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Moving to Northumberland from London was not my idea. My husband was the only
one terribly keen. After a decade-long campaign he finally succeeded, and we
moved in the late summer of 2005 when I was seven months pregnant with our
daughter. Our two sons were two and four. When I asked my younger son what
he thought he confided: “Bears might eat me.”
“There are no bears,” I told him as I looked into the darkness and the
growling started.
Late last year I raised my head long enough to start a blog, wifeinthenorth.
com. This is the adventure of the wife in the north as she tries to create a
new life for herself and her family while her husband — irony of ironies —
spends long stretches away working in London. At the end of this year we
will decide whether we stay or return to the capital.
November 9, 2006: Life in London was simpler in many ways. Most
importantly I had friends. When we moved to Northumberland I gave up on the
friendship I had once known. There is no one I feel I could immediately turn
to in a crisis; I simply don’t feel I know them well enough yet to impose.
One Saturday, after four sleepless nights on the trot, I was desperate. I
hated my husband, myself and my children in about that order. I spent the
day on my knees. When Sunday dawned I crawled to the phone to confide in my
absent husband that I simply didn’t know how I would cope, what to do with
myself or what to do with the children.
“I know,” came the reply. “Why don’t you go to Alnwick garden, gather autumnal
leaves and make a collage.”
“I know,” I replied. “Why don’t you just come home and you can make the
f****** collage.”
There are people up here who would have welcomed me if I had ’fessed up to a
crisis, but I just didn’t feel I could. I was too low and my children too
ghastly to inflict them on anyone.
One couple have been immensely generous and welcoming, but I can’t say it’s
not disconcerting when someone you had previously thought entirely sane
admits he is waiting for Christ to return to earth.
He told me: “I believe the world will end, the four horsemen of the apocalypse
will come among us, death and destruction, the whole package you know. I
would only say this to another believer.” I shifted uncomfortably in my seat
at this. Evolution he dismissed as a “theory”, homosexuality an
“abomination”. Even slavery was okay providing it met the biblical caveat of
justice within it.
So take your choice. Do I remain a Billy-no-mates or do I ride with the
apocalyptic horsemen and his friends, my inhibitions scattering to the wind?
December 12: Outside it’s all glorious green rolling acres everywhere,
while the beaches are empty, endless stretches of silvered sand. Inside my
particular country cottage though, it is hell — a two-bed-roomed toy-strewn
hovel. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, we were supposed to knock through
into next door to create a
perfect domestic environment positively bursting with Agas, en suite bathrooms
and underfloor heating. Instead it is a sorry tale of planning delays and
overpriced tenders from merciless builders.
December 14: My husband has wafted back to London for his office
Christmas party. The amount of time he spends in London he might as well
live there. “God, I’ve had such a bad day,” he tells me from a friend’s
house, where he enjoys his child-free shaved truffle supper. “I don’t want
to be here, you know,” he moans from my favourite Covent Garden patisserie.
Really? Neither do I.
December 15: Even watching television can make me feel homesick if the
camera pans across the London skyline.
January 19, 2007:My reason for agreeing to move to Northumberland
(which I have apparently failed to explain adequately to anyone at all,
including myself) is love, simply. Mine for my husband and my husband’s for
this bleak and beautiful place.
January 22: An American reader asks what a “health visitor” is. A
health visitor is someone who arrives on your doorstep soon after you have
returned from an overcrowded maternity ward with your new baby who screams
like a banshee if put down for a blink. You are wearing a grubby cotton
waffle dressing gown. It istied with a worn pair of black nylon maternity
tights and you sport a muslin square on your shoulder. You and the muslin
square do not smell nice.
“Hello,” says the woman on the doorstep. “I am your health visitor. This is
Mary Jane.” She points to a large girl with a bob who is standing next to
her. “She is training to be a health visitor. I hope it is all right if she
sits in.”
Black-eyed with exhaustion and grim-faced from the agony of learning how to
breastfeed, you nod at Mary Jane, who nods back. You think: “If Mary Jane is
going to be a health visitor, she should lose some weight.”
The health visitor gets out a clipboard and a Biro.
“We haven’t met before have we? How are you getting on? Is that the baby?
Sweet. Have you ever thought about suicide?”
She waits, pen poised over a tickbox. That is a health visitor.
January 25:Last night my mother rang to say: “Daddy and I have had a
little accident.” It was late and I was lying, melancholy, on the sofa
contemplating sleep. My husband again away in London. It was oblivion-dark
outside and the wind so strong off the sea that it had twice pushed open the
front door like a barroom heavy.
“We wrote off the car,” I heard her say, the gusts now knocking at the sash
window. “We’re fine. I broke a rib, that’s all, and your father is a bit
bruised.”
They had been crossing a carriageway, given the nod by the driver of the car
in the lane nearest to them but unseen by the driver of the car in the other
lane. My father, reassured by the kindness of the other driver, slowly, oh
so slowly, old-man slowly, pulls out and across the road and whoomph.
“It could have been worse,” she said, cheerily. “Because I’m blind I was
relaxed when the car went into us, and everyone was very nice.”
I should have been there. I should have held their soft papery hands and told
them they were okay.
January 27:Now for something I thought no one would ever hear me say:
“Boys! Put your boots on, right this minute. We are going to be late for the
hunt.” They probably shoot you if you are late for the hunt. I do not want
to miss a moment. It must be — gosh, how long is it since I went hunting in
London? Oh yes, never.
It is one of Northumberland’s apple-crisp, beautiful mornings. So here we are,
cold, with mud on our rubber boots, on a faraway farm, the snow-capped
Cheviot hills brooding in the distance and surrounded by nice giletted women
thrusting haggis balls at us — well, it works for me. It is 10 o’clock in
the morning and suddenly something called a Percy Cup seems like a good idea
— a half measure of whisky mixed with a half measure of cherry liqueur. In
the city this would be called an alcohol problem; in the country it is a
tipple.
One of the mothers at school invited us along, since the hunt was meeting at
her farm. Out of respect to her I worked very hard not to think city
thoughts like: “Didn’t Tony Blair outlaw this?” and “Go fox, go”. I also
decided against talking the pros and cons of hunting through with the
children before the outing. The risk of “Mummy says animals have rights too,
don’t you, Mummy?” over the coffee and shortbread was just too high. I must
reprogram them tomorrow before they think what we did today was entirely
normal.
January 28: In two weeks’ time we are due to move into an unfurnished
rented house in the village to allow the builders to start work on knocking
through the cottages to create that dream home I was promised. I am in far
too much chaos to start packing. A neighbour dropped by for a cup of tea
(one of those second home owners we locals despise). “I so admire you,” she
said as I moved a dirty saucepan to reach the kettle. I looked round my
kitchen at the enormous Gilbert and George-style painting of the children we
all did together, the wilted yellow roses on the table, their heads just
visible above the breakfast cereal packets. I picked the baby up from the
wooden floor, where she was eating her brother’s buttered toast crusts.
“Do you?” I said, touched. “When I was a young mother,” she carried on,
reaching out to take the grubby baby from my arms, “I was always cross with
the kids for making a mess. I was always picking up after them, cleaning and
keeping house. You just don’t bother. I do admire that.”
January 29:A friend invited me for coffee this morning. “Drop by for
coffee, I’ll make scones.” I say it out loud to see how it sounds.
Unconvincing, in my case. She, on the other hand, knocks out a warm batch of
home-baked treats with the same nonchalance as I swill a glass of chablis.
My new friend is about to move somewhere bouncing hot and sandy. I want to say
to her: “Don’t go out ofmy life. You have only just arrived there.”
As I drink the coffee and graze on blossom-coloured cake, I gaze at the trucks
and old jeans piled up on her dining room carpet, salvaged from the rooms
upstairs. Each of her four boys is allowed one black plastic bag of toys to
tote with him into his new and sunnier life. One boy is missing — her
oldest. Seven years ago she lost him. Just 13, mowing early summer grass and
daisies, he cut the lead. Zap. I have seen his face smiling out of a sharp
school photograph, and in his mother’s eyes you can see him yet.
They are packing for the sun and a fresh start. I admire her determination
that the four remaining boys will run from school bench straight into a warm
and salty sea. While she was packing, she found bed treasures her missing
boy once slept with, his teddy bear and a keepsake velvet cushion. In a
suitcase at the top of a wardrobe she found his summer coat, in its pocket a
packet rustling, the crisps long gone. Prawn cocktail. She slipped the
packet back into the coat and the coat into a bag to carry with her.
February 1: I am seriously contemplating getting a ferret for a pet,
maybe two ferrets, because you keep them in pairs. Today at school one of
the women told me you handle them from when they are a “kit” and they get
used to you and play with you. We do not have a cinema up here so needs must
on the entertainment front.
February 5: After a weekend with my achy-breaky mother and father
(“Mummy, you have been away 100 days,” my four-year-old told me when I got
back) I hare off to London for meetings. The train shudders to a halt and it
emerges that someone has stolen the overhead lines on the track. What do you
do with secondhand train lines? Start your own train company?
I get to my first meeting an hour late. It is important. I have not met the
person before. I realise I have been waiting in her glass-walled office,
examining the books on the shelves, my back to the wide open-plan seating
area outside, with my skirt firmly tucked into my knickers. You are not
telling me nobody saw that. You are not telling me people weren’t e-mailing
each other about the mad woman with her skirt in her knickers and deciding
whether anyone was going to tell her or let her leave that way.
February 8: We move tomorrow. My husband has decided we do not need to
pack anything. What he is going to do is drive a white Transit van up to the
back door and throw things in it. This does not necessarily strike me as the
best idea, but my husband says it will work. His plan — I say plan because I
do not know the word for the opposite of plan — is to manhandle the contents
of the cottage out into the van on a room-by-room basis, drive it two miles
down the lane to the rented house and then unpack the contents and install
them
on a room-by-room basis, recreating our life exactly as it was before. Perhaps
he was a museum curator in a different incarnation. He could probably submit
it for the Turner prize. He could call it Our Life — A Mess In Two Places.
If I videoed it while he was doing it he would probably win.
February 9: I could not help with the move because the permanent amber
alert we are on with my mother switched to red. I spent a ghastly day
watching my mother being brave and cleaning up old lady poo. My husband
started the move alone.
February 10: My mother is a fastidious, ever-busy little body, neatly
suited and booted with hair like the Queen. She smells of Chanel No 5 and
floral perfumes that carry jasmine notes. Not yesterday, though. When I
arrived her hair was spread across the pillow in an iron-grey frizz and she
was lying still and sad. Loudly, I said “Mum, Mum, it’s me” and I placed my
hand against her cheek as I do with my own children and I bent to kiss her.
“Is it you?” She grasped my wrist and pulled me closer into her and hung from
me like an eight-year-old daughter would and cried into my neck, sobbing at
the latest pain to strike.
She told me the nurse was going to give her an anemone. I thought this
unlikely. The bustling Scottish nurse arrived not with flowers but with
rubber gloves. Mother, teeth biting into the cotton pillow and tears falling
onto my hand, shrieked in silence as the nurse got on with it. Old age
smells of s*** and shame, not Chanel. Do not go there. Find another route
into the hereafter.
My mother is the best reason I know for living a life of decadence and
debauchery.
No cigarillo smoke, gin slings or mistakes between the sheets. Instead, a life
of heroic virtue, good deeds and care. Well, poo and phooey! Her goodness
did not keep her well. She still got old and sick and I will learn by her
mistakes. I will inhale smoke from pink cigarettes, drink absinthe and have
unrepentant sex with strangers in dark places. I will buy my sons a kitten,
call it Trixabelle and torture it.
February 12: Okay, the move. I am at risk of spontaneous combustion. I
am at risk of the children coming to find me and finding instead a flaming
office chair and a pair of charred sheepskin slippers smelling of burnt wool
and cheesy feet.
Apart from the blizzards of last year it was the worst weather I have come
across since we arrived almost 18 months ago — three degrees, driving wind
and rain that wanted to hurt you. At one point I ended up driving behind my
husband, who was in the hire van. I flashed him eight times and peeped the
horn continuously to get him to stop because we were about to go through a
flooded section of the road. Hedrove on oblivious. I know you should not say
these things with children in the car. You should at all times present a
united front. But I might have said “Your father is a bloody, bloody idiot”
as he sped his way through the flood, abandoning me, the three children and
the low-slung car in the black-as-pitch darkness on the other side of the
water.
We were lucky; we made it through in first gear by keeping to the centre of
the road. When we got home my traitorous eldest son ran in. “Why didn’t you
stop the van, Daddy? Mummy says you’re a bloody, bloody idiot.” I tried to
look like he made the last bit up, but I do not think my husband was
convinced.
Over dinner he said: “I think I have done really well today and yesterday. My
arms are tired.” Usually I am more than prepared to play the “Yes, I think
you are marvellous too, darling” card in the game of marriage, but I stood
up and filled the kettle instead.
The rented house looks like a shipwreck. Clothes, books, toys and bedding are
strewn across every room, while in the hallway plastic binbags breed like
something from a low-budget sci-fi movie. I keep thinking “socks for school
tomorrow” and realise I have no idea where they are. I may send the boys to
school wearing saucepans on their feet.
Next morning I drive my six-year-old to school. I drive back to the wrong
house because I have, understandably in my opinion, momentarily forgotten
where I live. I curse. I drive to the rented house to find my husband
running up and down the street. As I open the door of the Saab he tells me I
drove off to school with the keys to the Volvo and to the hire van on top
ofthe roof. He put them there. He has miraculously found the keys to the
Volvo a mile down the road at the roundabout. He cannot find the keys to the
hire van. He says he wants to cry and that he is going to have an asthma
attack.
I decide killing him might traumatise the baby and my four-year-old, who are
still belted into the back of the Saab. Instead we drive very slowly down
the road with my head out of the passenger window. A friend’s car passes us
and we wave cheerily to the driver. I am not feeling remotely cheery but I
am mindful of my husband’s reputation locally. When he locked us out of the
cottage the driver who just passed us had to scale a ladder and vault over
our bedroom window to let us in again. He must be 60 if he is a day. I am
pretty sure he told people.
We drive on into the village and I start going into shops to see if anyone has
handed the keys in. What I really want to say is: “My husband is an idiot.
Have you seen his car keys?” What I actually say is: “You haven’t seen any
car keys around have you?” Eventually the lady who works in the butcher’s
directs me to a woman down the road, who has handed them to another woman
who has handed them into the local school.
Then it all got much worse, because my husband left to catch the train for
London. He is away for three weeks on a work deadline. Just before he left,
the children wanted a hug so he went upstairs to kiss them goodbye. This
gave me the chance to pour and swallow the remains of a bottle of chablis in
the kitchen and burst into tears.
I had just got my act together and he came down again to tell me he had
screwed the tops of the children’s wardrobes on so they would not come down
and kill them, but I had to ring the repair man tomorrow because the TV is
not working. I stopped crying at the thought of three weeks with three
children and no TV. But by the time we said goodbye I was already snuffling
away again. As he headed into the night with his smart trolley-dolly
suitcase on wheels, I closed the heavy wooden door behind him and went back
to the kitchen to pour another glass of whatever I could find. Cooking oil
probably.
I was just about holding it together till I heard a wail from the top of the
stairs. Two minutes later my husband cracked open the door to slide in a
stray children’s car seat; he glanced up the staircase to find a sobbing
six-year-old dressed in a robot sleepsuit with his legs wrapped round his
crying mother.
“We’ll be fine. Go and get your train. Hurry up or you’ll miss it.” I waved
him away. As the door closed heavily behind him again my four-year-old came
out of the bedroom. He knelt down and kissed me. “I love you, Mummy,” he
said and lay next to us on his tummy as I patted his brother’s back and
rocked him gently back and forth.
“Shush now,” I whispered. “Shush. We’ll be fine.”
© Judith O’Reilly 2007
Adapted from www.wifeinthenorth.com,
to be published as a book by Viking Penguin
I think it is all hilarious, just what we need to laugh at ourselves. I was / am in a similar situation, a mile from the scottish border me and my cat until big daddy arrives for the weekend. What larks I get up to. Polly (and her cat called Princess D )
Polly Ka, Cornhill on Tweed, Northumberland
I enjoyed, empathised and laughed, (although not too loudly, you may have a headache.) I think this is written, not as a comment on Northumberland, but as an experience common to lots of women, who follow, out of love, husbands dreams and careers, to the ends of the earth. When nothing is familiar, and nearest and dearest are hundreds of miles away, then even the most picturesque of views becomes loathsome- It's only the title that leads folk to jump to conclusions... surely this is not scathing comment on 'The North', but a sharing of the darkest of hours. Thank you.
Sarah Riseborough, Belford,
Pathetic! Does this pass for humour down south these days?
If you don't like it here in Northumberland, why don't you move back to London?
Leslie & Aud Garland, Yarrow, Hexham,, Northumberland
Very funny Judith, you're every bit as good as Kathy Lette. I love the way you combine wit with poignancy - you deserve your book deal. Good luck.
Jules, Canterbury,
The Sunday Times this week had an article about a blogger to which my husband brought my attention.
In ever true fashion I watched the emotion reading these articles pulled me toward. My spouse immediately went towards what the article said about herself. I also made my assumptions about her from her writing. However, I chose to dig just that bit deeper to see what my reaction said about me.
I am rather old fashioned I suppose and still hold ideals of community to core, which brings up the “here comes another southerner moving up to ruin the countryside & community” attitude. Which as it happens also happens to be not only a Yorkshire attitude, but a New England attitude as well. Ask anybody in Maine what he or she thinks about Weekend New Yorkers who decide to give up life in the fast line for back woods Maine existence.
I must admit I find myself chuckling. I suspect those from New England will be chuckling as well. It occurs to me that my attitude may or may not be unique and although I can understand how someone in her situation can feel, I can’t help thinking about how ungrateful it is indeed.
Which takes me back to myself. A wise uncle once told me, never forget, there are always those better off than you and always those worse off. I think Ms Blogger who’s earning a tidy sum should meet Bono and spend some time in Africa (and not the good parts either.)
There are folks, who would indeed appreciate a two-bedroom cottage, a husband that is hardly home and the freedom and beauty of country community life. Life is what you make it and no matter how good or bad you have it; you can’t hide what’s on the inside.
It occurs to me this woman has had such a hard time where she lives now because she doesn’t understand the values, beliefs, and community around her. Nor can she appreciate a simple existence and the freedom and great humanity, which can be released in such existence.
She’s qualifying modern city life in a country village (what, they still deliver milk to your door and you have to WALK more than 400 m for a bus stop?) Charles Darwin discusses survival of the fittest, and this woman has had a taste of real life, how would she survive living in Chappeltown in Leeds? How would any of us survive in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan? What if she had to be a trainee Nurse? A janitor (cleaner)? A street sweeper? A nursing home administrator? Live in a northern council estate (they'd have her for lunch, they would.)? Personally, I'd like to see her cope with a cricket tea on her own.
I watched the film Children of Men last night and couldn’t help thinking that somewhere in the world people exist in just those conditions but for the grace of life, I’m not. This morning I read this article and I find it rather ignorant and selfish.
Further a publishing company, rewarding her monetarily for the spoilt public behaviour, reinforces the perpetuation of this ignorance.
I’ll take my cup of tea, with my scone with my simple life any day and I won't be buying her book either.
K Tagg, Halifax, UK