Why we moved from Luxembourg to Spain

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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 50^th 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 50^th birthday earlier in the month, as well as our 20^th wedding anniversary on 6 September, and Livia’s 6^th 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.

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.