First person: relocating from Sussex to France
I realised our days in France were numbered when I came back from work one evening and found my wife sobbing on our bed. It wasn't the first time she had been tearful since we had moved into our farmhouse in the Tarn, but it was the worst, and for that reason it was the last. That night, a tacit understanding passed between us that the whole French idea just wasn't working and that we would go home.
We'd begun our "new life" near Toulouse about three months earlier and until this early autumn evening I was sure that all the difficulties we were experiencing were no more than teething troubles, the sort anyone would face after moving abroad - problems with the language, a strange bureaucracy, a general shock to our cultural system.
I had tried to rationalise these problems by reminding myself that roughly one in 10 people in Britain are planning to move to France and about 200,000 have already done it. If so many others could do it, why not us? Besides, we were in a better position than many people leaving the UK because I had a job to go to. We weren't one of those optimistic couples who thought they could earn a living by letting a gîte or starting a business installing satellite aerials.
My new position as a copy editor with an English company did at least give my day a structure and purpose and enabled me to meet people. In this respect, I was luckier than my wife. Sioni had given up her job as a violinist with a London orchestra to come here and was hoping to do some tuition and find work with a local orchestra. It soon became clear that neither was likely to happen. So Sioni stayed at home, helping our three-year-old daughter, Ellie, adjust, while trying to ignore the first twinges of unease and regret.
Home was an 18th-century, ivy-clad farmhouse approached along a gravel drive flanked by mature conifers. It had a large garden, beyond which was an orchard of cherries, pears, figs and plums. Our house was on a hill next to a field of sunflowers and overlooked the orange-tiled rooftops of a nearby town. It felt idyllic and was absurdly cheap: the monthly rent far less than the mortgage repayments on our 1930s semi in England.
A few weeks after we had settled in, a colleague from my new workplace came for lunch. He, too, had just moved to the region because of the job. Joe gasped when he saw our place. "You're living the dream," he said. I smiled quietly, and a little smugly, for I thought so too. Yet the smile was already beginning to crack.
Having arrived in France in early July, it felt at first like an extended summer holiday. But it was a skewed vacation, with me absent all day and us based in a region that made few concessions to tourism. Every inch of the rolling countryside around us was intensively farmed and many of the towns and villages, though pleasant, were ordinary places where the French worked and their children stayed out of sight in summer camps.
Although our home looked idyllic, it was turning into a prison for Sioni, a place of solitary confinement.
When I came home that evening, I found her weeping at the end of a long, bad day. Our daughter had thrown another tantrum in the supermarket - these were happening several times a day, at home and in public - and my wife's composure wilted under the disapproving tuts of passers-by. Ellie's disturbing behaviour had begun soon after we arrived in France. Sioni was desperate to meet people: she knew no one, yet was convinced the whole town must already know her as the mother of a hysterical child.
Moving to France had been my dream. Over the years, I had wasted many hours looking at property magazines and websites, drooling over pictures of stunning houses that were unaffordable in Britain but within our price range on the other side of the Channel. I was seduced by the cliches of every "true story" I read: of people who had got off the treadmill and swapped their pokey house for a mansion with a pool, where they would enjoy long, hot summers surrounded by glorious, empty countryside.
Though appealing, it was just a fantasy. Then I was offered the job near Toulouse and the dream became reality. Sioni, swept up by my enthusiasm and passion, buried her reservations. A life-changing move like this will divide a couple if they are not both equally committed. People who give up on France return to England for many reasons, but the most common is when one person in a relationship is unhappy, usually because they have no meaningful role to play in the new life.
Living abroad is a constant strain, because you just don't know how the little things work. Even in France, despite all the helpful literature on relocation, the small, routine details of everyday life that you take for granted at home are a mystery and reinforce your feelings of separation from those around you. You will need to query a bill from France Telecom (everyone does) and if you have to buy an electric cooker (which you probably will if you rent) you will discover only after it's been delivered that it doesn't have a power cable, which needs to be bought separately. If you have always lived there, you know that. If a newcomer, you'll be eating salad again that night.
On holiday, a passable conversation in French with a local person will add to the joy of your two-week vacation. When you live there, though, these superficial chats serve only to remind you embarrassingly how little of the language you know and send you into a pit of depression. Though I had read many books and articles before leaving England, warning me of the hardships I would face without good French, I still thought I could get by; I would pick it up. But I woke up everyday with a small knot of tension in my stomach, born of a fear that someone would speak to me and I wouldn't have a clue what he or she was on about. Sioni couldn't wait for summer to be over and the school year to begin. Once Ellie met other children, we hoped, she would quickly learn the language and make friends, and that would calm her down. We enrolled her at the only nursery school in our town that had any space. Ellie would be in a class with 25 other children, many as young as two, all of whom would be looked after by just one teacher and a part-time assistant.
On the first day of term, I took Ellie into her new class. She was distraught, as were half the other children. The teacher ignored them. It was not her role, apparently, to mother the children, only to teach them. Every morning was the same: Ellie clinging to my leg, me prising her fingers off and walking away as she pleaded with me to stay.
When the weather turned in November, the house turned against us, too. Those features that had kept us cool in the hot summer - the thick walls and flagstones - made it feel like we were living in a fridge. The log fire in the large, communal kitchen was ineffective and the oil-fired central heating horrifically expensive.
Once the novelty of "being on holiday" wore off, life settled into a familiar routine: work, home, dinner, bed; except now it didn't gel quite as before - we had no friends to eat with, there was nothing on the telly (so far, we had resisted satellite television) and no local pub. No local anything, in fact. Outside the big cities, France is one big ghost town after 7pm.
Everything is shut on Sundays and you rarely see a soul. This is because the French love to spend time with their families, which is nice for them but not much help to outsiders hoping to integrate. I spoke to several long-term expats and they all said it takes about five years before you feel you belong. That's a long time in anyone's life to feel excluded.
I wasn't ready to pack it in just yet. I was sure things would improve. Nevertheless, I was beginning to understand Sioni's grievance: we had been happy in our Sussex village, where we had friends, a couple of decent pubs and where Ellie was settled at school. It wasn't that life in France was awful - it just wasn't as good as the one we had left behind.
Clearly Ellie was suffering badly from the upheaval. She had lost her comforting routine; all that was familiar and reassuring had gone - her friends, her old school, her grandparents. No wonder she kicked up a fuss. Sioni was struggling, too, though as an adult she handled it differently - by trying to keep it all bottled up. Perhaps it would have been better if she had thrashed about on the supermarket floor instead.
When two out of three people in a family are miserable, the third member would have to be peculiarly detached not to be affected.Even so, we might have stayed were it not for a significant, nail-in-the-coffin event. When I came home that evening and found Sioni weeping on our bed, she wasn't just crying because Ellie's fractious mood had worn her down. That day she had bought a pregnancy test. It was positive. And in that moment her future unfolded with frightening clarity. If we stayed, she would struggle to understand the midwives and doctors, and once the baby was born she would feel even more cut off. In her eyes, our suitcases were already half-packed.
The glossy property and lifestyle magazines and the relocation shows on television tell you nothing about what it's really like to start again overseas. France isn't the end of the world, but if you're not prepared and aren't completely sure about why you are going, it can feel as foreign and far away as any place on Earth.