Location, location… location?

The gigantic Elizabethan mansion my mother had got my Dad to purchase was becoming too small for our family and now my mum decided it was time to move back nearer to my ageing grandmother. So, one day my parents packed us all into my father’s VW camper van, which always smelt as if the exhaust fed directly into the passenger cabin, and we drove off for two hours to look at a prospective new home. I admit that my memories of the house my mum had chosen have faded with time, but Caradoc Court, as it was known, was some kind of cross between a Victorian monstrosity and Hogwarts. The inside was a veritable maze. You would open a cupboard only to discover that it was really the doorway to a narrow staircase leading who knows where. The garden was even more remarkable – it was better described as an overgrown forest and if you wandered too deep into that dark morass, an eerie booming sound would somehow emanate through the knotted gnarly trees. This was not some distant orc army