The three children grew up in the sixties, seventies and early eighties when a family routine was established similar to that of most children in their district. They attended the local schools, leaving home at about 8.15 in the morning and returning home at about four in the afternoon. The primary school was on the estate, but the comprehensive (secondary school) was fifteen minutes away by bicycle.
At school, Sarah was shy and musical, Peter was friendly, a bit lazy, and (as it turned out) a really successful swimmer, and Kate was clever, wild, and stubborn. Both Sarah and Kate went on to university. Peter did not, but when he failed to get a job he trained as a sound recordist.
Sarah worked hard at university, and after receiving her degree she found a job in the planning department of the local government offices of a town on the borders of England and Wales. Working there she was not too far away from either her parents or her beloved grand-parents in Wales. Through her job she met a young accountant working for a local accountancy firm, called Martin Wright. Like her he was quiet and rather shy, but they found it easy to talk to each other. Martin was six years older than Sarah and proposed to her when he was twenty-nine and she was twenty-three - in 1986. They were married three months later in church. (Less than half of all marriages in Britain are religious ceremonies. Sarah did not mind much but Martin was a devout churchgoer, and she was happy to have a traditional wedding. Her father's chamber group played music at the service.) Ten months later Sam was born in 1987. Sarah took maternity leave, but returned to part-time work when Sam was eighteen months. A year after that, Nell was born. Sarah decided to become a full-time mother, at least for three years.
Peter finished the course which he hoped would enable him to find a job as a sound recordist in a recording studio, but he could only find a variety of short-term, semi-skilled or non-skilled jobs. It all seemed boring and disappointing. Eventually he found work in a shop which sold new and secondhand bicycles. The shop had a workshop attached where bicycles were repaired. He left home and found a room to rent, about ten miles away in south London, with his girl-friend, Linda. After a year or so, they moved to a rented flat with two tiny rooms in a cheap part of London, while planning for a future in which Peter would become part-owner of a bicycle shop and Linda would run the administration of the office-furniture business. Peter was already 2(> and had not saved very much money, while Linda was getting restless. They were not married, they had no children and they expected none for some years.
Kate believed that individual freedom was what matters most of all. She had two passionate and complicated affairs during her first two years at university, and dedicated her final year to 'chastity and study'. She left university with a first-class degree, a large overdraft at the bank and plans for working for a political-ecological society. Two years later Kate fell in love with Graham. Graham wanted to investigate the ecological situation and the question of human rights in Turkey. And he wanted to take Kate. By this time she was 23, nearly 24. She had no money because the political-ecological society paid tiny wages and hoped that people would work more or less as volunteers. So she struggled with the idea that Graham would be paying for her.
This is a summary of the lives of Sarah, Peter and Kate up to 1991. These were exciting and busy years. They could not anticipate what would lie ahead, either for themselves or for their nation. Nearly twenty years have passed, and readers will be more interested in the younger generation. So what follows is an account of the family as it spread outwards and forwards into the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Sarah and Mark have continued to live in the market town on the English -Welsh border. Mark has been a quietly successful accountant with enough clients to keep him busy and plenty of outside interests where he can, if he wishes, use his accounting expertise. Sarah waited until Nell had started full-time school in 1994 before looking for part-time work. She was offered her old job at the planning office, but this was a full-time job with no flexibility, and she did not want to work full-time while her children were still young. Mark was earning enough money for them to pay their regular mortgage instalments as well as day-to-day expenses, but Sarah wanted work for the interest and pleasure of adult company, and to contribute to the household income in order to give them extra money for holidays, for redecorating the house, for special excursions for the children. At that time the Local Education Authority (LEA) where they were living organised, as part of its music education, a county junior orchestra. The performers mostly rehearsed on Saturday mornings at one of the town schools. A part-time job (one day plus Saturday mornings) organising and arranging the rehearsals, meetings and end-of-term concert was advertised in the local paper. Sarah applied and got the job. As a young mother she had abandoned her flute playing, but now her enthusiasm revived as, through her contacts at the Saturday music school, she met other amateur wind players. They have now play chamber music among themselves and with a local string quartet. After a couple of years, Sarah moved further into the musical education world. She eventually became a music adviser for the LEA; now she is known in schools for fifty kilometres around. She occasionally teaches the flute, but most of the time she is busy bringing together children, instruments, teachers, music, performance places and music examination halls for all the youth events in this musical county. Sarah is now 45 and wondering, hesitantly, whether she might look for a different job or somehow change her pattern of work. She enjoys it, but is beginning to feel slightly restless.
Sam, like his father, was always good at maths. As a child he was absorbed in all the new computer technology of the late 1990s, but then he discovered that what really fascinated him was theoretical mathematics; this was obviously going to be his chief A-level subject. In 2005, aged 18, he applied to three universities and was awarded a place at the most prestigious one. Now he is completing his degree and wondering whether to look for a job or to continue with post-graduate studies. Sarah worries sometimes at his self-sufficiency. He is perfectly polite and friendly, but he does not seem to have any real friends, no one to talk to in the long private conversations that for Sarah are the meaning of friendship. And he does not have any girl friends - or if he does, Sarah and Mark know nothing of them. He seems content to study seriously at university and to live quietly at home during vacations. In 2007 he took himself off to Holland for two weeks, which he spent cycling alone round the country, following the good advice of his uncle Peter.
If Sam was quiet and clever, Nell was loud, cheerful and no more than average at school. Her school reports spoke of her as a friendly girl, a helpful girl, but someone who should 'try harder' in just about every subject she studied. At weekends the house was full of her friends, or else she was out at parties which she loved. She did not inflict hours of anxiety on her parents by coming back later than she had promised; mostly she was an obliging teenager, but she simply did not take her academic lessons seriously and was always ready to drop work for any kind of social gathering. Only later, when Nell insisted on leaving school when she was not quite seventeen (two years earlier than expected), could Mark and Sarah look back and say, 'Of course!' For in 2006 Sarah announced that she wanted to take a course in catering at the town's College of Further Education. She wanted to learn to cook. She liked the idea of cooking for 'functions' - celebrations like weddings and official dinners. Later, perhaps, she explained, she might like to run her own restaurant, but that was in the distant future. So far, completing her second year of the course, Nell has continued to be enthusiastic about her chosen career. She feels that it is her obvious path in life.