I feel defensive about my second home – but my guilt is largely unnecessary | Ian Jack | Comment is free | The Guardian

I feel defensive about my second home – but my guilt is largely unnecessary | Ian Jack | Comment is free | The Guardian

Only after my father won the football pools did I begin to take an interest in property. I was 18 or 19 at the time. My dad didn't win much. But after he disclosed we were £3,000 better off, it occurred to me that we might live in a bought house rather than a rented one. Not because I believed that owner-occupation was an inherently superior form of shelter, but because a particular house in our village had come up for sale and its strangeness was attractive to us. It perched at the edge of the sea and had a stone front that protruded in a semi-octagon, completing its besieged appearance with a battlemented parapet, pointy windows and a tower that had ornamental arrow slits.
A small house with grand pretensions: years later, when I read Great Expectations, I recognised it as Mr Wemmick's house, which is a cottage doing its level best to look like a castle. "The smallest house I ever saw," thinks Pip, wondering at the painted gun emplacements, the drawbridge and "the queerest gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham) and a gothic door almost too small to get in at". Both houses, the fictional and the real, dated from the early 19th century, but while the first was south of the Thames, the second lay north of the Forth.