The Fifteen-Year Itch.

We landed at Heathrow on a Tuesday morning in late August, and Richard was in a cab to the City before I’d properly found my feet on English soil. There was a meeting — there’s always a meeting — and I kissed him goodbye at the terminal, told him I’d be fine, and stood there with two suitcases, a hand luggage bag, and a thirteen-year-old who was looking at England with the careful, guarded expression of someone who has been told this is going to be wonderful and is reserving judgement.

Gemma had her headphones in for most of the flight. She’d cried properly when we said goodbye to her friends at Dio — the kind of cry that comes from somewhere real and doesn’t apologise for itself — and by the time we boarded in Auckland she’d gone quiet in the way teenagers go quiet when they’ve decided that further protest is futile and they’re simply going to endure. She was born in Auckland. She has never lived anywhere else. England, to Gemma, is a place her parents are inexplicably from, that features heavily in the books she reads, and that is apparently where she lives now.

The hand luggage bag contained: our passports and documents, a small greenstone pendant I’d bought in Hokitika fifteen years ago and would not have trusted to the hold under any circumstances, two jars of Pic’s peanut butter, and one well-worn copy of The Luminaries that Gemma had been rereading for comfort since we started packing the boxes in Milton Road. You cannot get Pic’s here. We were not ready to accept that.

I cried a bit in the arrivals hall. Quietly, to myself, while a family held up a banner for their grandmother and London carried on around me. I’d been holding it together through a month of packing and farewells, and apparently Heathrow Terminal 3 was where it gave way. Gemma noticed and said nothing, which was its own kind of kindness. She is thirteen and occasionally wiser than me.

How It Started

Richard and I got married in 1997. We’d met at Sheffield — him doing economics, me doing land economics, both of us ending up at the same terrible pub on the same Wednesday night in our second year, which is the kind of origin story that makes for a good wedding speech and a slightly implausible film. We graduated, we got married, and then we did what a certain kind of young British couple did in the late nineties: we looked at each other, looked at London, looked at each other again, and thought: not yet.

The New Zealand idea came from Richard’s Uncle Geoffrey. Geoff had spent the better part of two decades at Lloyds Bank in London — solid career, good trajectory, the whole City package — and had reached a point, sometime in his mid-forties, where he’d decided he’d had enough of the hamster wheel. He’d taken a senior posting at ASB Bank in Wellington, arrived, discovered that New Zealand suited him rather precisely, and had been quietly evangelical about it to anyone who’d listen ever since. He was also, not incidentally, a rugby obsessive of the first order — the prospect of living in a country where the national sport was taken with genuine seriousness was, I suspect, not a minor factor in his decision to stay.

He’d been encouraging Richard to come out for the better part of a year. “Just try it,” was essentially his message. “You can always come back.” And then in early 1998, he mentioned that ASB had a role that might suit Richard, and that he could put in a word if Richard was interested. Richard came home that evening and said: what do you think?

I said yes before he’d finished the sentence. I was twenty-three. I had a degree, a new husband, and absolutely no compelling reason to stay in England just then. The adventure seemed entirely manageable. Two years, maybe three. An OE. We’d come back with good stories and a suntan.

That was fifteen years ago. Geoff, for his part, is still there.

Wellington, Briefly

Wellington first — eighteen months in Khandallah, up in the hills above the harbour. I loved it with a completeness that surprised me. The walking, the wind off the Cook Strait, the café culture, the flat whites, the human scale of a city where everything is somehow within reach. I found work as a PA for a financial adviser at AMP — not exactly the career I’d mapped out, but I was twenty-three in a new country and it paid the rent and got me into an office where people talked about money and investment and I learned, by proximity, rather a lot. Geoff came to dinner twice, both times with a bottle of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc and strong opinions about Jenny Shipley, Christian Cullen and the Hurricanes, and by the second visit I’d decided he was one of my favourite people.

Then Richard’s role moved to Auckland and we moved with it.

Auckland, In Stages

We landed in Auckland in 2000 and rented a small bungalow on Croydon Road in Mt Eden while we found our feet. It was the right size for two people at the time, which is to say it was quite small, and we were cheerful about it in the way that you are when you’re young and everything still feels provisional and the city outside the window is interesting enough to compensate for almost any shortcoming in your kitchen.

Gemma was born that year — March 19th, at National Women’s Hospital in Greenlane, three weeks before my own twenty-fifth birthday, as if she’d decided to get in early before I started feeling old. She arrived in a city that would shape her entirely. She has never known anything else.

By the time Gemma was two we’d outgrown Croydon Road, and we moved up to a rented villa on Henley Road, which was an entirely different proposition: high ceilings, a big verandah, a garden that was slightly beyond us both and which we threw ourselves at anyway. The kind of house you grow into. I’d joined Bayleys by then, down in Maritime Square near the Viaduct — their Commercial team, starting in marketing — and was beginning to understand Auckland property from the inside. Richard was embedded at ASB. We had a child and a villa and a Fraser's cafe habit and without quite noticing, we had a life.

Gemma started at Dio — Diocesan School for Girls in Epsom — in the Junior School, and stayed there through primary, intermediate and into senior school. Thirteen years of the same school, which in New Zealand is entirely possible because Dio runs the full stretch from Pre-School to Year 13. She played hockey and netball. She had friends she’d known since she was five. She was, in every way that mattered, an Auckland girl.

In 2006 we bought. Another villa — Milton Road, Mt Eden, which is about as close to Henley Road as you can get without actually being on it. Bigger, with a better garden, and the very particular satisfaction of owning the walls. We were supposed to have left for England four years earlier. Then two years earlier. Then the year before. Each time something extended, or the timing was wrong, or — honestly — neither of us could quite bring ourselves to do it. Each time I was privately relieved. The Milton Road garden. Saturday morning walks up Mt Eden followed by flat whites at Circus Circus. Gemma’s hockey fixtures. Dinners at Molten. The life.

And then it was 2013, Richard’s contract had run its natural course, Gemma was thirteen and about to start Year 9 at Dio, and there was no good reason left not to go. Gemma did not agree that ‘no good reason not to go’ was an adequate summary of the situation. We had a number of conversations about this. They were not always short, and not always calm.

The First Evening

Mum was waiting at the Horsham house when we arrived, which I hadn’t asked her to do but which was entirely typical and exactly right. She’d brought a Marks & Spencer bag: milk, biscuits, washing up liquid, tulips, and a copy of the previous Saturday’s Times with an article she’d saved because she thought I’d like it. We sat on the floor together — no furniture yet — and drank tea from mugs she’d thought to bring, and she talked about the neighbours and Tom and John (my brothers) and the hydrangeas, and somewhere in that conversation something in my chest just let go. I hadn’t realised how tightly I’d been holding everything.

Gemma was in what would be her bedroom, on the air mattress, headphones in, texting Auckland friends on a time difference that meant they were still in yesterday. I looked in on her once. She had her phone propped on her chest and the determined self-sufficiency of someone who has decided to get through this on her own terms. She has had that quality since roughly her third birthday. It is both her most useful trait and, occasionally, her most exhausting one.

From down the hall, at one point, came the faint sound of what I’m fairly sure was the Warriors’ latest season highlights package. Richard had invested in season tickets since 2011, which happened to be the year they made the Grand Final run, and much to my delight, my daughter had picked up a familiar refrain amongst a lot of Kiwis - "those bloody Warriors". Devoid of any remaining emotional energy, I decided not to intervene with my usual lecture on her language.

Richard got home around eight — the meeting had gone well, the particular buoyancy he has after a good day in a room — and found me and Mum still on the floor with cold tea and an open packet of biscuits. He sat down next to me, loosened his tie, and said: “Right then. We’re back.”

“We’re back,” I said.

We got a takeaway. Watched something forgettable on his laptop. Went to sleep. The end of something and the beginning of something else, the way those moments usually are.

A Month In

The furniture arrived. Richard has slid back into London commuting life with the ease of a man who genuinely enjoys a commute, which remains one of the more baffling things about him. I’ve registered with three agencies, started getting my head around a London property market I last engaged with as a twenty-three-year-old graduate with approximately no experience (it has changed; I had not quite appreciated how much), found a yoga studio, and established that the Waitrose ten minutes’ drive away does a reasonable job of filling the Pic’s-shaped hole in our lives.

Gemma starts at Millais in a fortnight — my old school, which she views as a moderately interesting coincidence and I view as quietly lovely. She has opinions about the uniform. They are specific and not especially flattering to the design team. She has asked, three times, whether they play hockey and netball. They do. This has not resolved everything, but it has resolved something.

I left England at twenty-three with a new husband, no real plan, and an uncle-in-law’s tip about a bank in Wellington. I’ve come back at thirty-eight with the same husband, a daughter who considers herself a New Zealander, fifteen years of a life built somewhere else, and the slightly vertiginous feeling of starting again in a city I left before I’d quite finished growing up.

I don’t know exactly what this blog is going to be. A record of the re-entry, maybe. What you notice when you come back to somewhere you left before you knew yourself properly. What it’s like to be thirty-eight and starting again, with a husband who’s already back at full stride and a teenager who’s grieving a country she can’t quite explain to the girls she’s about to meet at Millais. And a garden on Milton Road I’m already dreaming about.

Watch this space. We’re all finding our feet.