Sujet 8 ♦ Sujet national, juin 2005, séries ES et S, LVI Sam landed a job 1 as overseas sales...

« Sujet 8 ♦ Sujet national, juin 2005, séries ES et S, LVI Sam landed a job 1 as overseas sales director for a shipping company which took us in turn to Hong Kong, Australia and South Africa.

They were good rimes, and I came to understand why black sheep are so often sent abroad by their families to start again.

lt does wonders for the character to eut the emotional ries that bind you to places and people.

We produced two sons who grew like s saplings in the never-ending sunshine and soon towered over their parents, and I could always find teaching jobs in whichever school was educating them. 10 1s 20 2S 30 As one always does, we thought of oursdves as immortal, so Sam's coronary at the age of fifty-two came like a boit from the blue.

With doctors warning of another one being imminent ifhe didn't change a lifestyle which involved too much travdling, too much entertaining of clients and too little exercise, we returned to England in the summer of '99 with no employment and a couple of boys in their late teens who had never seen their homdand. For no particular reason except that we'd spent our honeymoon in Dorset in '76, we decided to rent an old farmhouse near Dorchester which I found among the property ads in the Sunday Times before we left Cape Town.

The idea was to have an extended summer holiday while we looked around for somewhere more permanent to settle. Neither of us had connections with any particular part of England.

My husband's parents were dead and my own parents had retired to the neighbouring county of Devon and the balmy climate of Torquay.

We enrolled the boys at college for the autumn and set out to rediscover our roots. We'd done well during our rime abroad and there was no immediate hurry for either of us to find a job.

Or so we imagined. The reality was rather different.

England had changed [...] during the rime we'd been abroad, strikes were almost unknown, the pace of life had quickened dramatically and there was a new widespread affluence 2 that hadn't existed in the 70s.

We couldn't bdieve how expensive everything was, how crowded the roads were, how diflicult it was to find a parking space now that "shopping" had become the Brits' favourite pastime. Hastily the boys abandoned us for their own age group.

Garden fetes and village cricket were for old people.

Designer clothes and techno music were the order of the day, and clubs and theme pubs were the places to be seen, particularly those that stayed open into the early hours to show widescreen satellite feeds of world sporting fixtures. "Do you get the feding we've been left behind?" Sam asked glumly at the end of our fust week as we sat like a couple of pensioners on the patio of our rented farmhouse, watching some horses graze in a nearby paddock. 1.

Land a job: succeed in getting a job. 2.

Affluence: money and a good standard of living. "By the boys." 35 40 45 50 "No.

Our peers 3 • I was talking to Jock Williams on the phone today" - an old friend from our Richmond days - "and he told me he made a couple of million last year by selling off one of his businesses." He pulled a wry face.

"So I asked him how many businesses he had left, and he said, only two but together they're worth ten million.

He wanted to know what 1 4 was doing so I lied through my teeth 5 ." I took time to wonder why it never seemed to occur to Sam that Jock was as big a fantasist as he was, particularly as Jock had been trumpeting "mega-buck sales 6 " clown the phone to him for years but had never managed to find the time - or money? - to fly out for a visit.

"What did you say?" "That we'd made a killing on the Hong stock market before it reverted to China and could afford to tak.e early retirement.

I also said we were buying an eight-bedroom house and a hundred acres in Dorset." "Mm." I used my foot to stir some clumps of grass growing between the cracks in the patio which were symptomatic of the air of tired neglect that pervaded the whole property.

"A brick box on a modern development more likely.

I had a look in an estate-agent's window yesterday and anything of any size is well outside our price range.

Something like this would cost around f 300,000 and that's not counting the money we'd need to spend doing it.... »