Stuck in the sticks

If you are fantasists like us, who pore over the weekend “property pornography” supplements, then wake up and smell the (freshly brewed, metropolitan) coffee. Country living is not to be taken up lightly. First, I found as a freelance writer that, as soon as any editor began to dial a number starting 01273, they would drop the phone, shake their shoulders and punch in another number beginning with 0207.

Then my husband got a job in town, and found our local train station at Plumpton as useful as Trumpton as a place from which to commute. With one car between us, I would swing up to the level crossing before the only morning train and watch his death-dash across the tracks, ducking beneath clanging gates. When a baby – and no friends – came along, and all our work dried up, I knew that the rural idyll was over. It was back to London to get real.

Now, ten years later and with the pressure of secondary schools forcing us out of town, here I am again, haunted by memories of failure and loneliness.

The townies among you need to know that the countryside is not only very, very quiet but also very, very dark. On that first evening in our new house, a neighbour popped round with a bottle of wine and some cake, to tell me that a weekly fish-and-chip van appeared for a few hours in the village that night.

“Ah, yes. Food,” I thought, staring at a box labelled “Freezer and fridge contents”. I tramped over the squishy grass in my city heels, through a gate in the fence and on to the lane beyond. It was totally dark – so dark that I couldn’t see my hand in front of me, let alone a pavement.

All around was silence. Above me was an eerie yellow toenail of a moon. I panicked and ran back through the gate.

The children seem to have none of my initial hang-ups about the move. Every time they walk out of the door, they come back as if dipped in chocolate – the Sussex clay clinging to boots, knees and elbows as they roll around like pigs in the garden. Unlike their mother, the three of them have taken everybody’s suspicious kindness at face value, while I dismiss offers to share the school run as likely evidence of satanic rituals about to be performed on my offspring.

While everyone else walks to the village school, I am still driving my rolling fortress, ready to give the Wandsworth finger to anyone challenging my double-parking. I don’t know why I bother.

On the first day, a country lady appeared from her house wearing a strange brioche hairdo, and asked if I’d like to park in her drive. “Here, I’ll guide you in,” she said, as I nearly crashed the car in shock.

I can’t pretend that I was mobbed with friendliness by the other mothers in the vilage school playground. I had been told to expect mistrust by another London evacuee, who had found conversation in her first term from only one friendly face, which turned out to belong to a Romanian au pair.

For me, the very Englishness of it all was quite a culture shock. “Not many black people around here, are there?” said our Jamaican former nanny, who came to visit on a weekend. She had a point. Instead of the full burkas, colourful saris and bling of the South London primary, I now saw nothing but pastel rainwear on the school run. My own black London coat just looked wrong.

More baffling than the fashion was the complex muddy boot code. Full, knee-length riding boots and mud-caked Timberland overshoes were de rigueur and I could see the need to cultivate a just-stepped-off-my-horse look to fit in.

My biggest surprise, though, was how healthy eating seemed to have missed this corner of the countryside. Because everyone is out in the fresh air, burning calories by trailing wheelie bins for miles down lanes, nobody bats an eyelid at the volume of cakes and biscuits pushed at you everywhere you go. Birthday cakes and sweets were banned at our local London primary, but at the village school the head teacher insisted that a cake baked for the twins’ seventh birthday was brought in for himself, the class, the secretaries and the dinner ladies to taste. Wheat, dairy, nut allergies? Never ’eard of them ’ere. Pile up the Victoria sponge and pass it round.

But my poor husband has had to suffer the real brunt of the move, with a new life on the Brighton Booze Express. Where once he would wake early and fetch me a cup of tea, I now have to put the coffee under his nose, like smelling salts, or threaten to pour it over him just to get him out of bed. Three extra hours of travelling each weekday means that he zombies out of the door in the dark morning and slaps his face to stay awake at the wheel while dodging rabbits, black ice, deer, foxes and pheasants on the way to the station.

Because one of the myths that we Londoners believed is how much safer the country was than the town, I am also still adjusting to the diet of disaster I hear each day. Since arriving, I have heard, inter alia, how a neighbour’s shoulder was torn by a cherry-picking machine, how an assistant at a farm shop lost his fingers in a thresher, and – most recently – how a man on a shoot was hit in the stomach by a pheasant falling from the sky. While his fellow guns stood laughing and making Chicken Licken jokes, the poor man’s spleen ruptured, allowing two pints of blood to pour into his intestine, causing a heart attack and a trip to A&E. How much safer London seemed, with only the occasional mugging or drive-by shooting.

The one question that all my (far safer) London friends still ask whenever they call is whether I have any regrets. I know that as the dark afternoons lighten and winter turns to spring, my secret longings will be overshadowed by a delight in wildflowers and the children running about freely.

Meanwhile, I can find nowhere that will serve me a proper cup of coffee. The ecclesiastical reverence with which I used to hold a Costa Coffee cup is now a fading memory, and I have nasal hallucinations when I think that I can smell coffee when it’s just someone baking more bloody cake.

In place of trained baristas and the Gaggia I have Roy in the village post office-cum-store, who gallantly fetches water for the kettle and spoons in some Nescaf? after the morning drop-off. He and his wife Sue have taken the place of the camaraderie of my London yoga class. I no longer have bendy Lisa training pelvic floors and urging us all to wear comfortable clothes. Instead I pat the postoffice dogs, and beg their daughter to babysit so that I can escape to the bright lights of Haywards Heath.

This afternoon my daughter starts at Brownies in the village hall. Her twin brother was indignant. “It’s unfair, Mum. I want to go. Why does she get to eat chocolate cake and I have to stay at home?”

The country. Ignore that guff about healthy living. I promise you, it’s a cake thing.

A walk on the wild side

After 18 months in a tiny Scottish seaside idyll, I knew that I’d had enough. The initial thrill of open spaces, panoramic vistas and the raw, rejuvenating voltage of nature had stultified into agonising emptiness. The grey Moray Firth and the shadows of the Highlands were dark and oppressive. At times I felt like Jack Nicholson in the Overlook Hotel, at others like Tom Hanks in Cast Away. But mostly I felt like Chris McCandless, the wandering protagonist of Into the Wild, who learns too late – on his deathbed, in fact – that the secret of life is that it should be shared with other people.

I wasn’t as bad as McCandless. I had a family with me, a wife and a child. We had left London because it was, like, soooo not the right space to raise a toddler. London was a noisy, polluted, wealth-obsessed and violent place where paedophiles hid inside hamburgers and grannies were gunned down for the price of an Oyster card. Rural Scotland, on the other hand, had mountains, rivers, beaches and, we quickly discovered, no people. And for a while this suited us just fine. Indeed, I have sacred memories of mornings on the beach with my son, then only 2, dabbling our toes in icy water, throwing stones and cuddling (alone, always alone). But time passes, the rot sets in and soon you crave company. You dream of the dreary dinner party, you fantasise about the baskets-only queue, you ache for the delicate choke of diesel fumes. After 18 months you buy the ticket back to London. One way. (Kevin Maher)

Ten facts of country life

1 You will never eat another takeaway again, unless it is from a fish-and-chip van.
2 Silk parkas from Joseph and raincoats from Zara and Whistles don’t repel water.
3 You may as well bin your wardrobe of black clothes. They look funereal and sinister against all that green.
4 Sell your shoe collection on eBay before moving, and buy a miner’s hat with a lamp for dark country roads.
5 Don’t take on any after-school activities for children, unless you like stamping your feed and rubbing your hands together outside dark, chilly village halls.
6 Buy audiobooks for the car, because you will never have time to read.
7 The commuting partner will turn white with exhaustion and refuse to get out of bed.
8 The telephone will become your best friend, so ask for itemised bills now.
9 Don’t telephone country folk after 9pm because they are always asleep in bed.
10 You may need to drive up to 30 miles to find a decent cup of coffee.