Home, Sweet Home

Today

House-hunting seems to be all the rage right now. Becky & Richard seem at last to have found a suitable flat to live in. Paul & I have decided that, much as we love the flat, we are tired of being so cramped at home. So the flat has to go to pay for a bigger house where the Bentley can come in out of the rain, Paul can house his model railway and I can have a permanent workshop. We've spent hours browsing property websites and fantasising about our next home.

In My Day

Paul's dad was of the opinion that having a mortgage was a "millstone around your neck" and actually turned down the offer of a private mortgage to buy at a ridiculously low price the 17th house he was already living in, thus depriving Mum of an asset that would be worth about £1.5 million today.

I, however resented every month's rent, knowing that that money would never come back to me, and when we had an opportunity, in 1975, to buy a house in Eastbourne, I jumped at the chance. Even though the monthly mortgage repayments were £106, compared to rent of £45 I knew it was the right thing to do.

This was a new build house on a brand-new estate. The Levetts had already bought one and we were able to secure the other side of the semi. We had to rely on the pictures in the brochures as the actual house was only foundations and a few half-finished walls. Eastbourne Borough Council, anxious to attract younger people to the town, were offering 95% mortgages, based on total joint income. As this was back in the days when lenders normally either discounted the wife's income or included only part (you were going to have lots of babies and give up work, you see!), this was an offer not to be refused.

Daddy coughed up the deposit of £400 which we paid back by standing order over the next five years and the house was ours!

It wasn't yet a home, being supplied with only the most basic of fitting, but during the next seven years we made it into one and a good place in which to start our family. And when we were ready to move to something better, the price we got for the house outstripped the remaining balance on the mortgage by such an extent that we already had a very good deposit.

For so much of our lives we have juggled within such a narrow margin that it will be fun to have so much more scope. But I think that I'm going to miss little no7 which has been a real home to us for twenty-five years.