How it all began

November 21, 2010

I find myself standing, staring out of the bedroom window in the dying afternoon over the water meadows to Salisbury Cathedral silhouetted beyond. A thin layer of mist has already risen from the river and sits suspended above the heads of the sheep, otherworldly against the darkening sky. I love this place. We chose it 19 years ago, not for the house, which is remarkable only for the way we keep discovering how previous occupants have cut DIY corners, but for the view (although I wish I had a pound for every time I’ve complained about the inconveniences ever since and told my husband ‘You can’t live in a view’). Still, how fortunate we have been to have this glorious backdrop to our daily lives, changing with every passing cloud.

The thought of leaving has created a constant undercurrent of sadness, a tightening of the chest, ever since the R word was first mentioned.

This is, after all, the town – it calls itself a city but it’s on a much more human scale   – where we chose to base our lives with our young children. A place I plumped for in preference to Bath because, as a colleague of my husband’s put it when I sought his advice, “Bath is all fur coat and no knickers, but Salisbury is real.”

I wanted for our boys something I never felt for the London suburb where I grew up – I wanted them to have roots. When people later in life asked them where they came from, I wanted them to know the answer in their hearts. Somewhere that gave them a standard against which they could compare everything they encountered as they set off to explore the world. Not too big, not too small, a self-contained community with some of the finest architecture in the country, with a wonderful cultural heritage. Well, I’d ticked that box. And now it might be time to move on.

When it first became apparent that my husband’s devotion to the National Trust might no longer be reciprocated I think it’s fair to say were both shell-shocked. We’d known for some months that another big R word – Reorganisation – was on the way. Yet it seemed unthinkable that the wisdom and experience of 24 years was simply and suddenly expendable. Nothing can prepare you for that feeling of finding yourself an overnight outcast. I don’t know if it’s true that the higher you climb, the harder you fall. I do know that no matter how many people tell you it’s your job that’s redundant, and not you as a person, it still feels almost like a bereavement.

And yet, as our emotions see-sawed over the next couple of weeks, we began to see positives. For a start, we had more, and more meaningful conversations in that short period than we’d had in the previous 12 months, when my husband was either travelling all over the country, hunched over his Mac in the study for ten hours at a stretch while I tiptoed round trying not to interrupt his work, or asleep in an armchair still clutching a large glass of red wine that threatened to tip over his trousers if he loosed his grip. He simply wasn’t there, and even when he was, he was mentally somewhere else. Looking back, it was no way to live.

One thing we were sure of – we didn’t want to go through an experience like this ever again.

We began, tentatively, to explore the possibilities of a freelance career as a consultant, to compile lists of contacts, things to do, things to find out about, like tax and pensions.

We began to wonder whether we might not be able to turn his lifetime’s pipe dream of a smallholding into a reality.

And then, having supper with girlfriends one evening and discussing the doings of our student offspring, the phrase ‘gap year’ popped into my mind …. and those two little words started wriggling around looking for room to grow……