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IF YOUR BACK IS AGAINST THE WALL, THE ONLY WAY IS FORWARD
Thursday 29 June seemed like such an
ordinary day. I drove the two younger children to their crèche, then took our
five-year-old eldest, Livia, to her speech therapist. We went to the playground
a little afterwards, before I drove her to school ready for lunchtime. When I
arrived, the head teacher asked me to join him in his office. He weirdly called
me by my first name, which I found slightly unsettling. For legal reasons, I will
not mention the name of the school, or any names of those who work in there,
but you can be sure that my account of events is accurate.
Back in winter, at the parent-teacher
meeting, Livia’s teachers had come forward to tell us Livia was showing some
behavioural issues and didn’t want to speak to them in French or German.
Throughout the time, we heard reports of Livia eating leaves, stones, paper,
and taking other children’s hats and throwing them over the fence onto the
footpath that runs next to the school. Having said that, I also noticed that the staff tended to exaggerate the
severity of typical children’s behaviour, for example at the end of the school
day, all children were assembled downstairs in the canteen, and if the noise
levels went above what I would call Thursday Afternoon At A Village Tearoom Level,
the lights would be switched off until the kids went back to being dull and apathetic
zombies again.
Livia’s German teacher in the school had
suggested we send her to a “Special School” in Germany, where they would “look
after her and help her find her place”. A German doctor, at a pre-school
inspection in Trier spent half an hour in his room with her and then declared
that she had autism. We were sure this was not the case – there are certain
very large pointers to autism, and she had very few of them.
If anything, we thought she had ADHD, but
these so-called professionals were pushing hard to make sure she ended up
isolated from the real world in an age where most education systems are closing
their separationist schools and moving towards a more integrated model. We were
quite adamant that if we reached the point where we were forced to send her to
her certain isolation, we would get the hell out of here.
It was at about this time we started
getting letters from the local school in Saarburg. The head teacher wanted us
to visit to enrol Livia there. Considering her complete aversion to German,
this was a non-starter. We are not totally sure how she decided to reject
German, but back in 2019, she was in the local child daycare centre here, and
she absolutely hated it, which is why we moved her to Luxembourg in the first
place. So enrolling her there would be a step backwards.
I remember very clearly, when she was just
two years and four months old, taking her back to her daycare centre in
Saarburg after Christmas. She entered her room and saw her educator, but then
she noticed the head of the school, a rather unsympathetic and businesslike woman.
Livia took one look at her and ran to me screaming. I resorted to get her out
of there and vowed never to put her in a local school again.
Fast-forward to 2023: all of this barrage
of various messages from different people in the school was leading up to
something, of course: the school was trying to expunge someone who didn’t fit
their Sound-Of-Music, Top-Of-The-League-Tables image, and the German authorities
were trying to reclaim one of their own from the clutches of the neighbouring
country.
The nurse at Livia’s school said she
thought we should send her to the paediatric unit in the CHL Hospital in
Luxembourg to have an assessment. We went there, and the very kind doctor spent
a few sessions getting to know Livia before writing out eight (that’s EIGHT)
prescriptions for various specialists and tests: child psychologist,
ophthalmologist, speech therapist, ergotherapist, ENT doctor, blood test, brain
scan, and one other I have forgotten. These would come in very handy if the
German authorities decided to follow through with their half-hour assessment
and request us to send Livia to a Special School.
For the next four months, I spent at least
two days in every week driving her from place to place, getting reports and
assessments done. After I told her about the German doctor’s rather rushed assessment,
the psychologist said she was convinced it wasn’t autism and found the method,
state-approved, to reach that conclusion extremely troubling. She also felt
that the school was trying to shake off their own responsibilities towards
Livia.
The speech therapist had ten sessions with
Livia, and she has advanced very far since those early days where she found it
hard to make conversation. We are coming to the conclusion that along with a
form of concentration deficiency, she also suffers from a crushing lack of
self-confidence; an almost pure form of perfectionism. I should add that all
these appointments had taken their toll on my working life: I am paid per hour,
so I had lost about €2000 in earnings through all these appointments, and spent
about €700 on them, which I wouldn’t get back, because Livia was seeing
specialists in Luxembourg. If I took her to Germany, I would lose even more
time at work, even if the service were free.
We came to an agreement with the school’s
head teacher that we would like to conclude her tests before we take any
action, and all this could last until way after the end of term. Our idea was,
as she was born at the end of August, it wouldn’t really harm her to repeat the
previous year while we did all the tests necessary to put in place a proper
regime. The head teacher seemed to think this was viable, but he would have to
run it past the board of directors. However, he didn’t think this was a big
issue. We even told him we would be prepared to pay more for any extra outside
help brought in.
In early March, we had another meeting with
the teachers, and one of them came to me in private to say she thought we
should take precautions and apply to some other schools, just in case. This filled
me with panic so I did just that. We wouldn’t hear until the end of June from
the other schools, but we had to hope we would get in somewhere, or Livia would
be condemned to her solitude.
In the meantime, Livia was struggling to
communicate with some of her teachers. A few of the after-school carers, who
spoke predominantly English, managed to have a good relationship with her,
plaiting her hair, getting her to draw and paint some elaborate pictures,
playing with the material, but the morning teachers in the learning hours
really saw her differently. They would say Livia would mess up other children’s
artworks, spread sand or soil across the classroom floor, or mix up all the
pieces from different sets of games. On occasion, she would soil herself and
have to be cleaned up. All this happened in the mornings, and was, as far as I
am concerned, a cry for help. The teachers just saw this as an annoyance, and
didn’t really relate it to her state of mind.
We were “summoned” to a meeting at the
local school in Saarburg to discuss Livia’s options there and we informed her
that under no circumstances would we be sending her to that school. She also
wanted to send Livia to a “Special School” in Trier, which would mean Livia’s
school holidays would be different to mine and to her siblings’. We might never
have a week free where we would be able to be a family again.
When we arrived at her office, with all
three children because I was going to take them to school directly after, Milda
walked in first. She is nearly three years younger than Livia, but this alleged
“pedagogical professional” astoundingly said “ah, this must be Livia.” I
replied “no, she’s 3 years old, and she’s called Milda.” First mistake.
Throughout the meeting, she didn’t once address Livia or even acknowledge her.
After 45 minutes in there, the three were
understandably getting a little boisterous. It was at this moment she at long
last spoke to them, rebuking them with the following remark: “this is a school,
we don’t play games here.” Second mistake. I spoke to the children myself,
saying “you heard her, there’s no fun allowed here!” She tried to backtrack,
but I wasn’t going to let her get away with such an outburst.
She then decided to go for the ultimate in
nonsensical power-play: “yes, well having seen her, I can definitely say she
would be better off in Trier at one of the special schools.” Third mistake. To
which Kirsten and I politely told her to take a long walk off a short pier.
We really hoped one of the other schools,
where English was the main teaching language, would come through, but
otherwise, another year in the same school repeating the year might help her
grow in confidence while we finished having her assessed. It was the lesser of
the two evils, the other being sent to a German school where she would most
likely flounder and lose any confidence she had picked up.
In mid-June, we received news from one of
the English-language schools we had applied to: they were sorry to inform us
that Livia had not made the cut. This was a disappointment to us, but having
filled out the enrolment questionnaire, which was clearly designed to spot a
child likely to reduce its ranking in the national table of scholarly
excellence, we were hardly surprised.
The other English-language school wrote to
us soon after, to say that she was on a waiting list and we would be informed
when a place came free. That might not be for months or even next year, meaning
that our hopes were firmly pinned on her current school. I asked the head
teacher, and he said all the paperwork would be done and he would inform me
when the board of directors had given the green light. I presumed this meant we
were going to be all right.
I had already planned the summer holiday to
Denmark from 20 July to 8 August down to the second, including stopovers in
northern Germany, ferries, three different rentals, and a birthday lunch for my
50th with my good friend Gustav, who had a house 200m from our rented apartment
on our final week. I had started telling the children about our impending trip,
and showing them pictures of where we were going.
I had also planned to return to Denmark a
few weeks later at the end of August for Gustav’s wedding. On that note, our
other mutual friends had arranged his bachelor party which would take place the
same weekend as my 50th birthday, and it would be a pretty special
time – fishing, hanging around on the beach, camping, and smoking a succulent
piece of meat for 24 hours. I had even got the perfect ruse for his surprise: I
would meet him, take him out for lunch, go for a walk, while other friends
would set up a gorgeous party scene in his backyard overlooking the Baltic Sea
before taking him off to Copenhagen for a night of camping and merriment around
the fire.
But all that was about to be pulled from
under our feet.
On Thursday 29 June, I stepped into the
head teacher’s office. He took a deep breath, invited me to take a seat, and
began:
“It is with the deepest regret and
frustration that I am charged with informing you that the board of directors
will not agree to let Livia remain in the school next year. They don’t think
it’s something this school can handle. We don’t have the space to cater for a
Special Educational Needs child here – as you see, we are already struggling
with the space we have. I am truly sorry, as I thought they were going to agree
to it.”
His eyes were moist and he was holding back
some emotion, but I could tell he regretted ever leading me to believe it would
get the go-ahead. I called Kirsten while I was in his office so that he could
deliver the news twice – it was the least he owed me. Kirsten gave him a
diatribe I don’t think I’ve ever heard her deliver. She went absolutely
berserk, and rightly so. She felt betrayed and let down. He advised us to write
a letter of appeal to the board of directors.
I left the school, went to my car and let
out the most anguished sounds I have ever let forth from deep inside my soul. I
knew the road had reached its end. This was the point where Livia was sentenced
to a life of unfulfillment and ordinariness. She would never find herself – her
anxiousness would manifest itself and she would forever be stigmatised by her
so-called “condition”.
It was just before that horrendous meeting
that the leader from the local school in Saarburg sent a menacing email telling
us “time is pressing.” Later on, I found it rather suspicious to get it at that
moment, and my suspicions were confirmed when our neighbour, who works at the
same school, said in a passing conversation that she had heard our application
had been rejected.
In the days that followed, we decided to
fall back on other contingency plans that we had considered were unlikely to be
required, but we should have some anyway, and that included a list of countries
that would be acceptable to us both. My list was a lot longer than Kirsten’s
but we had two countries in common: Ireland and Spain.
I looked on the International Schools
Database at various cities in Spain, and did some research on the Irish
education system. Both seemed viable, but it was the cost of living and
especially property prices that swayed us towards Spain. Also, it was going to
be a city, not a glorified village in the middle of nowhere that we would move
to – we are city people at heart, and after 15 years here, it was time to move
back to our roots.
I stumbled on a very revealing fact:
Spain’s third city, Valencia, has three times more international schools than
the entire country of Luxembourg, and ten times more than our entire state in
Germany. This alone is an appalling indictment of the lack of educational
infrastructure and the unimaginative scarcity of choice in this area. When we
consider Luxembourg is home to almost three-quarters non-native people, it
starts to really exasperate me that the pitifully low number of educational
facilities is woefully oversubscribed.
It is also an element of shame that one of
the pillars of European integration, the freedom of movement of people, is at
the national level, just a sham. The shining light on the hill of European
identity, that we can live and work in, fall in love in, be educated in any
other European country, is not real. It is kind of a cross between Potemkin and
Schrödinger – it’s there but it isn’t, it’s enshrined in law but it’s not
carried out. You see, in Luxembourg, if you want to work in many sectors, you
are required to have a certain level of Luxembourgish language skills, even
though French and German are also official languages, and English and
Portuguese are pretty prevalent too.
Also, many jobs require certain
qualifications to fill these posts, with some countries (let’s be honest,
everything to the west of the former Iron Curtain) making it mandatory to have
locally recognised certificates. This has caused a crisis of recruitment in
many sectors of employment. But this isn’t unique to Luxembourg: this is being
replicated all over Europe. That’s how EU member states keep immigration down,
and one of the reasons the UK was so popular: because before Brexit, it didn’t
apply such rules. Two of the sectors affected by this are education and
medicine. There are so few psychiatrists catering to youth in Luxembourg, that
they are sent to Belgium or Germany for treatment. Also, there are difficulties
recruiting native speakers to teach foreign languages. Imagine a country like
Denmark, where a qualified Spanish teacher from Spain needs to speak Danish to
teach their own language in a state school.
A week after the atrocity at Livia’s
school, I came to pick her up for the final time, just before their end-of-term
party. I really didn’t feel like standing there watching the kids give the
parents a performance when I knew Livia would be a bystander. I was sure they
were quietly relieved, too, in a macabre way.
And a few days later, I flew to Valencia on
a reconnaissance mission: I went to view a potential school for all three
children and to sign in at various rental agencies. The school itself was
ultra-modern, had bigger and better facilities including sports facilities, a
theatre, and a lot of technology. I was dumbfounded at the difference from
Livia’s school, where they weren’t even in possession of a blade of real grass
in the grounds. And it wasn’t as expensive.
Rents in the city weren’t cheap, but less
than Luxembourg for much bigger places. We would probably start off with a
short-term rent and in the meantime find a more permanent place where we could
ship our possessions to.
I resolved to get the ball rolling.
Upon my return, I started my research. We
put the house up for sale, and started sorting out our stuff into two
categories: what we would take by car in August, and what we would leave here
packed up for when we moved in to a longer-term place. I cancelled my office
contract with the coworking place, and looked for another one in Valencia.
Another point here: there are three times as many coworking places in Valencia
as in Luxembourg.
This is the right place to go, as I can
find another place to work much more easily if we need to shift the centre of
activity to another area of the city. Furthermore, if the school doesn’t work
out, we have so much more choice.
I
had also planned a party on 27 August to celebrate my 50th birthday
earlier in the month, as well as our 20th wedding anniversary on 6
September, and Livia’s 6th birthday on 29 August. It was to take
place at a hillside venue with beautiful views of the Saar valley. I had
already sounded out a band to play, and we had written out the invitations.
This was also a victim of circumstance.
The realisation that we needed to leave was
traumatising – we had finally got things sorted in our lives: the garden was
now almost perfectly how I had planned and conceived it over the last 13 years;
I had a wonderful little office to work in, where my ideas were flowing; I had
started to regain some of my pre-children and pre-Covid social life, meeting up
with old acquaintances again; and I had established a burnishing reputation in
Luxembourg for my professional services, being called on by some of the
country’s most influential citizens. I was also continuing in my active support
of Ukrainians in the country, and had some big ideas.
All of this was swept out of the door by a
dismissive wave of a hand in a school board room. The period between receiving
this news and arriving at a new destination is an oxymoronic and multi-layered
sensation:
First, there is a mix of utter fury and
resentment that everything you know and have built up has been taken away from
you. You think about all the people, places and events that you will no longer
be part of.
Then there is the sheer panic about the
amount of work you need to do in such a short timeframe – find a new place to
live, arrange schools, hire a container to throw out all the stuff you can’t
take with you, pack up your belongings, call various people to arrange a house
sale, plot a way of getting to your new destination, cancel all your
subscriptions, arrange passports for your children, sign out of social and
municipal organisations, arrange for someone to feed your cat for a few weeks
until you can come back and get him, close bank accounts, and the list goes on.
Following this, there is the feeling of the
unknown: how will the children adapt? Can we find a place to live? Are we able
to cope with the stress of it all? Will we have enough time to clear out
thirteen years of life in a house and move it all to Spain?
And finally, there is the long goodbye. You
spend more time in places you like to be: a kind of drawn-out attack of nostalgia.
We spent every evening in our garden playing with the children, or sitting in
one of the numerous seating places dotted around the garden, looking out at the
view and noticing things we never did before, such as finally seeing our
hibiscus blooming, which it hadn’t done for the past 8 years. I went to the
Danish café in Neudorf more frequently, I took a few detours in the car to see
some of the old places I used to visit, I looked more intently at everything to
try to remember it. I took a lot more photos, although it will be a while before
I will be able to bring myself to look at them.
Moving house will bring about some
difficult decisions that you have to take in cold blood. There are certain
pieces of memorabilia you collect during your lifetime that were nice to keep
at the time as a souvenir, but you maybe shouldn’t hang on to them anymore. A
bottle of very strong alcohol that I received on a hilarious trip around
Slovakia; some notes from my raucous A-Level Law class in 1991; some trinkets I
bought on various excursions.
Then there was a box of old papers and
cards from years past that linked to an occasion, such as a remarkable Georgian
restaurant in Moscow, a pub in a small Scottish village where we had a wild
night, a youth hostel in a haunted castle in the Black Forest, the bus timetable
of a route I took in the mountains of Andalusia, a page from a Polish phone
book with the number of someone I regarded as very special, a rather
flirtatious note tucked into a menu from an admirer in Prague.
These are things I couldn’t part with, as
they are etched on my soul, but there were other things that I had to let go
of. The memories will grow fainter or even die, but you can’t keep hold of
every morsel of your existence.
All this has made me understand the plight
of refugees. I am lucky in that I don’t have to head off in a hurry and leave
everything behind; but the feelings that they evoke and the impressions that I
have are similar: I am not leaving on my own terms, I am abandoning the comfort
and familiarity of my home, my professional and leisure activities and telling
myself it’s better where I’m going. I am trying hard to convince myself that
it’s the right thing to do. I am jumping off a cliff and hoping for a soft
landing.
Which brings me to the saga of how we found
our new home: upon hearing the news, I knew I needed to get something sorted
straight away, but I refused to compromise. I had always promised myself that
if we were going to leave our lovely house, it would have to be something very
special indeed. I would go as far as to say that the only reason we remained
here is because of our house – the garden has been my life’s labour over the
last 13 years, and has seen so many changes.
From being just a plain parcel of grass
with a couple of walnut trees at the top, my garden now has 30 trees, including
a majestic hanging cedar, two cherry trees, four apple trees, a tulip tree, and
the queen of the garden, a magnificent two-coloured maple that provides dappled
shade on our terrace. There are blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, sloes,
redcurrants, roses, cypresses, and even a magnolia so rare, you can count the
number of species in the country on one hand. There is a pond with a bridge
surrounded by pampa grasses and syringa, and just below it a seating area made
up of slate stones in a semicircle where roses and catkin grow side-by-side.
So as you can imagine, I’m not going to
give this place up so easily. If we were going to move, I would do everything I
could to assure we found something special. Since my youth, where I made some
awful life choices, I resolved to reverse every negative or regretful
occurrence that affected me or those around me by taking affirmative action.
This was one of those times.
I went to the main real estate website in
Spain, Idealista, and began to search for places to rent within budget. Many of
them were really good for the rate, especially if you compare them with what is
on offer in Luxembourg for the same amount. I wrote to a few of the agents, but
I heard nothing back. Which is why I decided to go to Valencia for a couple of
days myself. Firstly, I wanted to make sure it was the right choice, but
secondly, I wanted to personally visit some of the agents myself, just to make
sure they knew I was serious.
One of the places I had found on Idealista
was a truly splendid four-bedroom apartment in a gated community about 15
minutes north of the centre, right next to the beach, with a communal swimming
pool, children’s playground, tennis court, ice cream cafés, tapas bars, French
bakery, and its own parking spot. I would have had to be completely nuts to not
even try to apply, even though the queue for the place, if all applicants were
brought together, would probably resemble a Japanese metro station in rush
hour. I sent an enthusiastic message over the website and hoped for the best.
It was a rent from September to end of June
only, as the owners rent it out in the summer to tourists for a higher weekly tariff
than the off-season monthly rent. Living there would be beyond our wildest
dreams: it would give the children such a fantastic kickstart to their new
lives in Spain. I imagined bringing them home from school, then heading to the
beach for a swim and having dinner in a chiringuito before we went home to bed.
Or the rush they would get hurtling down the five floors to the swimming pool.
I was picturing our ability to sit on the enormous terrace and have dinner in
short-sleeved clothes and sandals while watching the sea. In November.
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| A place worth moving to: beach access, swimming pool, parking space, entertainment facilities, children's playground |
But I was sure I needed to jump through an
enormous number of hoops to get there. Being in Valencia and actually going
along to speak to the agent herself would surely help – I don’t think there are
many who would go so far just for an apartment, but this was different. After
my visit to a potential new school, I called a taxi driver I had befriended
called Toni to drive me to the agency near the outstanding Palace of Sciences
in the south of the city. In 38 degrees heat, I walked the final 500 metres to
the agency, located at the back of an enormous converted warehouse, only to
discover that the woman responsible was not there. Crestfallen, I left my
details and went back to my room on foot in the stifling heat for a siesta
while I figured out what to do for the afternoon.
But to her credit, she did call me back explaining
the situation and what we would have to do. As I would discover over the coming
three or four weeks, she was a really kind, patient and happy woman called
Mercedes, but when talking business, she also did her job properly. “Are you
aware it’s available only until June next year? Why would this suit you?” I
replied that this would give us the opportunity to look for a more permanent
place to live, and if we found one in the spring, it would allow us time to
send for our stuff and set it up properly. In our conversations, she had a warm
and human approach which made me feel we were actually in with a chance.
I wasn’t dreaming yet, but I had made
contingency plans. There were a handful of more expensive and smaller
apartments on an Airbnb-style short-term rental website and one of the places
was rather humdrum but fairly adequate for our purposes. It had no access to a
balcony, but it was big enough for us all. I would rent it for a couple of
months until we had bothered enough agents to give us a place. It was near the
beach though, which meant we could at least do something in our free time. It
was the only one perpetually vacant on that website, and it was an instant
book, which is why I considered it our place of last resort. I wasn’t even sure
it was actually real.
As the weeks went on, Mercedes and I spoke
on a number of occasions, and each time she would prepare me for the next stage
of our application, guiding me through the process. There were times I became
quite despondent as I was getting jittery, and I nearly pressed the button to
apply for our last resort when I saw the advertisement had been removed from
Idealista. But I held on against all hope, even with the start of the school
year only five weeks away.
Three days before my fiftieth birthday, I
received a call from Mercedes, telling me that if I agreed to certain
conditions of residence set in a new Spanish law from May 2023, she would be
able to grant us a rental contract. Did we have a job to go to? I explained
that we were both freelance company owners and were going to set up an office
in Valencia once we were there. Which is true. To Mercedes, I could only say
the truth – she was that type of person.
I misunderstood the mood slightly, as our
conversations take place in Spanish and I was in a supermarket with a rather
verbose Livia constantly seeking my attention, so following the phone call, I
messaged Mercedes to say if it was a big obstacle, it might be better for me to
find a short-term rental and once I’m there look for something else. Within an
hour, she called back and explained that all we had to do was write a reply to
an email she was sending asking us about how we were going to finance our stay
through work.
24 hours later, two days before my Big Day,
and a month after my visit to her office, I received email confirmation that,
indeed, we had been granted a rental contract for the highly-cherished
apartment by the sea. Upon reading it, I let out a scream so full of elation
that I got a massive headache within an hour. I think it was also my body
releasing all the toxins of stress it had accumulated since the start of this
ordeal.
To read about how things went, you’ll have
to wait a while – I need to write it first! But write it I will.
