pressure that I put myself under to keep it all going, was worth it. But I still don’t think I have recovered.