The Family Home

When I was 15 years old, my family moved from our modest but unique home in a small picturesque town in Sussex, England, called Arundel, to a very large and very old (parts of it are over 400 years old) manor farm and acreage, just outside a Roman city called Chichester, where my sister and I were at high school. The main reason for moving was that my brother, Jonathan, was born in May that year and we needed a larger home. My grandmother lived with us, and we only had 3 bedrooms in our Arundel home. Hence the exciting move to this rural and beautiful place my Father and Mother had found on one of their driving excursions in the Sussex countryside.
The house had everything a young family could want - fields of our own for ponies, barns to explore, a huge house with 2 staircases, old servants' quarters (which my Father turned into his workshop and greenhouse) and endless fields of crops and sheep surrounding us. We soon learned that the house had a great history - not only was it mentioned in the Doomsday Book as the property of a family called St. John, but it had undergone many structural changes in its long life. The original 2 farm cottages dated in the 1600's were added onto during the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800's and a full, Georgian Manor House was created with the French prisoners from the War brought in to do the heavy masonry work. Local flint stones from the Sussex Downs (hills to the North of the house) were used to face the house and heavy slate tiles were quarried locally and put on the roof. Then, during The Battle of Britain in WW2, the house was used as an Officers' Mess for the Polish Squadron of Battle of Britain Pilots. It is situated very close to Tangmere Airfield, one of the Battle of Britain airfields along the South Coast of England, and therefore was strategically placed for use by the Air Force for their personnel.
When we moved in as a family, my Father took all of us down to the cellars underneath the house - scary place for us youngsters at the time - full of different rooms, dark and dank, and really not much use to us because of its dampness, and we were shown the ceiling of the main room where all the Polish officers based there had written their names. They had also drawn some pictures of almost-naked ladies which my Father joked about and said he may whitewash over one day!
So...last weekend when I phoned my Mother - who still lives in a part of the same house - she told me that a gentleman had turned up that week asking if he could see the house and the cellars as he was writing a book about the pilots of the Polish Squadron who were based there. He had photographs which nobody in my family had ever seen, of the house during the War, and he gave copies to my Mother. She was quite excited about this event, and in chatting with her, I remembered all the fun we had had as youngsters growing up in that house, and feeling very special that we had "inherited" all the history that went with it.