22 February

We fled to Suffolk … to get a life. I’m sure you all know the kind of life I mean; a proper family life. A life where our children could thrive in a small community. A life that would, hopefully, be freer from some of the pressures we had grown accustomed to. A life where we could keep the wolf from the door, and plant a tree there while we were at it. So for the past six years we have tried to build just that, in bucolic – and intensively farmed – Suffolk. Having nearly fled FROM Suffolk many times during that dimly remembered first year, I have now wholeheartedly embraced my adopted county and my adopted lifestyle. A city girl by birth, and, I always thought, inclination, I finally gave in to my husband’s entreaties (he took advantage of those fuzzy post-childbirth days when any resistance, frankly, is too much effort) and embraced the dream. A dream that showed absolutely no sign of materialising in those early days, when we battled with financial catastrophes, with renovating a house that seemed to be stubbornly refusing to be coaxed out of its gentle decline, with settling into a small agricultural community where we didn’t know a soul and felt we had neon signs on our heads announcing ourselves as ‘London incomers’, and, for me, with the challenge of coping pretty much alone. My husband, of course, has the ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card of travelling extensively for work – he is away for days, sometimes weeks at a time – with which I cope, of course, with grace and fortitude and not a scrap of resentment.

There have been times when I have felt that this fertile, quiet, industrious land has been swamping me. I have felt that I couldn’t overcome the East Anglian reticence of the locals, that my past life, my way of speaking, my way of living, even, would always be alien. That I could never hope to belong to a region with which I had no connection and which, despite its relative proximity to metropolitan life, has always been a stubbornly independent part of the world. I’d settled for being a friendly outsider. But something happened, gradually I think, or maybe it was something as sudden as the wind changing direction, I can’t say. I began to identify with this ordinary little corner of England, this pretty but unremarkable village, to feel it was home, and that in changing my life so dramatically I had, in a way, come home. Then something quite magical and serendipitous happened. I had become interested in genealogy and was tracing some of my family on the internet. Despite my southern-suburban upbringing and many years in London, my parents and extended family are originally from the north east, mainly Northumberland, and I hadn’t expected to find any deviation from generations of Geordies. It transpired, however, that no-one had ever actually known where my maternal great grandfather had come from; he’d been a seaman and had died young, away from home, and his wife had died shortly after, leaving very young children who didn’t know much about their parents. Family lore tells us he wasn’t from Tyneside, but none of us had thought any further than maybe Durham, or if he was really foreign, Yorkshire. But thanks to the online census, I discovered he was born about 8 miles away from where I now live – close to the hospital where his great great granddaughter was born, some 130 years later. He was a Suffolk boy. So I mentally raise a glass to my Great Grandad as I traipse through landscape that he would have known, with my children who have always known, with complete certainty, that this is their home.