First Person: Inspired by solitude in the States

When my husband, John, was offered a job in Boston my initial reaction was ‘no way’. We were happy in Oxford, and we’d already lived in Seattle for four years (our middle child, Sam, was born there).

Then we realised this would be our last chance to live abroad before our children – then aged 12,10 and 7 – hit GCSEs and A-levels. And so, in July 2010, we packed up our possessions – including the family dog – and relocated to the States.

Our rental house in an affluent Boston suburb was an ugly mock-Tudor beast, but unlike our Victorian terraced Oxford home, it felt spacious and airy, set on a corner plot, with a generous lawn that stretched round to a paved backyard, complete with basketball hoop.

We arrived in mid-July. Everything was so leafy, so sunny, so pleasant. The elementary school was a short walk across a park and beyond that was a local shopping street with an independent bookshop, a café, a yoga studio, and not one but two artisan bakeries.

Life, we felt sure, was going to be amazing here. Once we’d settled in.

I had not bargained for what it would take to ‘settle’ a family of five plus dog into a new life abroad. I’d last relocated with a baby and toddler, and had no idea about the reality of yanking three older children away from their friends, family, schools, routines.

At any given point during that first summer, one or other of my children – often all three – would be yelling or sobbing.

They were wracked with insecurities, homesickness, regrets, accusations. They turned on each other: bickered, fought, drew blood more than once.

The gorgeous sunshine became sweltering, humid, 100 degree heat. John, working a 40-minute drive away in a demanding role in a security software firm, seemed almost completely absent.

Once they started school I also found that I had not anticipated how isolated I was as a self-employed writer.

I had decided to write a novel, but with nobody even to meet for coffee, the days felt wide and very blank.

Some days the only people I saw were the teams of Guatemalan gardeners, hired to mow the immaculate lawns of the empty daytime houses.

It turned out that solitude is brilliant for novel writing. I finished my debut, The Missing One, during those two years in Boston. And the kids did settle – well, two of them.

My eldest, Izzie, blossomed, academically and socially (suburban middle schoolers, it turned out, led a far more protected life than Oxford secondary schoolers: no makeup or boys, and it was still ok to play with dolls). Now 16, she sees this as the happiest time of her life.

Our youngest, Ted, also settled fast. He was the first to adopt an American accent and rejoiced in how far behind his classmates were in ‘math’ (in the States, they start school a year later than in the UK).

But our middle child, Sam loathed everything about America. He worried incessantly: he didn’t know the games they played at ‘recess’; his accent marked him out as agonisingly different; he was – and remained for those entire two years – beside himself with misery and resentment. Now 14, he still growls that America ‘ruined his life’.

We moved home in 2012 because John’s job changed again, and also we wanted Izzie to start GCSEs back here. And though our time as suburban ex-pats wasn’t easy, I don’t regret it for a moment.

We learned so much about our children (especially Sam); and we had great adventures – we took trips to Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon; to Mexico, Montreal, and Manhattan. We skied in New Hampshire, ate crabs in Maine, spotted whales off Cape Cod.

But that early feeling of displacement, isolation and anxiety – the eeriness of those empty suburban days – stayed with me, long after our boxes were unpacked in Oxford.

And although we have been home for three years, now, I never really left that mock-Tudor house, because my second novel, The Other Child, is set – you guessed it – in an affluent Boston suburb.

Each day for the past two years, I’ve sat at my rainy Oxford desk, looking out on to that wide, silent street, and feeling, again, the anxiety for my unhappy child, the alienation and homesickness – the sense of profound unease.

My main character is not me: Tess is a single mother to nine-year-old Joe; she’s a photographer, she has just married a glamorous American paediatric heart surgeon, and she’s unexpectedly pregnant.

But there are some similarities: Tess’s little boy is miserable, he cannot settle, she worries about him constantly; Greg is always away, always working; Tess misses her best friend, she feels exposed and uneasy.

But then, in that neat-lawned street, odd things start happening: someone is watching Tess’s house, the neighbours are acting weirdly, and worst of all, Tess discovers something that makes her wonder who, exactly, she has married… Fiction, in this case, might be stranger than life, but the two are inextricably tangled.

The Other Child by Lucy Atkins is available now and is published by Quercus