Surrey Homes | SH17 | March 2016 | Fashion supplement inside

Above: Emma’s B&B guests can relax in her pretty drawing room which overlooks the gravel driveway and raised vegetable beds in the front garden. Pale decor
and reflective, glittering treasures make the most of the light, which floods in from the kitchen though half-glazed sliding doors.
The Madras Club was built in 1832 and, as the
elderly brigadier and I sat having tea on the
hallowed verandah, nothing very much seemed
to have changed since that date. My host was Indian but
educated and trained at Eton and Sandhurst, in many
ways more traditionally English than I would ever be, and
had had a ‘glorious’ life serving in both the British and
Indian armies. He was now, however, a troubled man.
“It’s my sister,” he said sadly. “She keeps pointing
out – rather insensitively I feel – that I can’t last
forever. She says the time has come for me to begin
preparing myself for my next incarnation which
means a great deal of navel-gazing in uncomfortable
positions and endless pilgrimages to places that I’ve
taken great trouble over the last 80 years to avoid.
“But the real problem, you see,” he said, wistfully
buttering a crumpet, “is that I have no interest
whatever in returning as anything or anybody
else. I feel that this is the life that all my other
incarnations have prepared me for: my journey’s
end. This has been the one life I was always destined
to lead – the being I was always meant to be.”
And so, strangely, it can be with houses. Very
occasionally, I walk into a house that has had
myriad previous lives but they all seemed to have
served only to prepare it for one final reincarnation
Sparkling objects reflect the light. “I’m afraid I’m a magpie – if
something is shiny, I’m just drawn to it,” says Emma
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