Christian Doyle’s series Quietly Getting On focuses on women in their late 80s and 90s, their memories of a wartime childhood and how they live now
As a way of maintaining contact with my elderly neighbours during the Covid restrictions of 2020, we set up a project where each person held up a card showing the age they felt inside. From their life stories, a new idea formed in my mind.
This is a generation of women who had experienced first-hand the impact of war on the domestic front, who had been evacuated to strangers across the country, not seeing their parents for months on end. Maybe these experiences created a different mindset; a resilience and stoicism, where the self is less important than being part of a community.