One day, Harry turns to me and says, “Do you ever get the feeling we’re just waiting for the Grim Reaper to call?” I know what he means. It’s as if the genie is out of the bottle and before you can say “mid-life crisis”, we climb aboard the roller-coaster that will only stop when we step off the plane onto the tarmac at Auckland airport.

And what a roller-coaster! Harry walks out of his job and is accepted onto a fast-track science teacher on-the-job training course. He lasts 10 weeks before he acknowledges it was the job not the profession that he needed to change and he applies himself to finding employment in New Zealand. Meanwhile I go full-time for a year and spend it finishing off or handing over projects and recruiting and mentoring my replacement. The children become increasingly nervous as the move gets closer until Liam, our 13 year-old, repeatedly tells us it will ruin his life. This cuts the deepest even though I comfort myself with the thought that “He’s a teenager, I’m his parent - hey, it’s my job to ruin his life”. But he’s only reflecting the bit in all of us that appreciates what we’re leaving behind. I have moments of blind panic.

With everything finalised and flights booked, we have three weeks to go. A final Christmas with my family: strangely subdued with absolutely none of the usual family tensions surfacing. My mum is unbelievably supportive: it’s not until I see her face and hear her words on the video taken at our London goodbye party that the reality of being on the other side of the planet from her hits me. I cannot watch it. My sister on the other hand, has never been one to hide her feelings and my departure is clearly a huge life event for her that we must all experience and support her through…I will miss her more than anyone.

People turn out in huge numbers to say goodbye. Friends and colleagues whom we have accumulated over half a lifetime, people who have known me through all the various stages of my life. Most poignantly, an aunt and uncle, in their mid-80’s and both recently experiencing very poor health.

Our final day in UK dawns: a cold but clear winter’s day in January. Our house is empty and packed into a container to arrive eight weeks behind us. We have a suitcase each and have stayed with my mother for the last supper. My brother will inherit our car on the condition that he takes us to Heathrow – one last traffic jam on the M25 and goodbye to both brother and car. The flight over was (fortunately) uneventful: the highlight being shopping at Hong Kong airport (fantastic silk pyjamas at bargain basement prices).

And we are still lucky and privileged. Our migration has been planned and smooth. Our reasons for moving were positive and forward-looking. We have brought resources with us. We have a warm welcome awaiting us from the New Zealand contingent of our family. The adventure has begun!

Palmerston North: first impressions

Then we are off on our own driving the Desert Highway to Palmerston North. We are treated to a fantastic view of Ruapehu standing in snow-covered majesty above a blistering Lake Taupo. The children are unimpressed: they reckon the view from New Mills over Kinder Scout is better. Apart from this, the scenery is as I remember from our holiday: green and bumpy, with tree ferns and spiky plants with striking blue flowers, very little traffic and lots of fruit stalls by the roadside.

We are keen to get to balmy Palmy so don’t hang about: we have all the time in the world for the tourism thing. Our first sight is of the high-rise buildings around the Square against the backdrop of mountains and “the biggest wind farm in the southern hemisphere”. We’re big fans of wind farms so the omens are good. Driving into town, our impressions continue to be positive: plenty of facilities, clustered and easily accessible. Remember, we have come from a two-horse town in Derbyshire with basic, and I mean basic, amenities. Even though Manchester, a vibrant, cosmopolitan city, was on our doorstep it always felt a bit of a drag even to get to the cinema. Giving the children independent access to facilities as they enter their teens was a big part of the rationale for leaving New Mills: however, it’s a bit too soon for them to appreciate this. All they want is an internet cafe so that they can see if any of their old school-friends are on-line via MSN.

We had pre-e-booked a two-bedroomed unit at a local motel. An exchange of emails establishes that our Hostess is also a Pom and that we are “looking forward to meeting each other.” It struck me very forcibly that, even as I was saying goodbye to lifelong friends in the UK, this tentative relationship with a motel owner on the other side of the world was soon likely to be the closest human contact I had outside my immediate family. Fortunately, and from what I gather, by sheer fluke, our motel owners couldn’t be more welcoming and helpful.

Come Monday morning, we’re all still jet lagged so Harry is first to arrive at his workplace and the children and I are at the Victoria Esplanade in time to see the attendants at work readying the park for another busy day. Another of the reasons for our move was that I wanted to escape the sedentary lifestly I felt we were forced to lead in New Mills. New Zealand’s reputation for outdoor living is well-earned: I have been able to incorporate plenty of exercise into my daily routines. Not least, we use bicycles a lot since Palmerston is the ideal town to cycle in – very flat with everything (work, school, shopping, leisure facilities) only a short bike ride away. Anyway, I leave the children playing while I run along by the river. It is beautiful: the sun is shining, the scenery is fantastic, everything seems so fresh and clean. (I am amazed by the quality of the play equipment, the lack of vandalism of the play area, the free barbeques: being cleaned!) These morning visits to the park give me a space at the start of each day when I can focus on the major and urgent tasks to establish our new life.

Day 1 task is to get access to cash. We have already opened an account, so I go to the bank and within half an hour have EFTPOS sorted out. The person who deals with us is friendly, knowledgeable and efficient. Maybe we’ve been lucky so far but without exception, as I have dealt with the various bureaucracies necessary to set up the life support systems we need, from buying a pushbike to a house, to setting up energy agreements or a mobile phone contract, we have had uniformly good service. This contrasts starkly with service in the UK: as we wound up our affairs with perhaps 20 different agencies, only one managed to get it right first time.

Day 2 task is to buy a car. Our motel Host, as it turns out, used to run a garage so he spends the afternoon with me looking around all the used car dealers. We narrow the choice down to two cars and I sign up with the dealer who offers me the best after-care package. A phone call to arrange insurance and we have wheels!

Day 3 task is to find somewhere more permanent to stay. After doing a tour of rental agents, I realise we don’t want to sign up to a 6 month rental agreement if we can help it and take a short term lease on the only property available: a condemned house within minutes walk of the Square. We can stay there for 6 weeks before it’s pulled down for redevelopment: this gets us out of the motel and gives me a bit of breathing space. We can move in at the end of next week. But it’s unfurnished and our container doesn’t arrive for another six weeks so I have to beg, borrow and buy cheap the basic necessities that we will need.

Running alongside all of this is the hardest task of all: being Best Friend to Liam and Roz. They are putting on a brave face but I know that they are desperately missing everyone back in the UK. I suspect that the pattern will be different for the adult and child members of the family. I am on an adrenaline high at the moment and anticipate some low points to come. The children (I hope) will settle into a new life and within six months will wonder why they ever thought New Mills was better. Meanwhile, Host and Hostess introduce us to Derek and Carolyn, from Oxford, who occupied the same motel room for 6 weeks last June while they went through what we’re doing now. Carolyn, it turns out, is the kind of gal who does all her research and is completely generous in sharing her experience with me. But almost the best thing about Carolyn is her children: Boy (aged 13) and Girl (aged 10) – same as mine. Boys therefore have several 13-year-old bonding sessions on Playstation and X-box and at the lido. Girls have found they share a fetish for annoying their older brothers. Both mine stop looking at me resentfully and Liam stops telling me interminably that I have “ruined his life”. Thank you Carolyn!

Beginning to settle in

Within a week of arriving in New Zealand, just as we were getting up one morning, we experienced our first earth tremour. It was centred in Wellington where evidently it was quite a big one and knocked stuff off supermarket shelves. Here in Palmy, it just moved the mattress across the divan and made the curtains wobble. The papers were full of it the following day – it being the anniversary of the big one in Wellington 150 years ago that created 10 acres of harbour-side real estate and another big one being long overdue. What with the dreadful Asian tsunami and several unusual tremours, the speculation is that the plates are gonna slip big style soon – tabloids are the same everywhere…

Non-Palmy New Zealanders sniff a bit at Palmerston North because it suffers the “fatal flaw” of not being near a beach. Well, it’s only 30 minutes from some fantastic beaches. We were recommended to go first to Waiterere which is a bit further away but is beautiful. You can drive your car straight onto the sand and along the beach for several kilometers in either direction. The beach is flat with gentle body-boarding waves and sand dunes to the beach baches and holiday homes where a thriving community hangs out. We have been twice to Foxton beach: both times it was quite windy and the beach is not so sandy as the others BUT it does have a very nice beach café. The closest beach is called Himatangi: probably the best surfing beach since it has lifeguards and a flagged area for safety. The papers regularly report that swimmers outside the flagged area are swept away by the rip tides so we constantly reinforce to Liam and Roz that they must stay inside the flagged areas when we go to Himatangi. The lifeguards boast that they’ve never lost anyone yet from within a flagged area: it’s not any safer but they have to limit the area they can keep an eye on. Harry’s brother in Auckland reported that they saw the boat go out one day to bring back a boy that was struggling too far out only to discover to their horror that it was infact their own son!

Zoning in on schools

Liam was definately into High School and, from the internet, had selected two possibles; Palmerston North Boys High School and Freyberg High School. PNBHS had said that their open enrolment was closed and we would need to have an interview with the Rector – yes, that is the flavour of Boys High: very “old school”, very strict BUT it has a very good reputation within New Zealand, both for academic results and sport (at one time, 25% of the All Blacks were old boys). Freyberg is much more laid-back, co-educational and was very happy to enrol Liam from New Mills. Liam was biased towards the Boys High because the people that he had met were going there. So we went along for an interview: they were very non-committal when I got there and asked me to leave him with them for half an hour so they could “run a few tests”. When I returned, it was all smiles and they offered him a place in an accelerated year 10 class! After that, Freyberg didn’t stand a chance so I cancelled his enrolment there. Whilst, Boys High wouldn’t have been my first choice for Liam, it would have been very difficult for me to turn down a place for him there given that he was so keen, I have already “ruined his life” by bringing him here in the first place and everyone we speak to (including current pupils) speaks so highly of it.

So far, it has worked out better than I could have hoped. Of course it was difficult at first: he spent a few days lunching on his own and wandering about looking at the happy groups of friends or returning to his form room early. This broke my heart but it didn’t seem to bother Liam unduly and he was enthusiastic about the work and clearly enjoying the challenge. He will be taking some equivalent GCSE’s this year so he has a heavy workload. Fortunately, this inspires him (and yes, I do know how lucky I am). His form teacher, an Englishman from Northampton, rang as part of the introductions to parents and seemed pleased with how Liam was settling in. Towards the end of week 2 he had established a rapport with a boy in his class, Jonathan, and was lunching with him and his friends. Whilst Liam still doesn’t seem to have the strong and easy friendships he had back in England, he seems happy enough and has links with several different groups reflecting his interests – football, music, computer games…

As for Roz, it was slightly more complicated. The consensus of people that I’d spoken to was that Roz really could go either way; be the oldest in last year of primary or the youngest in first year at Intermediate. Most people seemed to think that Intermediate is the great leveler and that she may be better off just starting there rather than doing a year at primary and then changing and doing another two years going over some of the same ground. So, with Harry’s mum, Anne, by our side, Roz and I went to Palmerston North Intermediate Normal School for their Open Enrolment day with an open mind. What we saw was truly impressive; we spoke to an extremely nice woman who is Deputy Principal and who convinced me that Roz’s particular style of learning (i.e. the exact opposite to her brother!) could be supported and as we walked around with Anne asking all the right questions, we all came away very excited by the prospect of Roz going there. On her first day she looked every inch the Kiwi school-girl in her sun hat and Roman sandals. She immediately hooked up with another new girl and they lunched together from day 1! She is, predictably enough, the most socially settled of any of us with a tight-knit “gang” and a best friend. She is flourishing at school in a way that I didn’t think she ever would in UK, with their emphasis on SATS and basic literacy and numeracy testing. Roz is quite sporty and the boost she gets to her self-esteem through her prowess in this field has paid dividends in other spheres at school.

The only issue for people new to the area is the school zoning system: most schools (particularly the ones with the best reputation) have home zones and it is quite difficult to gain entry if you live outside the home zone. Having said that, there are enough well-thought-of schools that I don’t feel any child will get a poor education in Palmerston North but if you have your heart set on a certain school, it is certainly easier to live in zone!

  contact Harry and Denise