Kate Gostick

I was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent my childhood in a little village called Hoghton.  When I went to university in Cardiff, to train as an Optometrist, it seemed a world away from my childhood home, so I never imagined that I would travel even further afield. When my husband Dominic came home one day and said he had been offered a job in the States we thought it would be a little adventure for a couple of years which would allow me to spend more time with my two young son's James and Edward before they began school. Sixteen years later we are still living just outside Boston Massachusetts in a house in the woods.  Our family has grown with the addition of our all American boy, Henry, a a giant Newfoundland dog named Matilda. 

 

We decided to head off on a second adventure and spent three years in Germany before returning to Boston.  Here I trained as a Special Education teacher in order to offer support to my three dyslexic sons . The differences in attitutudes and cultures was striking between the three places I have come to think of home and our days were filled with laughter and terror as we walked a cultural and language tiperope, never quite knowing when the next failure would hit us. Despite my travels though my heart has never left the cobbled streets of Lancashire where my family had lived for generations and I wanted to pass on my Lancastrian traditions to my three boys.  So along with the fear that one day our adventures would be forgotten this drove me to write down my memories of my upbringing and life as a trailing spouse. I hoped this would allow me to  pass on to future generations the connection to Lancashire and allow them to learn from our mistakes whereever they may end up.

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