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 times, and I came to understand why black sheep are so often sent abroad by their families to start again. It does wonders for the character to cut the emotional ties that bind you to places and people. We produced two sons who grew like 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.

As one always does, we thought of ourselves as immortal, so Sam's coronary at the age of fifty-two came like a bolt from the blue. With doctors warning of another one being imminent if he didn't change a lifestyle which involved too much travelling, 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 homeland.

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 time 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 time 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