‘My heart BROKE’

I could never have imagined, when I was a child living with my parents, four brothers and sister in a council house without any bathroom or flush loo, that one day my home would be a big, lovely, 300-year-old Cotswold house with 20 acres of land and a bright, burgeoning kitchen garden. But it was.

I was one of the lucky ones. From the late 1970s onwards,