Five years after Covid lockdown: Life now for one street

Not long ago, Sophie Weir was driving with her mum beneath Auckland’s Waterview interchange; a looping web of high concrete overpasses connecting two state highways, that opened to traffic in 2017.

“Do you remember when this motorway wasn’t here?” she asked.

Her mother thought about it for a beat. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

“I was like, ‘Isn’t that buzzy, that it’s just like, normal now?” Sophie recalls.

“You never feel that change. Quite drastic changes are happening around us all the time - infrastructure changes, cultural shifts - and it’s all normal because you’re just living in it.”

Related stories:

Sophie and I were neighbours - renters on a street of mostly owner-occupiers - when our world did change suddenly, on the morning of 26 March, 2020: the first day of the first New Zealand-wide Covid lockdown.

There was no other story in town, and so I wrote for RNZ about that first strange week through the eyes of Sophie and her husband Jay, and our other neighbours on the street.

Back then, the virus and the lockdown were both novel.

The Weirs harnessed that into a WhatsApp group for the street, our interactions coloured by a blitz-era bonhomie that carried us through the next six weeks.

But over the next 18 months, as restrictions waxed and waned, we got used to - and began to chafe at - what politicians, public health experts, and the media all dubbed ‘the new normal’.

Like Sophie says, we were just living in it.

Five years on, with restrictions largely lifted, there’s now a new new normal.

So I found my old neighbours, scattered across Auckland and beyond, and asked them if they thought Covid had changed them or the country - and if it’s even possible to pinpoint how.

Winona - two, blonde, determined - raises a measuring cup of cloudy paint water to her mouth.

A rainless fortnight in Auckland has left the backyard dry and, even in the strategic shade of an umbrella, creating art is thirsty work.

“No darling, it’s not for drinking,” Jay says, reaching over to intervene.

Plenty has changed for the Weirs since Covid.

Like me, Sophie and Jay left the street in Sandringham where we spent the peak Covid years not long after the last big Auckland lockdown ended.

Both finished re-training; Sophie as a high school teacher, Jay as a social worker. Then Winona came along, and as well as a second baby on the way, they now share a large house in Mount Roskill with three flatmates - including an old neighbour.

The five adults in the house are “an uncanny match”, Sophie says.

“It’s the best thing ever, but also you could imagine why a lot of people wouldn’t do it because there’s lots of potential for conflict - we’ve just been really lucky to not have that.”

The seeds of their communal living arrangement were sown in part by the pandemic.

Even before Covid, the couple had made a conscious effort to participate in the local community.

Then came lockdown.

Forced home from their hospitality jobs, with time on their hands and the wage subsidy just keeping them afloat, their focus became hyper-local: offering help to others on the street, reading to the neighbourhood kids over Zoom, swapping produce.

“It was a hopeful time for me despite how grim it was,” Sophie says.

“It just gave me probably a subconscious tangible example of, ‘Oh yeah, this can work. A version of this can work and you can have baby steps towards that.”

At the height of the first lockdown, Jay wondered if the experience could be monumental enough to prompt some collective reflection and change.

“But if I’m honest, and not necessarily cynical, it just feels like life has resumed more or less, and there was already so much time before Covid that the normal was kind of baked into how society operates.”

Memories of lockdown and Covid are already hazy for many of the younger kids who were living on the street when Covid hit.

Freddie and Gus Lockie were 10 and 8 when the first lockdown began, and struggle now to separate out the stages of the pandemic - the difference between this or that lockdown, the degrees of restrictions, or even what they did at home for all those weeks.

“I've basically forgotten it,” Freddie, now 15, says. “I mean, I remember it, but it's not a massive thing that we talk about or anything as kids.”

Their memories are mostly snapshots: doing the beep test in the back garden for fun, school classes over Zoom, the two-metre distancing rule.

“We learned that Gus was very happy in lockdown,” his mum Bethany says.

“He’d probably happily go back into lockdown again sometime, would you?”

“Yep,” says Gus, now 13.

“I kind of enjoyed it,” Freddie says. “You could get through [school work] a lot quicker and just be done for the day and then do whatever you wanted.”

The boys and their parents moved to another part of Auckland a few years ago, but up the road the Dale family - Juliet, Jon, Brady (12), Eve (10) and Charlotte (7) - are still holding the fort.

The Dales were my next-door neighbours through the pandemic, and the sound of the kids playing together would float across the fence as my flatmates and I knuckled down on laptops set up on makeshift desks.

There used to be a small gate in the opposite fence, just the right size for the three children - much smaller then - to visit with the kids next door.

The gate is gone now; a collateral victim of fencing regulations for the brand-new pool glinting iceberg-blue in the sun.

“Getting ready for teenagers,” Juliet says.

Brady was only Charlotte’s age when the pandemic hit, and Charlotte was just a toddler.

“I'm glad our kids were not teenagers because at the ages they were, we were still the centre of their world and they still had us,” Juliet says. "Whereas with teenagers, friends become the centre of their world and they were completely cut off.”

That was one of the circumstances of timing - along with Juliet only working part-time - that made the entire pandemic era a largely positive experience, she says.

“After it all finished and everyone was back in the real world, we felt like we couldn't really talk about it because we felt guilty that for the most part we managed to have some really nice family time together.”

Brady does remember missing seeing his grandparents and friends face-to-face.

“I remember I had like my first play date after lockdown and it felt really good getting to know everyone again.”

Right after the long Auckland lockdown of 2021, the Dales set off for a year living and working in Italy - a plan the pandemic had already postponed for a year.

“Auckland Airport was insane. We were the only ones there,” Juliet says. “Walking through the massive food court in the international terminal and there was no one else in sight.”

They watched the protests at Parliament from afar, and were struck by how the national mood had shifted when they arrived back in New Zealand at the end of 2022.

“It feels like people became a lot more polarised,” Juliet says.

“Do you feel like that?” she asks Jon.

“Coming back and going to work, people looked exhausted,” he says. “And then I feel like the fatigue became frustration and, ‘I'm having a pop at something.’”

It was odd to see New Zealand like that. “I don't see Kiwis as being angry people - but it seemed like there was a lot of anger, which is something I wasn't used to.”

People had shifted their politics, “maybe further to the left and further to the right”, Juliet says.

“And I feel like that has remained.”

Just down the street, Baz the dog watches through a scaffolding-shrouded window as a procession of tradies arrives at Ali Swarbrick and Chris Eggleston’s house.

Ali describes Baz as “the overpriced standard lockdown-issue Cavoodle”. Chris describes Baz as “the only good thing to come out of Covid”, along with remote working.

The renovations signal the end of an era: after 13 years on the street, Ali, Chris (and Baz) will board a flight soon, bound for a two-bedroom apartment in Sydney.

It’s a situation that would never have come about without the normalisation of remote working.

After years working for a major New Zealand business, Ali jumped ship to their Australian competitor, and has spent the last 18 months commuting between Sydney and Auckland.

The couple’s kids, Jack and Kate, were teenagers when Covid hit and have since flown the family coop - Jack to Christchurch; Kate to Sydney, too, to study.

Now Ali and Chris are making the move permanent, with mixed feelings.

“We will be sad to leave the neighbourhood,” Chris says. “It’s been fantastic, and as it gets closer, you appreciate more and more what a good little community it’s been. So that will be a wrench.”

But right now, Australia looks pretty good.

“New Zealand’s taken a massive hit over Covid,” Chris says. “There will be tough, austere times ahead.”

Both of them have jaded memories of the long Auckland lockdown of 2021, in particular.

“As it dragged on, we’d watch Jacinda on TV announcing that it was yet another week or yet another month,” Ali says. “I remember those 1 o’clock broadcasts, just wanting to throw something at the TV because it just didn’t seem to end.”

By the end, “it wasn’t like we felt like we were saving lives”, she says. “It just got to the point where it seemed crazy, like a total waste of time.”

They worried about Jack, especially, who was in his final year of high school in 2020 and had friends whose mental health was badly affected by the months of isolation.

“I think that age group were really hit the hardest in terms of how they struggled with it,” Ali says

Jack was able to attend lectures at Canterbury University in person, but some of his friends who stayed in Auckland to study ended up dropping out after battling through two semesters of lectures online, Chris says.

“Some of them haven’t gone back to it. So it is, for that generation, I think, a lot of permanent long-term issues. Kids dropping out of school, being lost forever.”

Their own family “got away with it quite lightly”, he says.

“The people in the leafy suburbs actually did very well out of it - stopped having to commute, we had people deliver packages and food to us when we wanted. But it really created a division in society between those who could manage it and those who couldn’t.”

Through his social work with Auckland’s street community, Jay Weir has seen in retrospect how intensely isolating lockdown was for some groups.

“It was a vulnerable moment for people. So much of how people coped and navigated the Covid landscape was through digital interfaces, and people I work with are constantly losing phones or don't have phones or are offline and services just weren't equipped for that.”

The years that have passed have given both him and Sophie pause for thought about how New Zealand chose to tackle Covid.

“My opinions, in hindsight, on some of the restrictions, I don't know that they'd be different now, but they wouldn't be as strong,” Sophie says.

At the time, people seemed to either be strongly in favour of restrictions, or adamantly against them.

“Now it feels like it can be more nuanced, most likely because the danger or the fear is not there.”

But Jay thinks we might all feel differently again, if many more people had died or become acutely unwell in New Zealand as they did in some countries - Italy, the US, the UK.

“The safety that New Zealand earned itself, or perhaps was afforded, has made us perhaps more critical of the restrictions that were in place.”

Regardless of how people feel about New Zealand’s approach to Covid, the pandemic and lockdowns are a common ground we all now share, he says.

Sophie isn’t sure that Winona, or her soon-to-be sibling, will ever ask about it, though.

World War II traumatised her grandparents’ generation, but Sophie only remembers one conversation with her grandfather about it.

“I don’t ask that much about historical events and maybe that's a fault of us as humans. Maybe we should talk more about that - learn a bit more from our past.”