When I were a lad, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I spent many a happy holiday with my family at my paternal grandparents’ house on the south coast.

This house had a real air of magic about it to me as a small child — it was quite a large house, detached with five bedrooms, set in just under an acre of land. My grandparents had lived there since the house was built in the 1930s, and much of the furnishings and decoration was old. The house was filled with little mementos from their trips abroad: not today’s plastic tat, but glass, shell, porcelain, wood, metal and so on. There were little lamps made from miniature liqueur bottles and glass paperweights. The house had a particular smell which I’ve not experienced anywhere else.

It had a coal shed, and bellpushes in two of the bedrooms and in the lounge to summon the maids that would have been commonplace when the house was built. The boiler that provided heat and hot water was coke-powered, and various generations of cat could be found sitting on or around it in cold weather. Shelves containing firewood, woodlice and spiders lined the alcoves at the sides of the porch. The whole house gave an air of self-sufficiency through old-fashioned necessity rather than modern eco-friendliness.

The garden was equally as magical to a young child as the house. An orchard at the rear of the house provided apples and pears from about twenty trees: the fruit was usually harvested off the ground, with the risk of turning an apple over to find it half-eaten and full of inebriated wasps. A vegetable garden featured runner beans, purple sprouting broccoli, potatoes, carrots, spring onions, sprouts, asparagus, raspberries, gooseberries and many other crops. A large concrete-framed greenhouse contained tomatoes, which gave off a heady aroma, and grapes grew from a vine on the roof strut. Trees and dense hedges gave plenty of hiding places and climbing opportunities, and fallen brown holly leaves taught the folly of skulking around barefoot.

There was also the “little” lawn, nomenclature that was definitely relative, which doubled up as a nine-hole miniature putting green; a grass tennis court and the front lawn with an old caravan and two hammock-spaced willows that were frequently put to that use.

The outbuildings were also great for me as a youngster: the garage housing the old green Morris Oxford was dark, with mysterious things stored in the roof space. A workshop with an old circular saw table and a workbench came off that — I spent much time in there building and fixing things, making use of the huge variety of ironmongery stored in metal tobacco tins.

The woodshed contained at least three mowers: two cheap and past-it electric mowers, and the petrol-powered “new” mower, which was only new relative to some ancestral piece of machinery that presumably expired long before I was born. This was self-powered and could pull a home-built trailer on which the operator could stand. I often used this when mowing the little lawn and tennis court, from well before the age of ten. Many other exciting things could be found in the woodshed: a large metal drum on a shelf containing petrol for the mower and imbuing its own distinct aroma on the interior; ancient oilcans with a thumb-pump; a 1966 E-reg Honda C90 scooter which I never saw in use; many old bicycles, a petrol rotavator and seasonally, strings of onions tied up with red baling twine drying out.

The house was set in the corner of a field. We would often have bonfires to get rid of garden refuse at the edge of the field, some of which would smoulder for days. The farmer would leave bales of straw around after the harvest, and my uncle would “help” me build bale houses (in reality, he must have done pretty much all of the work, but you know how kids are).

The house is just over a mile from the sea and on a flat peninsula, so we had many trips to the beach, mostly by bicycle. One of my projects was to build a trailer allowing me to pull our large sea-canoe down to the beach behind my bike.

The house is still in the family, but the magic has all gone and it seems a lot smaller now. I don’t think it’s down to the refitted kitchen or the redecoration; I think the magic was self-generated, by the excitement and awe of childhood.

Where am I going with all this?

That house and its feeling is what comes to mind whenever I read John 14:

1Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. 2In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. 3And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. 4You know the way to the place where I am going.

When Jesus spoke these words, a “house with many rooms” would have been something special, out of the ordinary. Nowadays, comfortable, multi-room houses are the norm and these verses lose some of their impact as a result.

One day, when I am called home, I will be back in a place with the same feeling of awe as described above, but on a much larger scale — and that will never wear out.

I’m looking forward to it! Will I see you there?