"Where do you live?" I asked, in the way you do when you are not interested in the answer.
"Oxford," she said.
We were sitting by a swimming pool in the south of France. Strangers, forced together by dint of having rented next-door holiday cottages. In the last few days I had already found out all I wanted to know about this middle-aged woman and her husband. He wore white socks and read Jeffrey Archer. She changed her swimming costume every few hours and appeared to read nothing.
"Where?" I asked, my mind elsewhere.
"North Oxford," she said. "Off the Banbury Road."
I told her that I had grown up there and knew north Oxford well.
"We live in N-Road," she said. The big house on the corner.
It was hard to know what to say. Number 15 N-Road was the house where I was born, and where I spent the first 22 years of my life.
My grandmother had bought the place as a semi-wreck in 1947, my parents got married there, had four children there, and lived there more or less happily for 35 years.
In 1982, my father looked at the leaks and the empty children's bedrooms, and decided it was time to go. The house dangled on the market for some time. "Would benefit from further modernisation," said the estate agent's notes.
And then along came the Wilkinsons. According to my mother they were a flash young couple-he was big in animal feeds, she pregnant. From the outset my mother was against her. "Obviously one would have to gut the place," she overheard her saying to the estate agent. Still, the Wilkinsons handed over ?67,950 and got a rambling six-bedroom house and a large romantic garden.
And here they were, 17 years on, laughing at the coincidence and telling me what a fine family house it was.
"Do come and see us if you're ever in Oxford," they said.
Some months later, I decided to do that un-British thing and take her at her word. I was curious to see what they had done with the place and the opportunity seemed too good to pass up. I telephoned the familiar old number and she sounded friendly enough. "Come and snoop by all means," she said.
It was good to see the front garden again. The old Victorian tiles just as they were, cherry tree still pretty.
I walked into the hall and instead of finding my feet on a threadbare Persian rug, I was on a deep turquoise carpet. Instead of Coles wallpaper chosen by my mother in the 1960s, the walls were a rag-rolled duck egg blue. Prints in gilt frames were hung too high. Horrible.
"Lovely," I said. I felt strange, almost giddy. How could a place feel so similar and so alien?
She took me into the kitchen.
"It's much brighter in here now," she said. She told me the first thing they had done was to cut that big tree down. I looked outside. Where the catalpa had sprawled was now a neat green lawn.
I wanted to see my bedroom. The place where I had made doll's clothes and lain on the bed in a depressed haze listening to Pink Floyd was now an en suite bathroom. The place where I had revised for my O-levels and A-levels was now a toilet.
"Gorgeous. How luxurious," I said. I could have wept.
Such sentimentality was ludicrous, I told myself. At the time I felt nothing about my parents selling our family home. This was a house sold at a fair market price to people with the money to restore it. These people had a right to it: they had raised their own children there-it was their family house now. And if they happened to like a dark blue stair carpet and duck egg walls, then good luck to them.
Only I did not wish them good luck. I wished them out. Now. I wanted to reach up and pull the fancy drapes away from the windows. This house could never belong to these people. The house did not like their taste. It was our house. It belonged to our family, not theirs.
"Sorry it's so scruffy", she kept saying. "Do excuse the mess." She would point at a brass trimmed coffee table with a couple of catalogues on it.
"The style's a bit dated," she went on. They were going to redecorate, but she thought there was no point. In a year or two her youngest would have left home and they, too, would move on.
And then I knew what I must do. Buy the house back. Move my family in there and un-improve it. Pull up all the carpets, rip down the floral wallpaper, put back all my father's homemade bookcases. The house needed me.
The next morning I called the estate agent. How much would one of the larger houses in N-road go for, I asked.
"I'd have to see it," he said. "But six beds, and three baths, two en suite-you might be talking seven figures."
"Ah," I said, explaining that my grandmother had paid ?900 for it in 1947, and in those days it did not have en suite bathrooms. He did not seem impressed. "The market's firmed up," he said.
