Worse than meeting your heroes is revisiting a former home

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Strange things can happen when you answer the door to a stranger, as I recently did. A woman knocked at our front door in London, aged in her seventies, perhaps. She did not introduce herself by name, but simply said, “I have a rather weird thing to ask you.” Admiring the boldness of her opening gambit, but sensing that she was nervous, I invited her in. “It’s my husband’s funeral tomorrow,” she revealed — and, yes, this is the point where I did silently ask what I had got myself into — “and I wondered if I could have some of your yellow roses to lay on his coffin.”

It turned out she and her husband had owned our house many years before, raising their children there, before selling to the rather unpleasant man I was then renting it from, so we had a good gossip about that. She had remained wistful for our home, having downsized to a flat only streets away, but was at least glad to see the beautiful yellow rose bush she had planted and nurtured in our front garden still going strong. “My husband didn’t really care about flowers,” she added, “but I do,” for which I admired her even more, since funerals are for the benefit of the living, not the dead.

So my own child fetched the secateurs and, as we all snipped blooms off together, I felt a multigenerational surge of love for this stranger who had slept where I slept and fed her daughter where I fed mine. And who had grown a pale lemon rose bush that had somehow kept on through the winter, as if waiting for this day. (Imagine planting a flower for your own happiness but it bringing even more to people you might never meet. There is such invisible grace in that act.) I was so glad she dared to come round — especially as returning to a former home is a thing my own family can’t resist doing.

When I was tiny my grandparents lived up a steep Devon lane in a house my grandfather bought when he retired from the army. There were dusty old barns and a garden that you could toboggan down at Christmas. It was impressive but understated, with an old meat hook still in the kitchen ceiling and no tarting up anywhere. They didn’t do ostentatious. My grandparents’ upstairs bedroom had a door that led straight into a greenhouse full of Granny’s geraniums. (I see now, from writing this, that I have a strong emotional connection to old women and their flowers. Good.)

So it was with some horror that, in my teens, my parents, brother and I knocked on the front door and found out what the new owners had done. They vaguely knew my mum, so proudly invited us in to show us walls that had been knocked through, the greenhouse gone altogether, and the master bedroom all tarted up with a strange bookcase carved into the Georgian wall like a Norman arrow slit. “Oh, but it’s small because we only keep pornographic books in our bedroom,” the woman said to me with a smile that felt like an oil slick. I was desperately glad we hadn’t brought Granny.

Many years after that, her descendants gathered in Devon to celebrate what would have been my grandmother’s centenary. We somehow found the strength (gall, entitlement, idiocy?) to knock again, by which point the house was a second home to an international couple who happened to be in, willing only to give us a tour of the outside. Devon had gone posh, and the barns where dogs used to sneak off to have their puppies were now swanky holiday cottages that we hovered around like ghosts, trying to fit into old lives that we couldn’t have back, however much we wanted to. I spent my grandmother’s 100th birthday staring, largely in silence, at a heated swimming pool.

There is an adage, especially when working with the famous, that you should never meet your heroes. If former homes take on a heroic role in our imagination, I wonder if the adage should extend to them. Someone I know recently dreamt that the house she sold when short of money after a divorce had come back on the market and she got it back. And now, only a few months later, her dream has come true and the house is, highly surprisingly, up for sale. It feels like destiny: she is desperate to buy it now. Sadly, it’s even more expensive than before and, in any case, friends are asking if it might in fact be her old life she is longing for? A family life that will not be returned by unlocking that door.

I have written before in this paper in favour of downsizing and I stick to my guns on that, convinced it is the moral way forward, unless you are willing to let others move in with you in old age. We have to find a way to stop ourselves missing the homes we had before. But I sometimes wonder, looking at the people who take them over, if the houses might just be struggling to stop missing us.

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