The Farm Read Online Free PDF Page B

six months we owned five and we were looking to own ten, a number I’d plucked from the air because it sounded better than nine. We started using phrases like ‘our property portfolio’. I blush to think of it. We spoke of those flats as if we’d actually built them with our bare hands. We marvelled at how their value had increased by seven, eight, nine per cent in a single year. In my defence, it wasn’t outright greed. I was planning for our retirement. Running a garden centre is backbreaking work. We couldn’t do it forever. We weren’t even sure we could manage another year. We didn’t have any money saved up. We didn’t have a pension. This was our way out.
     
    They’re calling me mad now, but five years ago I was mad, or touched with a kind of madness. That’s the only way I can explain it. I lost my mind. I ventured into a business I knew nothing about, abandoning a livelihood that was in our blood and bones. When the recession hit, our bank was on the brink of collapse. The very institution that had convinced us to borrow and invest now looked upon us as if we were an abomination. We were their creation! They wanted their money back even faster than they’d been happy to give it to us. We were forced to sell everything, all five flats, you knew that, but you didn’t appreciate the losses we were making on each. We’d put the deposit down on a new build. Since we couldn’t complete the purchase the money was lost. Completely lost! Our backs were against the wall. We sold our home and the garden centre. We were pretending to everyone, not just to you, that it was part of a grand plan. We brought forward our retirement under the guise that we were sick and tired of the whole enterprise. That was a lie. There was no choice.
     
    With what little money remained we bought the farm in Sweden. That’s why we found somewhere remote and run-down. We presented it to you as the pursuit of the idyllic. True, but we also bought it cheap, for less than the price of a garage in London. Cheap as it was, once the costs of relocating were included, we were left with nine thousand pounds. Quote the figure to any financial adviser and they’d state categorically that it can’t be done, there are two of us, four and a half thousand pounds each, we’re in our sixties – we might live for another three decades. There was nothing to fall back on. We were betting our future on a far-flung farm in the middle of nowhere in a country unknown to me for fifty years.
     
    Not having money in London is crippling. Board a bus and they charge you two pounds. A loaf of market bread can cost four pounds. On our farm we were going to rewrite the rules of modern living, happiness without the need of credit cards and cash. We’d cycle everywhere. Petrol would be saved for emergencies only. There’d be no need for holidays. Why take a holiday when you were living in one of the most beautiful locations in the world? In the summer there was the river to swim in, in the winter snow for skiing – activities that cost nothing. We’d reconnect our lives with nature, growing our own food, with plans for a vast vegetable garden supplemented with foraging, baskets of wild berries and chanterelle mushrooms, thousands of pounds’ worth if you bought the equivalent in any delicatessen. Your father and I would go back to doing what we’d always done, what we did best, what we were put on this earth to do – to plant and grow.
     
    Despite how it sounds, making these plans wasn’t a miserable task. It didn’t depress me. We were pruning our existence back to the essentials not out of some pious philosophy that austerity was good for the soul. To live within our means was the only way to be truly independent. We were pilgrims seeking a new life, escaping the oppression of debt. On the boat to Sweden, Chris and I spent the evening seated on the deck looking up at the stars with a blanket over our knees and a Thermos of tea, strategising