Imagine losing all the financial security you'd worked hard for over so many years - and losing it at 60 as you settle into paradise in another country. Author Dinah Jefferies experienced just that, but would she have started to write with such determination if she had never been touched by the recession? She's not so sure...
Dinah Jefferies
Leaving paradise and starting again
Posted on: Thu 29-May-14 16:03:53
(7 comments )
The paradise Dinah was forced to give up.
Picture a simple village house in forested mountains in Northern Andalusia; a lovely holiday home, but cold and damp in winter. As the attic had a large floor space but impossibly low beams, once we'd sold up in Gloucestershire and moved there, we began a major rebuild.
By 2007 it was almost complete. Surrounded by wild flowers we walked cobbled donkey trails admiring the gorgeous Sierra de Aracena close to the border with Portugal. It's easy to live frugally in a paradisiacal medieval village miles from the madness of modern life.
We lingered in the square with a one euro coffee while practising our Spanish and watching the birds. We'd decided not to touch the pension funds for a few more years but to allow them to grow, and my only luxury was the regular airfare home to see my new granddaughter. In August 2008 at my sixtieth birthday most of the village joined in, dancing exuberantly into the early hours.
Then came autumn and the economic downturn or "credit crunch". For complex reasons we lost our life savings, the value of the pension funds plunged, and so did the value of our house and land. We'd lost our financial security at the age of sixty without a clue what to do next.
The fact that I've found the thing I love doing more than anything has given me a new lease of life and really is a gift from the gods.
We'd been living on investments and a small pension, but we knew we couldn't afford to stay in Spain. Neither of us spoke Spanish fluently enough to work there, so we put the house on the market while brainstorming ways to recoup our losses.
I'd been thinking of writing for some time and had been swotting up on what it takes to write a bestseller. So once I'd stopped crying, I began. My first novel didn't get anywhere, but with no idea if what I was doing would ever be good enough, I didn't give up. Even though I'd repeatedly read that writing was a young person's game, I posted little success notes all over the house to encourage myself. I wrote like a maniac, with a deep anxiety that we'd never get home again. Paradise was still paradise, but not for me.
It took a year to sell our house, but once back in Gloucestershire, my husband began work again and I wrote a second and third novel. I am grateful that now, at 65, I have fantastic deals with Penguin UK who are publishing two of my books. Was losing so much money actually a godsend? I'd have started writing anyway, but would I have kept going so relentlessly, or would I have buckled under the early rejections? The motivation to start something new comes in many guises, but the sheer impact of our losses was what drove me initially.
The fact that I've found the thing I love doing more than anything has given me a new lease of life and really is a gift from the gods. I recommend starting again at 60, whether you need to or not.
Dinah's debut novel The Separation is published by Penguin UK and is now available from Amazon.
