“Went shopping at ASDA,” John from London writes in Lockdown Diaries of the Working Class. “Two security workers left and chased a man running from the store... When they came back everyone asked them what the commotion was about, and they said the man had stolen a box of baby milk.”
Sally McEvoy from Nottingham writes: “Working from home, my job as a complaint handler was a tough one today … the knock-on effect this lockdown has is unbelievable… I’ve ate one of the grandkids Easter eggs ffs and my team have done a pub quiz via Skype with alcohol.
"I’ll be a fat alcoholic when this is over.
"My nine-year-old granddaughter cycled past and shouted, ‘don’t die Sally!’.”
One man writes, simply: “Gave the cat a bath, because it was sunny day.”
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When we remember the time of the Great Pandemic, whose memories will rise to the surface?
That was the question that prompted Dr Lisa McKenzie, founder of the Lockdown Diaries project, to record the thoughts of 38 working class people whose experiences might otherwise be lost.
As a working class academic, Lisa knows that history is written not just by the victors, but by people with agency and power.
Inspired partly by Nella Last, whose ‘Housewife, 49’ Second World War diaries painted a vivid picture of the home front, she commissioned daily diary entries covering a month of the first lockdown in April-May 2020.
Many contributors sent entries by text message, or shared photographs of their own handwriting.
The result is a touching, often funny and sometimes heart-breaking record of Lockdown 1.
Over the last few days, extracts have been read on social media by an A-list of working class talent including poet Lemn Sissay, actors Maxine Peake and Ralf Little, and musicians Jason Williamson from Sleaford Mods and Billy Nomates.
The book is being funded by a Kickstarter to which almost 700 people have so far donated.
After months of curated garden projects, banana breads, kimchi and houseplants, the diaries are searingly honest.
McKenzie’s diarists complain of “w***ers” in next-door’s hot-tub, drug-dealers disrupting the NHS clapping on a Thursday, loneliness, the “shambles” of the free school meal scheme, and “people talking s**t about 5G”.
McKenzie, who lives in Nottingham and works at Durham University, says the book – which is being illustrated by working class artists – is also about solidarity. Working class people taking care of each other’s words.
“Often the voices of the working class are told through a middle-class lens,” she says. “When the pandemic started, I was thinking, what will happen to people who use food banks now they are closed?
"I was watching the news and all I saw was people clapping for nurses, but what about care workers, those working on public transport or ASDA workers?
"It would have been those voices disappearing from the narrative like during austerity.
"It was these stories I wanted to tell, because it is these people who suffer the most.”
As diarist Sally, 55, says: “It was the working class who suffered during lockdown, with no equipment to home school children.
"It was these children who missed out, they were forgotten.
"It took a footballer to feed hungry kids at home.”
Sam, a videographer, and her film-maker son John, also kept diaries in London.
They asked for their names to be changed. “I was bedridden for three months and if it wasn’t for my son, I would have been dead,” Sam says. “I have diabetes and so when I got Covid, I became seriously ill.”
She adds: “I didn’t clap for the NHS on a Thursday night, because I didn’t feel it was genuine. Why are we clapping when the Government can’t even give nurses a pay rise?”
John wrote in his diary about “trying to find a shop that was still open and doing electric top-up, because the electric key went down to 38p.”
Mental health practitioner Brigid-Mary Oates, 61, lives in Bradford with her husband, Richard, a train driver.
“Woke up feeling stressed, fed up of folk sympathising with Boris Johnson being in hospital,” she wrote in her diary. “How the f*** has he been put in ICU when some of our elders are being left to die in care homes...”
PhD student Karen Hammond, 36, lives in Hamilton, Scotland.
“I have an academic background but I’m a single mum of three, I am on income support and carers allowance and I live in a working class neighbourhood,” she says. “Everyone was looking out for one another. We all kept each other going, we would talk over the fence and if we all made a nice meal, we would put a little bit in a food box and deliver to one another.
"Before the pandemic I thought I would eventually move from this area, but now why would I? I’m surrounded by decent people who look out for you when things get tough.
“A whole year has passed and when I look back at the diaries, I am so, so grateful I kept them, but I also get emotional. They were very precious but also very challenging times.
"If there ever comes a time again when I struggle or doubt myself, I will look back at them and see I do have the capacity to cope.”
