I drank my tea carefully so as not to spill any on the brand-new, over-stuffed floral sofa. Surrounding me, the rarefied ambience of an immaculate, Victorian-style conservatory with a domed roof and ruched curtains; beyond, a vast garden.
Each time I returned the cup to its saucer it tinkled delicately – a nostalgic, comforting sound that reminded me of my grandma. Yet this wasn’t a visit to grandma’s house. I had driven down a long, winding country lane, been buzzed through electric gates with stone gargoyles on either side, and side-stepped a swimming pool to get inside.
The conversation became more and more convivial and confiding until my hostess mentioned a woman whom she suspected of ‘going round’ criticising her curtains. I told her I knew the woman. Her eyes narrowed, her lips thinned, the temperature in the room plummeted: ‘Did she say anything about my curtains?’ she snapped. ‘No,’ I replied, taken aback. ‘We never discussed your curtains.’
I felt a small knot form in my stomach. The atmosphere changed so I drained my cup, said my goodbyes and left feeling as if being on speaking terms with the alleged curtain-criticiser had been a deal-breaker.
My husband was a country boy and I’d caved in to years of spousal pressure to move out of London
 It was to be the first of many mistakes I made as a diehard city-dweller who had no idea what the rules of living in the country were. Only a month previously, I’d caved in to years of spousal pressure to move out of London.
We’d been very happily married for 14 years, apart from one large sticking point in the relationship: he’s a country boy; I’m a city girl. While he can think of nothing better than a long country walk followed by a pint in front of a roaring log fire, I like the theatre and restaurants.
But our children were getting bigger, the flat was feeling smaller and his desire to leave the city was intensifying by the day. Yes, London was fun – there was lots to do – but was it fair on the kids? In the country, they could roam free, school would be low pressure and instead of days in front of screens they’d be out building dens and pond-dipping.
Eventually, plagued with guilt at all I was depriving my family of, I agreed to take the plunge and try it: what was the worst that could happen? We rented our place out, moved to a gorgeous house with plenty of space and great dog walks that was two hours on the train from the city.
This turned out to be a mistake. Because we still had a place in London, we weren’t seen as proper country people from the start, rather ‘Chelsea tractor/Hunter welly types. But in fact, I’d been born in the country and had grown up plucking pheasants, mucking out a stables and rounding up escaped cows. As a child I used to burn the stubble and dig up potatoes. But at the very first opportunity, I’d hot-footed it out of there and never looked back.
On the day we moved, my husband reassured me that I could go back to London whenever I wanted, but for those first heady days of summer I couldn’t even contemplate the thought of city life. One evening, I drank a glass of wine while watching my kids play a game of real-life Minecraft. They gathered resources from the garden to make their worlds, weaving in and out of the trees. It felt idyllic. They looked so happy. The air was clean and fresh. In fact, everything seemed so clean and fresh. My skin was clear; my head was clear. We should have done this years ago!
Then summer ended, real life began, the days drew in and life seemed a little duller. The drive to school each morning seemed to take for ever.
The route finished with a mile-long trek up a single-tracked road that you negotiated by shuffling into a passing place at the sight of another car. Impatient, often late for school, I bombed down it, vaguely noticing that people seemed annoyed with me, sometimes flashing their lights or shaking their heads.
Then one morning, as I was hurtling along as usual, a man coming the other way wound down his window, gave me the finger and yelled a load of expletives at me.
The penny dropped. I was driving that narrow road like a Londoner would, as if it were a game of chicken – first one to swerve into a passing place loses – and wrongly assuming everyone else was in on the game.
I mentioned this to a country friend who told me she believed these roads were the very reason everyone in the country was so nice: they were forced to consider one another and be patient. ‘Oh, yes, I suppose,’ I said, feeling like a terrible, self-absorbed city person, resolving to slow down.
But I struggled with slowing down. I was used to spending my days whizzing from one thing to the next.
But out here, an entire day could consist of nothing more than the school run, a dog walk and a trip to the supermarket. Although I worked part-time from home, I didn’t have much more of a life. I felt like an old person. Days later, at the school gates, I spotted the man who swore at me. He was one of the dads.
I pretended not to recognise him, said hello as if nothing had happened, but it had begun to dawn on me that my world had become very, very small. You couldn’t get away with anything. Eyes were on you all the time. There might be more space, but there was less escape: I’d have to be best behaviour always.
Over time, life eventually settled into a period of normality. I was bored, but just about coping.
The biggest problem was how friendless I began to feel. In London, I had lots of friends on my doorstep. My children went to the local school a five-minute walk up the road and the juggle between work and family life revolved around a group of local mothers who lived a stone’s throw from our house.
We’d help each other out at a moment’s notice with sleepovers and trips to the park. I’d often end up with a group of mums in my kitchen having a glass of wine while the kids mucked around together. It wasn’t until I no longer had it that I realised how important it had been.
In London, most mothers juggle huge workloads on top of their children and it meant there was less judgment and more understanding for anyone struggling. In the country, the pressures were internal rather than external. The aim was for perfection: a perfect house, a perfect child or a perfect marriage.
And it felt old-fashioned. Men, at least on the surface, were afforded a special status. I once said something about the patriarchy at a dinner party and the room fell silent.
Everyone just stared. But while the men were considered important outwardly, beneath was a hidden vice that made my eyes water.
‘Would you like to join a sex website together?’ I was asked not once, but by two different women. ‘You’re not getting enough sex. You need more sex. Everyone’s having affairs in the country. You’re an attractive woman. You should be having more sex,’ other women urged me.
I was astonished – and I felt harassed. The school organised a camping weekend and when one of the mums went home, leaving her husband alone, he spent the rest of the evening blatantly up to something in his tent with a divorcee while his kids were innocently toasting marshmallows in the next field.
Another married mum used to see her lover while her husband looked after the kids; then the lover would babysit while she had ‘special time’ with her husband.
I was invited to a swingers’ party, offered help to line up a list of potential lovers, and told if I wasn’t going to get a lover, I should at least get a decent vibrator. Nothing like this had ever happened in London.
At one point, I had to ask someone to tone down the smutty talk because I couldn’t cope. ‘I feel like such a prude,’ I texted a friend. ‘It’s all the time they’ve got on their hands,’ my friend texted back. ‘And the fresh air.’
I didn’t want affairs and weird sex. All I wanted was a nice bunch of female friends I could actually talk to – but I couldn’t seem to find any.
The neighbours made no secret of the fact that they didn’t want an ‘outsider’ in their midst, and I felt for the most part the women I was meeting just weren’t the same as me. There was always an edge of disapproval – and nastiness.Â
A war could begin over nothing – like those damn curtains – and children were often caught in the crossfire. A mum in my child’s class annoyed another mum, so in retaliation she left her child off the guest list for her son’s birthday party: the entire class, minus one. The innocent, excluded child was devastated.
It seemed as if – in the absence of work – these women’s status came from their children and they didn’t mind trampling on others’ kids to get a leg up.
While I understand that, with any bunch of mums and their kids, there will always be scuffles, but I’d never witnessed this level of cruelty towards other people’s children in London.
If one woman annoyed another, or a child had an off-day, invariably revenge would be taken against the child.
At my children’s old school in the city, the relationship between mothers seemed indifferent at worst, and supportive at best. But in the country, this strict management of children’s social circles seemed to be the norm.
‘It’s because they have nothing else to do,’ my husband kept saying. There were lots of pictures of immaculately turned-out tweens holding up rosettes and sports cups on Facebook, but I knew the pictures were hiding the horrible stress many children were under. The eating disorders, depression and self-harming that lurked beneath – all the things we assumed only happened in the city.
I began to reassess my friend’s view that the narrow roads made everyone nice. There was a brutality concealed beneath the surface of normal life that I hadn’t bargained on. So I tried to have as little as possible to do with most of the women around me.
All this petty – and sometimes not so petty – backstabbing over curtains and kids made me despise them. About a year into our new life, I experienced the brutality first-hand when a couple of the mums turned on my son.
He has an autism diagnosis, struggles with school and friendships but had managed to make – for the first time – a true best friend. He seemed to be genuinely happy. Likewise, the best friend described our son as one of the most important people in his life. He adored our family – would come for a sleepover and never want to go home.
Then one day, he burst into tears, told me hated his life and asked if he could move in Âpermanently with us – in front of his parents. I appreciate that it must have been a difficult thing for his mother to witness, but nothing could have prepared me for the tsunami of hostility we faced after that.
Rather than look within at where their relationship had gone wrong, the mother launched an all-out assault on me and my family. I was undisciplined and indulgent, I’d spoiled her son, so of course he’d want to come and live with me where he could do whatever he wanted.
‘I have boundaries,’ she hissed at me. Off she went into school, demanding that they kept my child away from hers.
She Âgossiped about me to other parents, some of whom appeared to take it on board, and gradually my son became so Âisolated, Âconfused and depressed that we removed him from school altogether.
To make it worse, we were considered wealthy because we were living in an old Georgian house with a huge garden. In reality, we were anything but – yet jealousy seemed to underpin this tirade against us. A kind of well-it’s-all-right-for-you-with-your-money-type justification. The woman had this idea that I could pay my way out of any situation, so I deserved it.
Mumsnet once had a story about a woman complaining that while she had a take-home pay of £9,000 a month, she couldn’t afford new clothes or a holiday.
The internet crucified her, yet when she broke down her Âexorbitant housing/childcare/transport costs, she had no more than a single mum with housing benefit and universal credit to live off each month.
This was my experience in London – very few families have spare cash to throw around.
No matter how much they earn, everyone feels a bit broke and it’s a great leveller. I never experienced rivalries over money because everyone I knew complained about how poor they felt, whereas in the country there’s an acute awareness of who’s got what/who’s got more than them; and it fuels some intense emotions.
I felt broken by my experience at the hands of that woman. And I realised that we were never going to be accepted. A local friend, who sympathised, told me: ‘There aren’t women like you round here. You’re independent and outspoken. You do your own thing. They’re nasty because they’re threatened by you.’
But I felt as if I was metaphorically in the stocks, getting rotten tomatoes hurled at me. I didn’t care what was motivating the behaviour.
In the end, I couldn’t take any more. I didn’t want to make my life there, and certainly didn’t want my children growing up around people like that. We gave up on our country dream and limped back to London – and while I do miss the fresh air, I don’t miss the people.
It felt like coming home.
