It has been almost two years since my husband Ray turned to me and said: “I think it’s time to move back.”
Our decision to return to the UK was almost as spontaneous as the one to move to France in the first place.
In some ways it was just as exciting – and in many ways it was much more terrifying.
We had spent 15 happy years in France at that point. All our children had been born there.
Moving back would involve a return for us, but a step into something entirely new for them.
We were concerned about housing, schools, the NHS, how the children would cope. Yet the feeling that this was the right time somehow overruled all of that.
In many ways we could have continued to live in France quite happily.
However, things around us had changed. The children had begun to grow up, and we wondered if they would have the opportunities we wanted for them in our rural area.
One was very unhappy at school and we felt she needed a fresh start.
Missing family back in the UK
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Plus, we wanted to be closer to family again.
The distance, which had seemed almost insignificant when we moved, had begun to yawn – partly because the cost of travel had increased, partly because family members had grown older and we wanted to spend more time with them.
Covid, too, had brought home the fragility of life, bursting the bubble we had become accustomed to living in.
Our move to France was never a rejection of the UK, and moving back was not a rejection of France.
Gillian at her new house in Norfolk, UKGillian Harvey
There are so many things to love in each country that we may always be torn.
However, I am pleased to say, having just bought a house in a seaside town in Norfolk, that we are settled and happy here.
We found a local school that has been really great. Although I have less than favourable memories of secondary school at a similar age, this school seems very nurturing – the teachers put a lot of emphasis on emotional wellbeing, which is something we are endlessly grateful for.
Importantly, the children are happy, settled and have made friends.
And other than the fact one of them decided to scale the fence and walk home from school in the first term (is it okay that I felt a little bit proud of her?), everything has gone pretty well.
Home comforts
As for the NHS, we have been pleasantly surprised on the whole. We have been in A&E twice and the wait was not excruciating.
The GP has had more than their fair share of our time and we have been very happy with the speed at which we have been seen. Headlines about the NHS loomed large in our minds when we moved, and there are obviously issues. But it is not quite the desperate situation we had imagined.
Do I miss France? Sometimes. I miss the space, especially the enormous garden we had. I miss friends who used to pop in.
I miss our little town of Eymoutiers in Haute-Vienne.
Equally, I am enjoying our new home, our new location, and living by the sea is something I can now tick off my bucket list.
I am proud of us too. While we were happy in France, we always wondered whether we might one day want to move back.
With that wondering came the other question: could we? Can we? Will we ever?
Somehow we negotiated changing our driving licences back to British (surprisingly easy) and the kids have managed to adapt to a new curriculum (finishing school at 15:00 and getting 100% on French tests has helped).
We have registered with doctors, dentists (a miracle), and we have tentatively landed on our feet. We are happy.
The great thing about having been away is that everything seems brand new. Carrot cake in a café? Don’t mind if I do. Pantomime at Christmas? Go on, then.
And I don’t mean to show off, but being fluent in the language (something I aspired to be in French but never quite accomplished) feels amazing. I can ring people up and be 100% sure I have explained myself clearly. Who’d have thought?
Sometimes when we tell people we have moved back from France, they are incredulous. “What did you want to move back here for?”
They cannot imagine that we have lived a dream, had our fill and moved on (never back, always on) to the next.
One thing my French adventure has taught me is that your surroundings go some way to helping you be happy, but true contentment comes from within.
My time in France made me reevaluate things, change my career and I have come back a better, more authentic (and wrinklier) version of myself.
As autumn sets in I will miss the longer summers across the Channel, but I am pretty sure we have made the right decision – at least for now.
Financing the move from France to the UK
One worry was that we would not be able to afford a property back in the UK.
The house in Bedfordshire that we sold to make the move in 2009 had doubled in price in the intervening years, whereas the French market locally had stagnated.
In the end, we decided to move to a rented property in the UK to get the ball rolling.
After all, I discovered I would need at least a year of UK self-employment and tax-paying under my belt to apply for a mortgage at all.
The Haute-Vienne house we bought for €160,000 in 2018 took a painful year to sell, and maintaining it from a distance (with the ever-growing grass) was a headache.
Finally, earlier this year we accepted an offer which was €10,000 less than we paid for it.
Ray retired from teaching when we moved out, and still has a generous pension, but due to his being older we were unable to have his name on the mortgage, which put all the pressure on me as a writer.
Luckily, my novels have been doing quite well, and I also took on additional freelance work in the year to make my top figure look tempting to would-be lenders.
It was a nail-biting time, but I managed to secure a loan of just over £300,000, meaning we had £400,000 – enough to purchase a six-bed house.
I will be paying it off until age 73, and the house needs a lot of cosmetic work, but it is bricks and mortar and I am both proud and relieved we have managed to make it here.
