I loved my childhood home so I bought it

The place where our memories, both good and bad, hang heavy on the walls; where the echoes of our past are too loud to ignore; and where reminders of our parents' taste in wallpaper and their questionable DIY efforts lurk in every nook and cranny - it's not what most people think of as their dream home.

The place where our memories, both good and bad, hang heavy on the walls; where the echoes of our past are too loud to ignore; and where reminders of our parents' taste in wallpaper and their questionable DIY efforts lurk in every nook and cranny - it's not what most people think of as their dream home.

Published Sep 5, 2011

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Emma Foden can’t help but smile whenever she takes a pile of warmed plates from the oven and sets them down with a clatter on the kitchen worktop.

“I love to think of my daughter, in my old bedroom above the kitchen, hearing the sounds of my own childhood,” she says.

“She smells the same cooking smells wafting up the staircase and she wakes each morning to the same sound of her mother putting the kettle on. I know it sounds weird, but it just feels so special to know that she, and our two boys, are experiencing these cherished memories of mine.”

In the secluded five-bedroom, two-bathroom home, now worth in the region of £750,000, that Emma, 37, a full-time mother, and her husband Charlie, 42, a marketing consultant, bought earlier this year, history is repeating itself every day.

Hidden in a warren of winding lanes at Billingshurst, Sussex, it is where Emma and her two younger brothers spent their idyllic childhood, and now, after buying it from her widowed mother, she is raising her own family there - six-year-old Phoebe and younger sons, Rufus, three, and Henry, seven months.

But regardless of how happy our childhood memories are, the appeal of returning to the home we grew up in is not immediately obvious to most of us. The urge to flee the nest and feather our own is all part of growing up.

The place where our memories, both good and bad, hang heavy on the walls; where the echoes of our past are too loud to ignore; and where reminders of our parents’ taste in wallpaper and their questionable DIY efforts lurk in every nook and cranny - it’s not what most people think of as their dream home.

Yet a surprising number find the prospect of owning their childhood home too hard to resist when the opportunity arises.

“My father died four years ago and, about a year later, my mother met someone else and moved out of the house to be closer to him,” says Emma. “As a family, we would still come back to the house at weekends, but during the week it was lying empty.

“Meanwhile, we were living in a small, three-bedroom house on a busy main road in Berkshire. The garden was too small for the children to run about in and the traffic noise was constant. It was fine - but not exactly idyllic.”

By contrast, Emma’s own childhood had been exactly that.

For almost four decades, throughout their married life, her parents lived in the bungalow which is just a short walk through the woods and across the stream from Emma’s aunt and uncle’s house. In the summer, she camped in the woods with her brothers and cousins, who still retreat to this unspoilt corner of the countryside whenever they can.

It was her husband Charlie who first saw Emma’s childhood home as a great opportunity for their own young family.

“I was the one that needed convincing,” says Emma. “As a mom, I think you have a strong urge to make a home for your own family, and I wasn’t sure I’d be comfortable surrounded by my parents’ furniture or living with the decor I’d grown up with. But now we’re here, I can see that’s a pretty small price to pay for giving our children such a special place to grow up.”

But buying the house at a price that was fair to the rest of her family was a more considerable cost for Emma.

People assume that if you buy a house that is already in the family, you get a bargain. But that’s just not the case,” she says. “You can’t do your family out of what is rightfully theirs.

“My mother and brothers needed a fair deal. And, whereas in ordinary circumstances you might bargain a little on the price when you find out that the roof is leaking or the chimney needs fixing, you can’t do that on your family home. You are committed emotionally. You have to accept it, warts and all.”

There’s no doubt living cheek-by-jowl with one’s childhood memories is not for everyone.

“If you’re going to move in, you have to be happy revisiting the past all the time,” says Emma. “There are a lot of memories in this house, of course. My father died here, and some of my friends couldn’t understand why I’d want to live here with that memory. But it all depends on how your memories make you feel. I’m comfortable with mine.

“When I see my daughter whizzing down the hill on her bike, I remember exactly how that felt when I was six. When she says she’s scared of walking past the long hallway near the bathroom when it’s dark, I vividly remember how it used to terrify me, too.

“But, by the same token, I don’t want to feel like this place is a museum of my childhood. It’s our house now, and the challenge is to make our own mark on it.”

Lutricia Norris, 51, who now owns the farm she grew up on, near Billericay in Essex, has experienced the powerful emotional pull that can bring a person home when they least expect it.

In 2002, when she was recovering from breast cancer, she suddenly felt quite certain that she needed to be back on the farm, where her elderly mother, Pat, was still living.

“When we were kids, we used to moan about not living closer to town, and my mom would say: ‘One day you’ll appreciate being away from it all.’ And she was so right.

“I hadn’t lived at home since I was 17, and I had a lovely, big four-bedroom house a few miles away. But, when I was diagnosed with cancer, I was shocked, and I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I needed to be somewhere totally safe and secure. I just knew I wanted to be at home, close to my Mom.”

Lutricia, a part-time actress and single mother of two grown-up daughters, sold her house and moved, initially, into a mobile home on the farm, allowing her mother to spend the last years of her life in the 1920s bungalow where she had raised Lutricia, her two sisters and her brother. In 2004, she decided to buy her mother’s house, which had the benefit of providing her mother with a lump sum to support herself. Although she believes her mother might have left the house to her in her will, Lutricia insisted on buying it out of fairness to her siblings.

“It’s hard to explain my decision, because I was just following my heart,” she says. “But I had no doubts about giving up my house to move back here; it felt absolutely right. Partly, of course, it was so I could be there for Mom and she could be there for me - we had always been very close - but the place itself had a profound effect on me.

“Picking apples from the same trees I picked from as a child; looking out of my windows and seeing the same, unspoilt views - the fields where my dad walked, bringing rabbits and vegetables back home for the pot, and the rusty old grass-roller propped up near the garden shed, which still has ‘I love Peter Cole’ (my first boyfriend) etched into the door - all of these things just made me happier, more settled, more positive.

“This is it for me. I can see myself living here for ever.”

When her mother Pat died six years later, it was Lutricia’s intention to pull the dilapidated bungalow down and build something similar in its place. But, she says: “I haven’t the heart to do it just yet. At the moment, I’m enjoying the memories it holds.”

In contrast, when Bryher Scudamore - following her mother Peggy’s death in 1999 - took on the Grade II-listed townhouse in Upper Norwood, South London where she lived as a child, she wanted to make it her own before she and her husband Paul moved in.

“Several times, my mother had said: ‘Darling, are you sure you wouldn’t want to live here?’ and I had been quite adamant that I didn’t,” says Bryher, 60. “In my mind it was her house - covered in Sixties wallpaper, freezing cold, full of leaks and in much need of renovation.

“But when she died, her neighbour asked me again: ‘Why don’t you come back and live here?’ And suddenly, I couldn’t think of any reason not to.

“I realised I had always loved this house - especially its location, tucked away in a quiet little grove, where we played safely as children, just like the neighbours’ children do today.”

She and her travel writer husband Paul, 63, who don’t have children, sold their own home half a mile away and bought Bryher’s sister’s share of the house.

Before making the move, however, there was work to be done. Chimneys and walls needed rebuilding, the roof needed waterproofing and bathroom leaks (which had infuriated Bryher’s mother for decades) needed plugging once and for all.

“As much as I loved my mother, we couldn’t leave the house as it was,” she says. The house was bought for £2,500 in 1955. Now that it has been renovated it’s worth an estimated £750,000.

“As we peeled off the layers of wallpaper, so the years went back. Each pattern was a flashback to a childhood Christmas or a hot summer. ‘Oh God, I remember this one!’ I’d shout as we scraped away at it,” says Bryher, who adds that exploring the house that had been her mother’s home for so many years inspired her to start her own family history website, autodotbiography.com, which she works on full-time.

“During that time, I felt it stopped being my mother’s house and started being ours - although I have always hoped that she would have liked what we’ve done.”

For Bryher, the house will always echo her childhood, no matter how different it may look now.

“Despite the new central heating and the radical change in decor, I’ll always remember what it was like to dress under the covers when there was frost on the inside of my bedroom window. I will always think of my family whenever Paul and I sit down at the walnut dining table.

“Although I didn’t know it for so many years, I am rooted to this place like an old tree. And that’s the way I like it.” - Daily Mail

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