The Girls We Left Behind
In 2020, I decided to keep a diary. I was four years into my teaching career, and expected it to be a year much like any other. I had kept diaries as a child and wanted to complete one as a reflection of how I was feeling day-to-day.
Little did I know what the year ahead was going to be.
On March 17th, I made the following entry: “Chaos ensued at school. Staff off, kids off, cover not available, world gone mad!”
By March 20th, this was the entry: “Last day in school. I feel quite sad I couldn’t say bye. I am living in a once-every-hundred-years event and it’s like an apocalypse. But we can all get through this together.”
The Covid-19 pandemic does not need an introduction. Everyone around the world was impacted, with anything deemed not essential shut down. As a teacher, within the space of a week I went from teaching normally to being abruptly told schools were closing to all but children of key workers, and I would be working from home for the foreseeable future. Even now I can remember those last few days in the classroom before the lockdown began so vividly, where the number of students present was dwindling, and by the final day, it was me and a handful of others, and lessons were spent discussing what on earth was going to happen.
For the exam classes, this was even more brutal. They had spent the past nearly two years prepping for their summer of exams, and then they were canceled. They left school, and never returned normally again. All expectations around their final year were quickly dashed. No exams (which some of them might have celebrated!), but also no prom, no signing each other’s shirts on the last day, no long summer where they could do what they wanted before jobs and university. Even when the summer came to an end, the pandemic did not. Nothing was normal for a long time, and it created a generation of young people whose lives were abruptly reshaped by lockdowns, isolation, and uncertainty.
My novel, The Five of Us, examines these events. Crow, Cuckoo, Goldfinch, Starling, and Wren are five girls in their last year at an underfunded school with high ambitions for their futures, and when lockdown strikes are at a loss for what to do. How is it fair that they’ve worked hard their entire lives and everything they’ve been promised has been ripped away? And so they decide to take back control where they can and spend their nights sneaking out. As their behaviour escalates, there are fatal consequences, and what they did that summer comes back to haunt them years later as adults.
It is all of this that creates the emotional core of The Five of Us. It is a novel about class, obsession, identity, and the seductive power of seizing control of any kind. Most of all it is about the binding force of friendship and that difficult transitional period between childhood and adulthood. It is a commentary on the generation that has been left behind and expected to get on with life anyway. What happens when that anger and frustration has a dangerous outlet?
Have we moved on from lockdown? Or have we simply refused to talk about it?
Sian Gilbert is the author of thrillers She Started It and I Did Warn Her. She has been selected for Book of the Month, an Amazon Editors’ Pick, translated into several languages, and optioned for film/TV. After teaching for almost five years in a state school in Birmingham, she now lives in Bristol with her partner. Connect with her on social media @SianMGilbert or at SianGilbert.com.
