We Must Never Forget the Horrors of Lockdown

The other day I published a retrospective article about how I and others contributing to this site could see from the start that lockdowns would be a public health, social and economic disaster.

The time has come to set down a more personal record, not because it’s particularly unusual or special but because it is through individual stories that history is best experienced. And the history of lockdowns should never be forgotten or forgiven.

I’ll start, however, with a BBC news item in 2020. It was an interview (online of course) with a man in his 70s who was raging at how the British government had killed his Dunkirk-veteran father aged 102 ‘from’ Covid. I’m not entirely sure exactly what sort of prognosis he expected his father to have at that age. It was more remarkable that he communicated no sense of gratitude for having known his father that long. No, he was spitting with rage that the lockdowns hadn’t come faster and harder to ‘save’ his father.

My mother-in-law was born in Keighley in Yorkshire in December 1920. She was an only child and therefore fortunately did not experience as much poverty as she might have done. Her father was also in gainful employment during the Depression. She went to Bradford Grammar School, leaving three years before the Second World War broke out in 1939, to work for the local council. Thanks to the war, her chances of finding a husband – a normal expectation at the time – were somewhat reduced. In the event she married a widower with adult children in 1946. He died in 1949, and she remained a widow until 1955 when she married my father-in-law, then a curate and later a vicar.

They had three daughters. The eldest died in a cot death in 1958 and the third died in even more tragic circumstances (if that were possible) in 1991, leaving a baby son. I had married the second daughter in 1981, and we proceeded to have four sons.

My parents-in-law were extraordinarily healthy. Despite the tragedies they had experienced, they were astonishingly positive and took delight in their grandchildren, a symbol of hope and the future.

My father-in-law lived until he was 95 and died in 2017. My mother-in-law insisted she did not want to be a burden and at the age of 96 asked us to find a care home for her. Her hearing was deteriorating and so were her eyesight and mobility, but she had been invigorated and overjoyed by the arrival of her first two great-granddaughters in 2016 and 2017.

And there her story might have naturally progressed towards a dignified end with the sense that she could finish her life believing in a positive future.

Then the first lockdown came on March 23rd 2020. We were in Australia after I had delivered a lecture tour in New Zealand. My wife, desperately worried about her mother’s prospects, wanted to get home. We made it back by the skin of our teeth. We’d have taken her into our house had it not been for its chronic unsuitability for someone of her age and disabilities.

I’m not going to bore you with a long and tedious account of the last year of her life. Instead, I’ll describe what her life became. She started out by saying of Covid, “thank goodness, at last something that might carry me off”. She’d had enough, but it was not to be.

She never touched her only surviving daughter again because she wasn’t allowed to. We had to stand outside her chalet and shout at her inside while we went through a fatuous ritual of wearing plastic aprons, masks and hats in howling gales. The plastic aprons with the magical powers to stop a virus in its tracks. Who knew? I’m not blaming the care home. It had no choice.

She never saw her five grandsons again, or her only surviving cousin.

She never saw her great-granddaughters again.

She never met the two of her three great-grandsons born before she died.

That was HM Government’s reward to her for living for over 100 years, along with a card from the Queen.

She had a Covid vaccine foisted on her. She didn’t want it and was outraged but the care home demanded she had it as a condition of staying.

Her most poignant comment in the middle of this saga was, and I shall never forget it, “I am being kept alive to live a life not worth living.”

Nothing could have epitomised better the cruelty to which she had been subjected.

She died in February 2021 in the middle of the night. Thanks to the care home, my wife wasn’t called until the morning. Too late. It was, incidentally, sheer old age.

A few weeks later we attended the funeral, stupidly standing around in the church at ludicrous distances. One of our sons flew over from Belfast to Heathrow to be there. At the airport he was accosted by a papers-please guard demanding an explanation for his travel.

And so ended my mother-in-law’s life. She was called Anne, by the way. The only good thing to come out of the tragedy was that she died before my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer a year later.

You may remember that by late 2020 the Government was trying to sell the idea that if you stayed away from elderly family members you could avoid infecting them and causing them to die. Then you could look forward to seeing them ‘after’ Covid. It was the ‘Don’t Kill Granny‘ campaign.

It was ludicrously easy to demonstrate that even women in their 70s were more than eight times more likely to be dead within a year from any one of all the other causes of death that afflict people of that age (see ‘The Risk To Granny‘, published December 15th 2020) than from ‘Covid’, even if you accepted the claims about Covid-caused mortality.

In other words, avoiding seeing granny to save her from Covid did nothing whatsoever to avert all the normal and much higher risks of being elderly. If you didn’t go and see granny, then you’d have to prepare yourself for the significant possibility that she’d be dead before next Christmas anyway. In fact, given the Covid Health Service’s reluctance to treat anyone, granny’s chances of dying from other causes were somewhat enhanced compared to normal.

For people in their 80s or older the risk of being dead within the year rises dramatically and by the time you reach 99, as my mother-in-law was, the risk of death within a year or two is so high you’d be mad not to be preparing for it. In the event, she survived 11 months after the lockdowns started and was sentenced to a kind of living death. Her grandchildren were left with the knowledge that they’d been obliged to stay away to ‘save’ her and she’d expired anyway.

I know her story is only one of many. A neighbour of ours in his late 50s had leukaemia. His treatment was badly compromised by the Covid Health Service, and the forced separation from his family more than he could bear. Eventually he discharged himself to die at home in the company of his wife. His two children came to visit. A neighbour, who spent her days recording car number plates and banging pans, immediately reported the family to the police. Remarkably, the police decided they had better things to do – like accost women out for a coffee and a walk by a reservoir.

Another friend of mine, whom I had known for 43 years, died in 2024. Back in 1984 he changed my life and if it hadn’t been for him, I might never have had a writing career. He had developed melanoma by 2020. The Covid Health Service refused to see him. By the time it had come to its senses, it was too late. It was Stage 4 and curtains for him.  

Animus meminisse horret, says Aeneas in Vergil’s Aeneid when he recalls the fall of Troy, “my mind shudders to remember”.

Exactly.

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer who has contributed to this site from its earliest days. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations (Abacus 2025).