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Our house was destroyed in 1943, and I moved the family to a cottage I owned before the war in the Bavarian Alps. This cottage was meant for a very few people, and at the end of the war, there were about 13 people in this very small house.

My family and I live in a wing of a Georgian mansion in East Sussex, which was built in the 1780s and fell into disrepair. It was rescued in the Seventies and carved into six terrace houses.

The house I grew up in was a tall Victorian town house in Bristol. There were very big rooms, which were under-furnished and always cold.

I was only 21 when I bought a five-bedroom detached house in Stoke-on-Trent that was way outside of my financial status in life. I did it by borrowing money from my family and the bank, taking out a huge mortgage.

I grew up in a few houses because my dad was a builder, so we used to build and sell quite a lot.

Years ago I had a house in Sussex, it was like Arcadia, with an old Victorian bridge, a pond and the Downs.

I made a penny for each paper delivered every day, plus 2 cents for Sunday papers. I had 120 customers. For a 10-year-old kid in the 1940s, that was a lot of money.

Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.

The bank told us we ought to sell this house to pay off our overdraft. Riders saved the day. I was so pleased when it got to number one, I went all around the fields crying and crying.

A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.