Freedom or rootlessness

It was a strange feeling setting the address for my mother’s flat into my car’s GPS for the last time. Even stranger turning up there and seeing it completely bare, just a space to be filled, without any of the jumble that had previously given it character and expressed her own.

They were ambivalent feelings. Once you’ve travelled the same route two or three hundred times, it’s a relief to know you won’t have to do it again. But the sense of relief is tinged by the sadness of the end of an era, when the one person you knew before you were even born has gone for good.

Good to be spared the drive. But I’ll miss the lunches

The death of my mother cut one of only two ties that kept me in Britain. My wife Danielle and I had decided we would, in time, move to Spain for her retirement and the rest of my working life – my job is one I can do from anywhere in Europe and, fortunately, I took the opportunity to take French nationality fifteen years ago, as an insurance policy against Brexit, which already seemed likely all that time ago.

The other tie to Britain was Danielle’s job. By coincidence, she was caught shortly after my mother’s death by the latest wave of redundancies in her company.

It wasn’t a fate unique to herself. A few dozen of her colleagues are also going, and two other companies on her business estate are laying off, while a fourth, from Germany, is moving its entire operation back home. Brexiters are always telling me that leaving the EU would free Britain to forge a powerful new presence on the world stage. If that’s so, it seems that we’re moving a long way back to get a runup to that seductive leap forward.

And that’s before Brexit has even happened.

With Danielle’s redundancy, the last constraint on our leaving has been removed. We’re free now, free to enjoy that freedom of movement that the EU guarantees and Britain, anxious to exclude immigrants, has rejected. Freedom feels good.

But the other side of the coin is a sense of rootlessness. For all its insularity and inclination to look backwards at a distant past that never happened, I liked my country. While my mother was alive, I had family here. While Danielle had her job, we both had livings here. Before Brexit, it kept its xenophobes in check.

Now those factors that formed something of an anchor have gone. Of course, the important thing with an anchor is not simply to drag it and end up adrift in increasingly rough seas. As we prepare for Spain, I like to think that instead we’ve deliberately hauled our anchor up, to set a new and more hopeful course.

After all, Spain is currently showing a much firmer attachment to liberal values than Britain. Spain is taking in migrants rather than leaving them to drown in the Mediterranean. Spain recently brought down an incompetent Conservative government to replace it with a Centre-Left one that might do rather better. A course that leads there strikes me as a good one to follow.

Our first step on that way is to put the house on the market. That, too, is a little ironic. We spent quite a lot just a year ago to make it far more comfortable. We won’t get the money back. We just have to take comfort from our enjoyment of a more pleasant house for the best part of a year. We have a track record of doing that: we spent a small fortune doing up a flat in Germany before moving back to England.

We’re far from alone in deciding that it’s time to move. The ‘For Sale’ or ‘To Let’ signs have been mushrooming all around our neighbourhood, though more especially in the streets with the cheaper housing. That’s where many immigrants from Poland or Eastern Europe live, and I wonder if it’s they who are going. After all, they can hardly feel entirely at ease in the foreigner-hostile environment Brexit has created.

'For Sale' or 'To Let' all the way down the street

So much property on the market could make selling our place more difficult. And time’s running out. With a hard Brexit looking increasingly likely, I can imagine that getting out after next March will prove far more difficult still.

It’s a shame. Britain was fun when it was more open, when so many – never everyone, of course, but many all the same – revelled in its multi-culturalism. It’s sad to see it declining, Trump-like, into a state that prefers walls to bridges. Walls that too many Brits think they can hide behind to keep the world out.

The Brexit illusion from which, sadly, they’re likely to suffer a painful awakening.