Under the Covid-19 Storms: Polly and Paddy’s Lockdown Tales

By Lindiwe Bhebhe

The year 2020 was a year like no other. Right from the beginning up to the end it was full of fear and a lot of unknowns. It will be years before people forget the challenges they went through during this year. Under the COVID-19 Storms is a record of the challenges that were brought about by the 2019 Novel Corona Virus told from the point of view of a child, and it is written in a way that is meant to entertain the reader and serve as a record of what transpired during this year. The book explores the negative outcomes of isolation for children and how online schooling had both positive as well as negative results for children. It is the writer’s hope that children will have this book as a go to read at a time when they wish to look back on this year of horrors. This may be in a few years to come or at the time they get to tell their own children or grandchildren about the year 2020.

It is a must have COVID-19 record read for children and adults alike!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Jun 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781543770483

Lindiwe Bhebhe

LINDIWE is an educator and an author of children’s books, she has worked with children in different educational settings, it is in her work with children that she developed an interest in storytelling. In her work she tells stories from everyday observed experiences of children in a simple and engaging way and with a pinch of humor.

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 by Lindiwe Bhebhe.

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www.partridgepublishing.com/singapore

CONTENTS

Part 1 My dear friend Timothy Townsend (Timmy)

Part 2 The New Normal

Part 3 When Paddy and I had a meltdown.

Part 4 My Surprise Virtual Birthday Party.

Part 5 The return to school

Part 6 The last day of School

ABOUT THE BOOK

In this book, Polly, a young girl from Kent in the UK, describes her struggles during the COVID-19 lockdown period and she explains how she developed a fear of the unknown and had drama featuring in her life every other day. She frequently wrote letters to her friend Timmy who was attending school in person while she was in the online school, she asked him questions about the things she did not understand during this time. Her mother asked her to keep a diary for this traumatic year, some of her letters to Timmy form part of this work. Polly hand posted her letters to Timmy through Khaya, a boy from next-door, and she made sure that her mother did not know about this as it violated the COVID-19 restrictions.

Whilst some of the work in this book closely reflects the experiences of most people during the COVID-19 lockdown period, none of it is taken from real-life situations, it is purely a work of friction. The names of places and people in the book are not real but some have links to the writer’s own life experiences. Scenarios described here are imagined in a way that mirrors what reality was like for most people, especially children with no siblings.

For Polly, her mother and her dog were a great source of support and she also got some help from her school and from a very unlikely source; Plop the Owl who was afraid of the dark featured in the book by Jill Tomlinson.

I believe many children went through similar struggles and because this was a very first experience for everyone, there were no documented experiences from other people to help them through the challenges they faced during this time.

DEDICATION

To my dearest son Vuyo, this is for you, I hope you will find this book interesting enough to inspire you to drop Netflix and start reading books and maybe one day write them too. To my beloved parents who did not get to see me write books, I wish I had done this earlier and had a day to read my book to them.

To all those who lost their lives to COVID-19, especially those closest to me, humanity owes you mountains of debt and gratitude as your loss of life left us with tons of knowledge about the 2019 Novel Corona Virus and the kind of vaccines that had to be developed to fight it.

To everyone who will buy and read this book, I send you my thanks and love.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks go to the people and organizations whose work I read whilst writing this book.

1. NHS Charities, (2022) Every Mind Matters; Dealing with unhelpful thoughts.

https://www.nhs.uk/every-mind-matters/mental-wellbeing-tips/top-tips-to-improve-your-mental-wellbeing/

2. The owl who was afraid of the dark, Stories n Stuff. (Aug 29, 2020) https://www.google.com/search?q=

the+owl+who+was+afraid+of+the+dark&rlz=1C1GCEU_enKW947KW947&source=lnms&tbm=vid&sa=X&ved=

2ahUKEwjcx9ft0_P3AhWE8rsIHcNOATcQ_AUoAnoECAIQBA&biw=855&bih=403&dpr=1.5

3. UK National Newspapers – All the reports I read about COVID-19 at the peak of the pandemic (Various).

4. Worldometer, (17 May 2022). https://www.worldometers.

info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/

Over 6 million people had died of COVID-19 worldwide.

5. Unicef-Child Mortality and COVID-19, (March 2022). https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-survival/covid-19/

Among the 3.7 million COVID-19 deaths reported in the MPIDR COVerAGE database, 0.4 per cent (over 13,400) occurred in children and adolescents under 20 years of age.

6. KATHY, KATELLA. Yale Medicine. (MAY 18, 2022)

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-19-variants-

of-concern-omicron

7. Rupak De Chowdhury/Reuters, Aljazeera. (4 Apr 2020) India newborn twins named Corona and Covid after virus. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/4/4/india-newborn-twins-named-corona-and-covid-after-virus.

8. My thanks also go to the Duchess of Cambridge- Catherine whose work on children’s mental health inspired me to finish this book after I had shelved it for almost a year.

I believe that while the death rate from COVID-19 for children was low the mental traumas were much bigger.

PART 1

My dear friend Timothy Townsend (Timmy)

boy-g4d2f7bf1c_640.jpg

I met Timmy at the Vines Nursery School, it was during our very first play time that we had a big playground fall out over a toy duck. We later made up and put that bad spat behind us, little did we know then, that we would become friends for life.

duck-2055481.jpg

The toy duck was made of a beautiful fluffy white material, it had a yellow beak and feet and brown eyes.

I first met Timmy at The Vines Nursery School on my very first day at school. The Vines overlooks the Medway River; it is housed in a big Victorian building with a modern-day extension, which is just a few blocks away from my house. Our first meeting did not turn out well, as our parents told us: we had a big playground disagreement. My mother told me that, on this day, Timmy and I had a big fall out after he took a toy that I had already picked