The run up to the August day we set off for Heathrow Airport was so impossibly hectic, I’m not sure if I had given much thought to what we were moving to. What we were moving from had been all-consuming for those past few months since Steve was offered the job.
I felt like I had done little except packing since Easter: we had packed the boxes to be shipped to Malawi; we had packed the boxes to go into storage for two years; we had done at least ten trips to the Sue Ryder shop with car loads of baby, toddler and domestic items we no longer needed; we had sold most of our furniture on Gumtree and passed family heirlooms to relatives for safekeeping. We were organising our ‘new life’ while still keeping up the rapid pace of our ‘old life’: two full-time jobs, the children’s school lives plus clubs, I was still on the crêche rota at St Mark’s and we wanted to spend time with Mum while we were still around the corner. There were also friends we needed to see before we left.
Piran was struggling to process what was about to happen. He became angry frequently and even ran away once at a very crowded Science Festival. In church one time he exhibited his frustration by tipping out all the percussion instruments from their box and threatening the other children with his nerf gun. Don’t even mention the vaccination appointments with the nurse! Piran was so adamant that he wasn’t having the second round of injections that he refused to get out of the car, pulling on my hair and clinging to the safety belt. Once physically manoeuvred inside the surgery, after kicking the nurse, he ran down the corridor, through the waiting area, tipping over tables and toys as he went, screaming, “And I’m NOT moving to Africa!” For a short period of his life, he was hard work. He fought us at every turn. Why? Because we were making him leave all that he knew and loved and was too little to grasp why. Izzy had the same anxieties, but she was old enough to comprehend how this experience could enhance her life, rather than limit it. Piran did not.
My penultimate month at Winchcombe, right in the throes of packing, sorting and sending documentation out to Malawi, we received ‘the call’ at school – a two-day inspection from the following day – an inspection where we were desperately hoping to lift the school from ‘requires improvement’ to ‘good’. And I seemed to have been selected to attend a good number of the meetings with the Ofsted inspectors. It was a high octane week and it would be fair to say my stress levels were very high. Thankfully that time we felt we were able to show off our school as we knew it to be. And the outcome was a reward for all our hard work: Good, with significant outstanding areas. Phew – it had gone well and that was one less stressful thing to face before departure.
Once term ended and we had said goodbye to our four schools, we sold both cars. Not to mention the small issue of trying unsuccessfully to let our beloved Edwardian home. Exactly one week before our departure date we finally had an offer to rent, fully furnished, at the asking price, just as we’d taken the drastic decision to put the house on the market. On that last Monday in the UK we were offered 85% of the asking price to buy (empty of course) and the removal company was due at 9 the next morning! We had one evening to make that momentous decision: to let or to sell? We sold. But none of these decisions seemed so momentous, next to the big one we had already made.
On the Friday we flew!
It wasn’t until we got on that plane to Johannesburg that we actually exhaled. This was it: we were really moving to Africa. 8 suitcases in the hold, two expectant children sitting between us, we’d actually made it to the plane. So many years of talking about moving overseas, we’d taken the plunge. After tearful farewells and, for me, many days of wishing we had made a different decision, there was now no going back.
You know that feeling when you get on a roller-coaster and the safety harness clicks into place? A rush of adrenalin flows through your veins and you anticipate the thrill of the ride… you know there will be sudden plummets where everything in you wishes you had stood to the side and watched as the ride whizzed by…but it’s too late. You’ve committed to the course and acceptance is your only recourse. Well, it felt like that.
From the glint in Steve’s tired eyes, I could see no regrets, no fears, barely any apprehension even. I had plenty for both of us. And I was dealing with the kids’ nerves. ‘Africa’ had come to mean so many things in my conversations with Izzy and Piran. ‘Malawi’ had taken on an identity of its own – some borrowed from guide books and Google, but mainly the invention of our imaginations. We had more questions than answers: this is always the hardest part of change – you know exactly what you are leaving behind and little of what you are moving to, and in our case, we had never even been there;
Kieron had sent us some photos of our house, so we did have an idea what it would be like, but you don’t really know until you’re in a place, do you? I was less worried about meeting Malawian people: I love people, all people. And I had lived for a year in Belleville, one of the most multicultural arrondissements of Paris, where I had made many African French friends. People are people; they live, they love, they lose, they learn. But what about day-to-day life, Blantyre’s surroundings, the country of Malawi itself?
As the plane inched north from Johannesburg, over the Drakensberg Mountains, then Mozambique towards Southern Malawi, I could not have been more surprised by the landscape opening up beneath me. The city gave way to countryside. Countryside gave way to rolling hills, which in turn gave way to mountains. And as my eyes tried to absorb all I could see out of the plane window, I was amazed how green it appeared. No scorched earth. No desert scenes. But instead, peaks and rivers. So much to be explored…
As we began our descent we began to make out villages, communities, the edge of the city, surrounded by hills and mountains. Then the terminal of Chileka Airport was there below us: small, basic and looking very dated. But this was it – we were really here! We stepped off the plane straight onto the tarmac (no airport buses or air-conditioned corridors). And it was very warm, but not unbearably hot. We paused for a photo…our family on Malawian soil for the first time…the adventure had begun.
Out of Africa: Yorkshire adventure 