I swapped the Cotswolds for Washington DC – nothing prepares you for how odd and wild America is

Transplanting our life has shown me that home can be a feeling as much as a place, and represented by people more than a feeling

A couple of years ago, when my husband Pete suggested we move to Washington DC, where he’d started spending long periods of time for work, the first thing I felt, as I contemplated leaving our messy, colourful kitchen in Oxfordshire, was acute homesickness. My security, my identity and my heart were built into the walls of the cottage and drenched into the landscape beyond it, all signifying home. And homesickness is the emotion I fear most. It’s one of my strongest childhood memories, and part of the reason I hated school, even though I wasn’t even at boarding school. I always just wanted to be back home.
This longing for home was something I inherited from my mum and the circumstances of her life. I spent my earliest childhood in Oxford, but she wanted my sister, Nell, and I, to have a rural childhood. My childhood comes into bright, beautiful focus, on my seventh birthday, when we moved to a remote village in Wiltshire. 
When I describe the life our parents created for us there, it sounds ridiculously romantic, but that’s because it was: we had ponies in the kitchen, picnics in bluebell woods, friends who lived a barefoot walk away across the field. We went to the village school and until I was much older, I rarely went to London or any city. We were intensely lucky. 
That childhood ended on November 25, 1991, when Mum had a riding accident which left her profoundly mentally and physically brain damaged. I was 16 and everything was lost that day. After two years nursing her at home, Mum had to be cared for by specialists, living in a nursing home where she stayed for another two decades until her death, when I was in my late 30s. Our home was sold. 
That period in my late teens and into my 20s was dark, for a long time, but horses and the wet, green landscape of southern England were what Nell and I turned to hold and heal us. She started Gifford’s Circus, and I started writing and having children, later creating a childhood for my own five children which looked – and felt – just like the childhood Mum created for us. 
As our family grew, Pete and I moved from Oxford where we were living when we met, to a cottage in Oxfordshire, in sight of the Bronze Age chalk horse on the hill at Uffington. I decorated our house with mismatched rugs and mugs from charity shops, where dogs snoozed on sofas and we had Shetland ponies in the garden. I felt close enough to the village where I grew up in Wiltshire to feel local, but not so close that I felt haunted by the past, either. And for the first time in my adult life, the homesickness that stalked me since Mum’s accident, was gone, only reigniting itself, like an alarm, when Pete suggested we leave the house, the hill, the ponies, and move to America.
We spent a long time arguing about what we should do. Pete was in America a lot, missing out on the children’s childhoods, and I missed him desperately. I like adventure and am not scared by challenges, so the horizons of America were exciting. I’d even lived there for a while in my 20s, on a ranch riding horses in Texas. 
But a less rational, more emotional part of me also clung very tightly onto home. Home and roots are not something that can be forged in a rush, or without meaning, and they’re not something to be discarded lightly, either.  They’re very valuable. The friendships I had in Oxfordshire, with the farrier who came to shoe my ponies, with the travellers down the road who became close friends after Nell died of cancer in 2019, with the ladies in the village shop I chatted to and the mums at the village school gate, mattered to me much, much more than the idea of a shiny new American life.  
Our children went to local state schools so had lots of friends in the villages nearby.  I felt emotionally and spiritually invested in this muddy, messy pocket of rural England which hasn’t, thankfully, been turned into a millionaire’s country club, unlike some of the Cotswolds. And yet, I knew that what Pete was offering was also an adventurous opportunity, and for the sake of my marriage, I eventually realised I’d have to leave.
Last summer, with tenants in the house, and foster homes found for the cats, dogs and horses, I flew to DC with our younger children, Evangeline, Dash and Lester, to join Pete. My elder children, Jimmy and Dolly, stayed in England at university.  
What I remember most clearly of those first sweaty weeks, as heat jumped off the pavements and my hair was permanently damp and frizzy, was an unsettling sense of everything familiar slipping out of reach, as life took on the sharp angles of a brand-new kind of chaos. I’d thought I was a capable person who knew how to get things done, but for a while I lost everything, from my sanity to my favourite clothes to the bread knife to the notebook where I wrote everything important. None of my chargers ever worked. 
Things I could do instinctively – cook, drive, write – felt totally overwhelming, my brain exhausted by the hundreds of tiny, new decisions I was making every day. Even a simple chore, like a trip to the supermarket, felt terrifying, as I tried to choose between hundreds of different types of breads, cereals, and flours. Once, I simply abandoned the shopping cart and ordered pizza instead, although I quickly learned you cannot beat an American supermarket for an outstanding range of highly addictive corn snacks. 
I was so homesick I had to stop looking at images on social media of my friends in beloved, familiar landscapes of home. At times I felt my life had been reduced to getting stuck in underground car parks in a car that was too big at an exit barrier that would reject my bank card. 
Most of all, I was confused by how very foreign America felt. I’ve consumed huge amounts of American novels, television shows, movies and music, but living here is a very different thing, and in some senses our shared language makes the shock of the foreign even more confusing. This country, I’m learning, is odder and wilder than anything I’d prepared myself for, its food, education, humour, language, climate, landscape and emotional sensibilities all very different to ours, and the fabric of this wildly multicultural society defies definition. 
This also makes it beautiful and exciting: a normal Saturday can involve taking our sons to karate lessons with their Iranian-American teacher, followed by lunch at an Ethiopian café and coffee in a Jewish deli, before driving into rural Pennsylvania to catch the end of an Amish quilt sale and grabbing tacos in a Tex Mex café on the way home. I love the wild sense of possibility here, and the collision of an infinite number of cultures and races, which is unlike anywhere else. 
Looking back, I can see we all, apart from Pete, who was already acclimatised, went through a period of acute culture shock, something that’s subsided slowly, tentatively, as we’ve started to create a sense of home, albeit impermanently, in DC. Autumn brought with it the sugary thrill of an American Halloween, with life-size pirate ships of model skeletons and huge blow-up ghosts decorating houses, and trick or treating – a vast, communal activity, where adults chatted around front-lawn fires while the children darted madly around lugging pillow-cases of candy. 
I love the American impulse to decorate the outside of houses, not just at Halloween, but for any festival, light-up candy canes and life-size sledges on front lawns lingering right into February, when they’re replaced by ditzy pink lights and blow-up hearts, for Valentine’s Day, then swiftly replaced again by bright green shamrocks made from tinsel for St Patrick’s Day. 
In the winter, snow lay thick and bright white for 10 days everywhere, and Dash and Lester earned forty dollars shovelling snow from front yards, like they were in a movie. Early spring has brought the astonishing froth of cherry blossom over the Tidal Basin, and we have favourite walks through Rock Creek Park, which brings a surprising sense of the wild, natural world right into the middle of the city, just blocks from the blacked out SUVs and presidential cavalcades of the White House.  
Everything in America is, of course, bigger, but embracing these seasonal rituals has helped the children feel at home in a city totally at odds with the rural landscape they knew as home. We wanted the children to go to American state schools, and they’ve swapped their village school, where they knew all the 100 pupils, for much bigger schools with an incredibly diverse intake, swapping break for recess, a peg for lockers and PE for basketball, and are learning about periods of American history they knew nothing about. 
The definition of home will always be England, and sometimes I feel gratified by how much the children miss the fields around our house, the green where they played and the village shop where they went for Haribos. I’m pleased that that landscape I love so much is in their souls and is the place they think of when we talk about home, but it’s exciting to watch their horizons literally expanding by the experience of our big American adventure. I still feel homesick, of course, but transplanting our life is also showing me that home can be a feeling as much as a place, and represented by a person more than a feeling, because more than anywhere else, home for me is with Pete.
The Giant on The Skyline by Clover Stroud (Doubleday) is out now