Devon ain’t Heaven(IT BROKEN UP MY FAMILY)
Seduced by a perfect holiday, Shona moved her brood west. But while she hated it (no Waitrose and too windy for her hair), her eldest daughters loved it so much they stayed when Mum fled back to Surrey
THE moment my life began its disastrous downhill turn — and I can pinpoint it exactly — was on the final evening of our 2012 holiday in Devon.
We were enjoying one last, blissful picnic on the beach. the kids were frolicking in the surf as the sun sank over the Saunton Sands horizon. I took a sip of rosé and thought wistfully: ‘I could live here.’
By the same time the next day, our car had joined the M5 heading north. But that thought had developed from an embryonic notion — which, let’s face it, we all have on the last night of a successful holiday — to a full-blown monster of a plan.
I presented the news to my husband, Keith, as we sat in a bottleneck, limping past Stonehenge. ‘ We should move to Devon,’ I announced.
By the time we had arrived back at our house in Surrey, I had an entire West Country future mapped out. I could practically smell the sea air as I sank into bed, envisaging a simpler life enhanced by cream teas and crabbing.
What the hell, I ask you now, was I thinking? If anyone reading this feels even the tiniest inkling of recognition, then let what I am about to tell you act as the biggest cautionary tale ever to be winged your way.
Because moving to Devon did nothing short of tear my family apart. today, I am back in the Home Counties — only without two of my four children. For so thoroughly did I despise country living that I felt I had no choice but to return to civilisation — even though it meant leaving my oldest daughters behind.
Flo, 18, who, against all the odds, has created a life for herself in Devon, point-blank refused to return with me. And Annie, 16, who was in the middle of her GCSEs when I made my U- turn, couldn’t be uprooted and is now living with my old next-door neighbour.
Even when she finishes her exams this summer she won’t return for good, and instead will take her A-levels at a boarding school there.
Meanwhile, my husband has since relocated to Dubai for work — a move I normally would have wholeheartedly embraced, but simply couldn’t face after my disaster in Devon.
So here I am, alone except for my two youngest children Monty, 14, and Dolly, seven, living in a rented house in Midhurst, West Sussex, close to our former home in Haslemere, Surrey. How did it come to this?
On the surface, our move had seemed like a positive life change — and, more than that, one which seemed to require little upheaval in our day- to- day lives, since my husband and I were lucky enough to both work from home, having spent 15 years bringing up our children in the Surrey commuter belt.
‘ Fulham with trees,’ I used to dismissively describe Haslemere and its surrounding area. ‘Not “proper” countryside at all.’
God, how I laugh at that now. Give me a Waitrose next to a field with no sheep in it any day.
I am so over the hell of real rural living: being yelled at by farmers for walking my dog on a public footpath that just happens to circumnavigate their stinky cows; having to light 20 scented candles every morning in a futile bid to obscure the smell of muck spreading; the mud and the rain — endless, relentless rain. AND the wind. I should have clocked this when, less than a year after deciding to move, we viewed our rented farmhouse at the top of a hill overlooking the sea. All the trees in the garden were growing inland at right angles. Not one went straight upwards.
Nobody tells you about the weather in Devon when it’s not August. It was just one of the many, many downsides I’d failed to identify before permanently decamping my entire family there.
We did our due diligence on the area. We’re not total idiots. I knew the part of Devon we had chosen to live in wasn’t the desirable, trendy part. Less Boden, more budget.
Indeed, among the establishments to be found in the High Street of Bideford — where we ended up buying a five-bedroom Victorian semi for £270,000 — was a shop selling legal highs and a tattoo parlour. Oh yes, and every cash-point distributed £5 notes, which really should have told me something, except I was too busy timing how long it took us to drive to the beach (five minutes, if you’re wondering).
We found a good school and thought we had properly grasped what we were letting ourselves in for. OK, so there was no John Lewis in our nearest ‘big’ town, Barnstaple, and Exeter was more than an hour away on the train, but none of that bothered me.
After all, wasn’t that why we were moving in the first place — to escape the consumerism our lives had become dominated by?
What’s so ironic today is that all the factors that drove our relocation to Devon became, when I didn’t have them any more, the very things I missed the most. ON THE day we moved — June 10, 2013 — I remember having a small wobble as we headed west on the A303 following the removal lorry, with the hamster cage on the back seat and the dog in the boot. I comforted myself with the thought that Devon couldn’t be that different. It was less than five counties away and the people there still spoke the same language.
It’s only now, four catastrophic years later, that I fully appreciate just how wrong that assumption was.
At first, things were great. With the benefit of hindsight, however, I can see this was because we’d arrived in the summer, when it felt more like an extended holiday than real life.
Just the fact that I could feel sand in my toes a mere ten minutes after the school run convinced me we had done something wonderful.
Even that first winter, although pretty hideous, didn’t put me off.
the six- bed, Grade II- listed farmhouse we initially rented — for £800 a month — seemed incapable of retaining any heat. Seagulls were flung past the bedroom window by gale-force winds and my hair was permanently scraped back into a scrunchie because I couldn’t do anything else with it.
I learnt to live in my wellies, hold my breath from the car to the house (there was a slurry heap about 50 yards from the front door) and push the wing mirrors in when I parked at night because the cows had a habit of escaping and stampeding down our driveway.
But — and you can imagine a Patricia Hodge voice from the sitcom Miranda here — it was, to begin with, ‘such fun!’
Admittedly, the children needed a little more persuasion, but I was convinced they would come round.
Flo, who was 15 at the time, absolutely hated it. the first time we went on a family outing to the beach, she flatly refused to get out of the car and told us she didn’t want the sea, she wanted shopping.
I remember after her first, disastrous day at her new school, she came home wailing that not one person in her Year 10 class had ever heard of the restaurant Wagamama.
Hands up, my children were obviously privileged, middle-class products of a Home Counties environment. And it’s only now that I see that’s exactly where I went wrong.
For you cannot bring up your offspring in an affluent area like Haslemere, a mere hour from London, and then expect them to fit in just fine in an economically deprived seaside town in the back end of nowhere.
Before we moved, I used to lecture
the children about Surrey, telling them: ‘This isn’t real life. This is Disneyland. Most people in the UK do not own two four-wheel drives and a house in the Dordogne.’
But then, foolishly, to give them ‘balance’ I moved them from one extreme to the other. We went from living in what, on reflection, seemed to be a gilded wonderland to an unremittingly bleak one.
Call me a snob, but I massively underestimated the impact this would have on all of us.
Yes, Devon offers a life by the sea, but the uncomfortable reality is that far too many places by the sea in England are rundown and pervaded by such a lack of ambition and hope it is utterly depressing.
Which brings me to the people. How can you truly know, before moving somewhere, what the locals are really like? Sure, they smile and seem charming when they’re flogging you ice cream in the summer, but when you have to live cheek by jowl with them through the desolate winter months, when everybody else has headed back ‘ up country’, you learn pretty damn quickly that they don’t want your sort hanging around at all.
Honestly, I have never met a more miserable, whingeing bunch of people in my life.
While I don’t want to risk offending the lovely friends we did make during our time there, most of them, it seemed, took issue with something or another.
One friend, a woman who had previously lived in London, told me the problem with the locals was that they suffered from a chronic case of TMT — too much time. She was spot on. I couldn’t cross the road outside my house without someone yelling obscenities at me from their car window because I hadn’t used the zebra crossing.
A bit rich, considering that just a few days previously in full daylight I had driven past a man taking down his trousers and peeing against the wall of Poundland.
It pains me to say it, but the Devon I adored on holiday wore me down when I lived there day to day. I wanted to love it — I really did. But I grew even to hate the sight of the sea, which, apart from about two days a year in the middle of August, was grey, uninviting and far too cold to enjoy.
It would be easy to say it was one thing or the other that finally broke me — the weather; the small-mindedness; the fact that even after exiting the M5 there was still a one-hour drive down the notoriously dangerous Link Road to get home.
But in the end, it just came down to an overwhelming sense of feeling exiled from the real world.
At first, I buried my feelings of anguish — after all, we had invested so much emotionally. We had bought a house. Keith and I planned to retire there.
But it got to the stage where I was so miserable that I didn’t even want to look out of the window and be reminded of our monumental mistake.
Then, while on a trip back to Surrey to see friends, it hit me that I felt happy for the first time in ages.
I called Keith, and suddenly found myself unable to stop weeping. Kind and supportive, he simply said: ‘Shona, let’s get the hell out of here. It’s not worth putting us through this.’
Then came the moment we told our children that, after all the upheaval, we were going back precisely the way we had come.
The four of them looked at me in horror. Because while they had moaned endlessly when we first arrived, they had come out the other side. Unlike us, they had made a life in Devon. EVEN Flo, probably the biggest casualty of our move, had managed to turn things around. When we arrived, she careered off the rails in protest, and Bideford made it so easy for that to happen.
People living there will say what a fabulous place it is to bring up children — young children, maybe — but in the eyes of a teenager, it’s a cultural wasteland.
They wander in clusters like tumbleweed, bored out of their minds and seemingly unable to see that there is hope beyond Honiton.
Flo dropped out of her A-levels — an act she now deeply regrets — and is currently studying travel and tourism. She is also holding down a responsible job caring for the elderly in their homes and doesn’t want to move back to Surrey with me.
Annie is on the Devon handball team, loves trekking on Exmoor and is studying hard for her exams. When she protested that she wanted to stay, I couldn’t help but relent. She is temporarily lodging with my former neighbour.
I recognise that leaving the girls behind in Devon is probably the most selfish thing I’ve ever done as a parent. But, hand on heart, I really felt I had no other choice.
And so here I am, back where we started with Monty and Dolly (who still isn’t speaking to me because she misses ‘home’).
Still, I’m heartbroken because we’ll never all live together as a family again.
The last years I’ll ever have with all my children together were ruined by that godforsaken place.
Thankfully, we have found a buyer for our home in Bideford, but we’ve lost a fortune in moving costs.
Perhaps one day I will be able to look back and fondly remember our time in the West Country.
But not before I’ve recovered from a four- year brain fog in which I felt I’d died — and gone to Devon.