The Grass is always Greener

As you race between childminder and supermarket with tired, whining children in tow, do you find yourself wondering what it’s all for? Do you stare longingly at pictures of rosy-cheeked children living on isolated farms and imagine what downsizing might be like? Don’t do anything rash until you’ve read Caroline Deacon’s look at whether rural living is really all its cracked up to be.

We all want to give our kids every opportunity, but are we working ourselves to death to pay for it all? House prices, certainly in southern England, have been driven up relentlessly to the point where most mortgages need two incomes. When both parents work, other costs inevitably rise. A recent survey showed that domestic help is on the increase as more women return to work after giving birth. Apart from nanny or childminder, working women employ cleaners, people to do the ironing – some even fork out for housekeepers and gardeners to keep the show on the road.

The problem with life in the fast lane is that whatever you’re doing to make life better for yourself and your kids, everyone else is doing it too. The big word these days is choice – of school, of consumables, of lifestyle, yet all that choice really seems to do is to make keeping up with the Joneses harder and more expensive than ever. Choice has brought our generation to expect perfection – even from our children. After all, we work hard and spend huge amounts of money to ensure they get the best education, buying them an endless array of stimulating toys and educational software. Perhaps we should pause for a moment and consider BBC’s Castaway 2000 participant, Michael Prater.

Before Taransay, he loved Playstation and TV, but read few books and struggled with maths. After nine months deprived of modern accoutrements, learning mathematical concepts through seashells and driftwood, he is confident with numbers and an avid reader. Dr Cynthia McVey, child developmental psychologist and consultant to the programme is quoted as saying that she’s never heard the kids moan about the absence of TV. “They have become very creative. Their concentration levels are way beyond their years.”

With technology it’s possible to live and work anywhere, yet most of the population still congregates in the south; more people live in Greater London than whole of Scotland. The cost of living, pace of life and stress levels are all higher in the southeast. Why don’t more of us downsize to communities similar to Taransay?

Nicola and Derek, with children Matthew and Adam moved to a remote location in the North-west Highlands of Scotland in 1994. “The kids moved from a school with 300 pupils, to one which has 20 children and 2 teachers. Our family boosted the school roll by 10%! They settled in from day one; they would say at the end of the day ‘It’s great, but we don’t do any work.’ What was happening with such good teacher-pupil ratios was that the teachers had time to talk to the kids, rather than leaving them to get on with work on their own.”

“Now Matthew has started at Gairloch secondary school. Luckily this is also a good school; with a catchment area of 700 square miles you have no choice. But the kids then all know each other, and there is none of that inter-school rivalry you get further south.” Nicola runs a relocation business over the Internet, helping other people downsize. She has no regrets. “The kids have as many opportunities here, if not more. I missed shops at first, but you adjust and you can get anything delivered. We use the cash and carry once a month, and when I do go to a big town, shopping is now a real treat.”

For most of us however, country living still means moving no further than rural East Anglia and the Home Counties. But living in the English countryside can mean pollution from industrial sized farms and lack of basic amenities.  In the tiny Surrey village where I live, the only public play area has a slide that doesn’t work and a couple of run down swings surrounded by dog poo. Ironically we love visiting grandparents in Fulham, London for Bishop’s Park’s fantastic playground. Our village teenagers are even worse off as their social life consists of hanging around the village green.

The Council for the Protection of Rural England points out that for parents in the countryside, there is “a sense of isolation, nine out of ten villages have no formal childcare facilities, and there are problems accessing other services like healthcare, while many rural shops and post offices have closed.” More tellingly, according to CPRE, there is not really a lot of difference now between stress levels in city and country. “People imagine a rural idyll, but in fact roads are busy and getting busier; traffic is faster than in urban areas. There are only three small areas in remote regions of England which are not blighted by traffic noise and pressure from urban development.” CPRE is now working with the government to make cities and towns better places to live and work.

These three areas where CPRE thinks English country living might still be idyllic are South West Devon and Cornwall, the Welsh borders, and Northumberland. Veronica and Terry, plus children Catherine and Ben moved from commuter belt Surrey to Wooler in Northumberland ten years ago.
“We decided to do it if one of us could find some sort of income, and I landed a six month maternity cover teaching job. We sold our house and bought one big enough to run a bed and breakfast, and we’ve never regretted it. The kids were involved in the decision to move, and they’ve always loved it. It took a while to settle, and you have to make more of an effort to get them places when they’re teenagers. I now have a full-time teaching job thirty miles away, Terry runs the B&B. Distances are longer here but traffic is lighter – it takes me thirty-five minutes to get to work; in Surrey it would have taken a lot longer. And I’m driving through beautiful scenery. I think it was all meant to be”

Is it easy to fit in when you move to a small community? Remember the 1980s when Welsh holiday cottages were torched? Janine married a Welsh speaker and moved to an isolated community on the Pembrokeshire coast. “I’m an import – even though I’ve lived here eighteen years! Many people round here go back for generations; they live in houses where their great-grandparents lived. If push came to shove I am the outsider, but it’s a really friendly place and mostly outsiders who come to live and work here are welcomed with open arms. They keep schools open, communities going.”

“Whether you can live here depends more on the kind of person you are. You can’t pop round to the shops, and the nearest M&S is thirty miles away. One woman came from London and couldn’t cope with the lack of anonymity. She said she couldn’t sneeze without everyone knowing about it. I like that sense of belonging, but she felt people were nosey.”

Not everyone finds rural communities welcoming or country life idyllic. Mary told us “When Thomas was offered the chance to move from working in the City of London to Norwich, we jumped at the chance. We sold our modest sized house in Billericay, Essex and bought a gorgeous, nine- room detached Victorian house in a village in rural Norfolk for under £100,000.

As I had pre-school children, I got into the NCT and post-natal networks. However, initially I made friends only with people who had also moved in recently. Locals round here are more reticent.

The real problems arose when Emily started school, and we realised she was not doing as well as she should. We wanted to find out if she has dyslexia, but the local education authority didn’t want to do anything – apparently they don’t like putting a label on a child round here, mostly I think because they like to keep their purse strings closed! In other counties she would have been sent for testing.

It’s not all roses moving to the countryside. There are lots of advantages to a small community – you have all the amenities without the crowds. But you have to travel some distance to change anything that’s wrong – if we swapped schools we would have to drive 15 miles into Norwich. Although we are only one and a half hours from London, attitudes take a long time to change.”

Is the choice really only between isolated rural living and big cities? A few years ago, Strathclyde University carried out a large survey to discover the best places to live in Britain. They asked 2000 people to prioritise factors that make for a good life: access to health care and education, low crime, cost of living and pollution were the top five. Using hospital waiting lists, crime figures, house prices, school standards and council tax rates, the researchers found that relatively small county towns come out best. Three out of the top five places to live were in Scotland, but as a member of the research team said, “in areas such as education and health there has traditionally been greater provision north of the border.” The other two places worth considering were Kendal in the Lake District and Hereford on the Welsh borders.

Carolyn and Dave, with their kids Angus (aged four) and Rory (one), have just downsized to the county town of Inverness, which the survey ranked fifth. “We were both in the armed forces and after 17 years you can retire on a reduced pension of around a quarter to a third of your income. The alternative, staying in, would have meant moving every two years and boarding schools. Coming from Watford we worked out we could have the same standard of living on a third of our salaries.”

“Inverness has more to offer than most towns this size because it serves the whole of the Highland Region. It has brilliant amenities and the quality of life is excellent; there are fewer cars, fresh air and it’s less frenetic. In Watford people wanted to talk about how much money they earn. It’s much less competitive round here. Schools are great – Angus has 22 in his class, and you don’t see many larger than 24. In Watford we could have had a small detached or largish semi for £300,000; here it costs £100,000. Nursery and kids’ activities are cheaper, entertainment costs less – I bought two tickets to the Scottish ballet and they cost £20; in London you would pay a lot more – if you could get hold of them in the first place.”

However, although comparative costs, particularly housing, can look attractive, for many people, the cost of raising children – about £60,000 per child, is actually higher than providing a roof over their head – and that won’t change wherever you live. What you are really buying into is a slower pace of life and a sense of community. You need to be prepared for a drop in standard of living, but expectations are lower.

Janine in Wales told us “There are lots of economic problems - farming is our biggest industry. It’s terrible if you don’t have a car – there’s one bus a week. But it’s compensated by being safe for kids – there’s not much traffic, they can cycle, go fishing, and we love the beaches and sailing.” 

Veronica in Northumberland adds “We knew we would take a drop in lifestyle; we were prepared for that. But it hasn’t hindered us – we can’t take foreign holidays but we can do everything we want to with the kids.” Terry is now taking a bookkeeping course and hoping to build up work that way. “You have to be prepared to take what’s there to earn a living. You can’t hope to live on B&Bs, but they’re an added bonus.” Nicola in NW Scotland made a similar comment. “Everyone round here survives on bits and pieces. Most people have a holiday cottage or rooms to rent out, and very few people just have one job. It does mean we’re a real community - we all muck in and everything gets done.”

Perhaps the most important factor in downsizing is choosing the right community. Carolyn reckoned “it helps that I came from round here originally, and one of the reasons we decided to move now was so the kids were in the school from the start. I don’t know what it’s like for complete outsiders moving to Scotland, but Inverness is pretty cosmopolitan.”

For Veronica, the move was because they did know the area already “My mother comes from the Lake District, and we had come here on holiday three years running. It just got to the point where we didn’t want to go back.”

Nicola advises people who contact her Internet relocation service to “come and rent a cottage for a month or two during the winter and see if it’s really what you want. People who do that on the whole find it’s not as bad as they think.”

However for Mary, settling in was not plain sailing. “You can live in Norfolk for twenty years and not be considered a local. It’s definitely worth checking out an area thoroughly before you commit yourself.”

Have you lived in a city too long?

1. Personal space means no one is standing on your toes
2. Any stranger who smiles at you must be a pervert.
3. You think the sky at night really is dark orange
4. You think a municipal park with a flower clock is “nature”

Would you enjoy the country?

1. The smell of manure doesn’t bother you
2. You don’t mind driving ten miles down single track lanes to buy a stamp
3. You get excited shopping for all your clothes from Littlewoods catalogues
4. You don’t mind wearing green wellies six months at a time

Nicola’s relocation service is at www.highland-dreams.co.uk
She has written a book, published Feb 2001, Living and working in Scotland Vacation work publications, Oxford £10.99

© Caroline Deacon
article first appeared in Junior Jan/Feb 01