I'M STAYING Chapter 1

 

CHAPTER 26

 

ENGLAND

 

NEW ADVENTURES IN THE REAL WORLD

Verrrrry cold!!!!!

In our last week at the estate, we managed to find a holiday home in the village where my sister lives in Gloucestershire.  The owner, being a dog lover was happy for us to bring Paddy and we were able to rent on a monthly basis during the winter months.

The Man with a Van transported our furniture to a storage depot in Gloucester and we settled in for the winter in our little country cottage.

We decided to register for benefits and visited the nearest Job Centre where we were interviewed and approved for what is known as Job Seekers’ Benefits.  This meant that as long as we were actively seeking work the Government would pay us a small amount to assist with living expenses until such time as we were once again gainfully employed. 

At this stage we were still confident that we’d find work quickly.  We had our earnings from our previous jobs and our benefits being paid into our bank account.  Plus we discovered that we qualified for some housing benefit and council tax which was a big help too.  The Job Centre website was filled with vacancies and we began our search in earnest.

We boasted to our friends and family about the joys of being unemployed in the UK.  How wonderful that while we are job searching, the Government actually pay us to live!

We then discovered that it wasn’t as easy as we thought…….. Because of my age (over 50), I was asked to report on a weekly basis to the Job Centre and John, being under 50, every other week.  Here we were subjected to rigorous interviews about our job searching.  Our searches were monitored on-line and we had to give feed-back at each interview about where we had searched and why we hadn’t applied for various jobs that they felt would be suitable for us.

The trouble was that although we felt, after reading the job descriptions, that we were well qualified for the position and in many cases could do the work with our eyes closed and hands tied behind our backs, the employers didn’t seem to agree with us. 

We also discovered the powers of technology in a civilised first-world country.  We couldn’t understand why, when we applied for over a hundred jobs in one week, we sometimes had only two or three replies and these were always rejections.  Our thinking was, surely when they read our CV’s and saw what experience we had they would leap at the chance to employ us. 

Much later on we discovered that most of the selection is done by computer.  Skills are picked up in your CV and covering letters and the computer simply casts you aside if the wrong wording has been used.  No human being ever saw our applications and carefully composed CV’s.

We tried sending off our CV’s to every Garden Centre in the county, every growing establishment and farm.  This produced very little results and those that came back were all negative.  We soon realised that this is not the way things are done in this country.  One cannot simply walk in to a business and ask for a job or apply directly to a company asking for work.  There is a system and you WILL follow the rules!

The time passed quickly.  The winter was cold but quite bearable with warm clothes, central heating and double glazing.  We longed for snow and checked the weather forecast daily.  We asked the locals: “When will it snow?  We want to see some snow!” They thought we were crazy of course. 

Finally I woke up at 3am one morning and saw snow falling.  I woke John and we rushed outside to watch the flakes falling.  We danced in it and laughed while Paddy licked at the falling flakes in wonder.  It didn’t even settle on the ground though and by the time the sun came up it had all but vanished. But we were pleased that we’d finally seen our first snow fall.

The landlady explained that we couldn’t rent the house for longer than three months as she needed to prepare it for visitors arriving during the summer months and so we began to do some serious house hunting. This turned out to be almost as difficult as finding a job.  We were looking for a detached house which means one that’s not in a long row and attached to the neighbours.  We also needed a pet-friendly house and something with a reasonable rental.  Rents in the UK where there are so many people and so little space, are very high.  At the going exchange rate in 2015 even the cheapest, 2 bed roomed terraced houses with 3 square metres of garden at the back and parking on the street would work out to a monthly rental equivalent of approximately R13000. (£650). Include your Council Tax (equivalent of Municipal Rates in SA) and you’re looking at R16000 (£800) per month.  I found it hard not to imagine what this amount of money would buy me as far as renting back home.

Our days became consumed with searching on the internet and phoning estate agents, driving to view houses in the hopes of finding something suitable.  When registering with an Estate Agent here one must complete an application and in order to be approved they need to do a credit check for which they charge close to £100 (R2000).  We felt that this expense would soon deplete our savings and decided to try and go it alone.  Each day we checked the biggest property site called Zoopla and then headed off in our car to check the houses available that met with our requirements.  More often than not, on enquiring, we would be told that a dog would not be accepted.  Where we did find a suitable house we would then be asked to attend an interview with the owners, which we were happy to do.  But for some reason we were still not successful.

Reaching the point of desperation we found a house in a small town. It was detached, had three bedrooms, they accepted dogs and the rent was within our budget.  So it ticked most of the boxes.  It was also dead opposite a very busy supermarket with an intersection of traffic lights which used a buzzing noise to alert pedestrians when it was safe to cross the road.  The garden was miniscule and the kitchen was ugly and unfinished, but we felt if we didn’t snap this one up we would soon be living on the streets.

 The owner asked for an interview which we attended.  We had by this stage realised that being new in the country and having no credit rating and with our status being ‘unemployed’ we weren’t very good candidates.  We learnt that we needed to make an offer to pay six months’ rent up front.  Unfortunately this still wasn’t good enough and once more we were rejected and deemed undesirable tenants.  We began to feel rather dejected and started to question our characters.  What were we missing that these landlords were looking for?  We began to suspect that our South African origins might have something to do with it.

Looking for work and accommodation together actually proved to be extremely stressful.  If we found a house first, would we find work close by?  If we found work, would we find accommodation nearby?  Of course we had been spoiled living in a small town in South Africa where we lived around the corner from our business.  What we hadn’t yet realised was that in the UK people commuted to work by car, train, bus sometimes for up to two hours each way.  We were told by the Job Centre that we had to consider any job where the distance was up to 90 minutes each way.  

Our rejections in the job and property market began to crush us and we became steadily more depressed as the grey days of winter continued.  Our self confidence and hope was severely diminished and we began to doubt the wisdom of our move, leaving everything familiar behind in the hope of a safe and secure future.  At the same time we knew there was no turning back by that stage.  We had no business or home to return to in South Africa and very little hope of finding work there either.  This was a very dark period for us and our motivation melted into dismal thoughts of becoming homeless, living off hand-outs or becoming a burden to our families.  Each morning a thousand questions would shoot through my mind.  Did we make the right decision to leave South Africa?  Should we have tried to hold on to our business?  Our house?  Could we have found work there if we’d tried harder?  What are we doing wrong in this country that hinders our progress?  How long do we keep on trying before we have to make a decision about returning?  Should we live on our savings or keep them in case we have to leave?  On and on, my mind worked, filling me with anxiety which in turn caused physical symptoms, leaving me drained but unable to sleep at the end of the day.  It became so hard to find the right motivation to continue job-searching or go out on yet another excursion viewing houses that we just couldn’t imagine ourselves living in.

I knew we sounded spoilt and I knew we had to adapt.  But after living in what by South African standards was a very average size house, having three bedrooms and a garden with pool, it’s very hard to accept that we should now live in something that resembles a doll’s house and has the same feeling as living in a caravan when the weather’s no good to be outdoors.  The houses we looked at were all very tiny with just enough room to squeeze past each other in the kitchen, a living room the size of our smallest bedroom and a narrow staircase leading up to two very compact bedrooms and no fitted wardrobes, and a bathroom with a shower over the bath.  Yes they were neatly finished, clean with carpeting, double glazing and central heating.  But they were so SMALL!  Opening the front door one would be standing a mere metre from the neighbours’ front door.  Very cosy.  The gardens were little squares of paving at the back surrounded by shared fences and overlooked by rows of houses all the same and with miniature gardens to match.  My mind rebelled against living in this way.  But my head told me I had to adjust.

Then we got lucky.  We had found a house in a small town nearby that we felt we could make into a home.  Although the garden was just one long steep slope, at least the house stood detached from its neighbour and our dog would be accepted.  We filled in the necessary applications once again and made the offer of six months’ rent upfront and waited for the agent to come back to us.  Meantime, of course, we started making plans and in our minds we had already moved in and arranged our furniture, hung our curtains and attempted to mow the sloping lawn.  Only to be hit once again by a rejection!  (Started to think there was really something wrong with us........bad breath?  Maybe in need of a new deodorant?)  But this time it turned out to be in our favour.  The agent was a very nice young man who obviously felt sorry for us.  He offered to show us a cottage out in the countryside warning that it was a little isolated but he said he was happy to show us around the following week.