Share a pic of the house you grew up in and win £100 John Lewis voucher -WINNING PICTURE ANNOUNCED

[RachelMumsnet]

To celebrate the publication of Lisa Jewell's latest book The House We Grew Up In we're inviting you to send in pictures of the house that you grew up in with a short caption.

Whether it's a shot of the exterior or a room indoors, a garden or even piece of furniture or ornament but all pics must be evocative of your childhood. Post your pics up before the end of 22 July, write a short caption, and we'll create a carousel of our favourite ten pics on 23 July. Each person who makes the shortlist of ten will receive a copy of The House We Grew Up in. Author Lisa Jewell will then choose the winning photo from the ten and we'll announce the winner on Thursday 25 July. The winner will receive a £100 voucher for John Lewis.

More about The House We Grew up in by Lisa Jewell

Meet the Bird Family

All four children have an idyllic childhood: a picture-book cottage in a country village, a warm, cosy kitchen filled with love and laughter, sun-drenched afternoons in a rambling garden.

But one Easter weekend a tragedy strikes the Bird family that is so devastating that, almost imperceptibly, it begins to tear them apart.

The years pass and the children become adults and begin to develop their own quite separate lives. Soon it's almost as though they've never been a family at all.

Almost. But not quite.

Because something has happened that will call them home, back to the house they grew up in - and to what really happened that Easter weekend all those years ago.

[loopyloou]

This is my mum and grandparents at Christmas in the dining kitchen of our tiny terraced house/newsagents shop in the early 80s.

Unfortunately I don't have any photos of the front of the house/shop, but the house was tiny - just a double bedroom and 2 very small bedrooms, bathroom, living room also upstairs and downstairs a dining kitchen behind the shop. I loved living there, had friends nearby and lots of lovely fields to walk our spaniel in.

[loopyloou]

This is the back "garden" - more a yard - of the same house, where my dad had lots of barbeques.

[ellyholmes]

Hello! I know it looks like I must be about a hundred but actually this photo was taken in 1978, the year I came to live at 60-62 Lion Rd in Twickenham. It was a junk shop and we had a domestic (although vicious) goat in the back garden.

[Kveta]

This is a picture of DS being washed in the same kitchen sink that I was bathed in as a baby - bits of the house have changed around the sink, and when the house was badly flooded (think 6ft of water in the kitchen) the sink went unused for several months whilst the whole of the downstairs was refurbished around it - but the sink has always been there, and probably always will be there! It's where us children were all bathed as babies, where the dogs are washed after a muddy walk, it's where veg is cleaned after being dug up from the garden, and where the dishes are washed after every single meal (because mum doesn't like stuff being left out all day). It's quite an integral part of family life :)

[Trinski]

This is a relatively recent pic, but my mum still lives there. It's the lower of the two houses in the picture. My parents bought it half derelict in the 70s and my memories of childhood are of them adding things like running water, a toilet, stairs... The rest of the time we were out playing on the mountain. Pretty idyllic and she's still there for me to take my children.

[OddSockMonster]

Me in my bedroom.

I don't remember the second hand furniture, I don't remember the wonky old pram, but I certainly remember the fantastic map of the world mum painted for me on the wall. You don't need money to be inspired (I went on to study geography and am now an environmental scientist. I also have a shocking ability to match curtains and wallpaper) :)

[inbetween44]

Picture of me and my brother outside the house we lived in until I was nearly five.

[JulesJules]

This was my Grandma and Grandpa's house. I lived here with my Mum and Dad when I was a baby, and we went back to stay for summer holidays and Christmas for years afterwards.

[CharliesMouse]

All the photos I can find of the house I grew up in - bar the one in the snow - were taken of the various extensions that were added to it over the years. I was four when we moved in. The previous owners had taken everything, carpets, bathroom fixtures, even all the light bulbs, and my parents had very little money to begin with to spend on furnishings but it was always a home. I lived there happily until I moved away to college. My bedroom is the one above the garage. I still think of it as my bedroom even though I haven't lived there for over 25 years! My dad, who spent pretty much all of his time tinkering with things in the garage, used to bang on the ceiling with a broom if I played my music too loud!

Mum and dad still live in the house, although it's really too big for the two of them. It will be a sad day for us all when they eventually, but inevitably decide to down-size.

[littlehouseinthesuburbs]

1970s Xmas. Note the TV and the curtains, and you can just see the stereogram

[PigletJohn]

The front doorstep. It's stone, and after the fashion for Cardinal Red Polish died away, it got painted red.

Years after I'd moved out, I scraped and painted it for my old mum. This is how it looked (before.)

[nostalgiaaaah]

(Namechanged for obvious reasons)
A couple of years ago in my work I had to ring a telephone number to advise of a raffle win. I recognised the number as the one that had been at my childhood home where I spent my first 18 years, we had moved from it 30 years ago.

The new owners invited us round, although I still live nearby, the rest of my family have long moved to new areas. These photos were taken 40 years apart, the same tree in the background.

Thankfully my Mum didn't make us all wear our matching BHS anoracks this time.

[PigletJohn]

here's an interesting one. The electrical incomer is paper insulated, lead sheathed, wrapped in steel armour, dates from about 1921. it's still there, though there have been other revisions.



What do you mean, not interesting?

[DuelingFanjo]

I can't do this on iPad so marking my place for later.

[BennyB]

I grew up in a three-bedroom council house with my parents and four siblings and had the happiest childhood imaginable. We played run-outs in the street with all the other kids on the estate, we knocked on doors to visit our friends, and all the neighbours watched out for everyone else's kids. Although we were not the kind of kids that Katie Hopkins would approve of (what a restricted imagination that woman has), but we had childhoods that were full of fun, laughter, and community spirit.

So, fast forward 30 years to Christmas 2012, and my sister - a body builder and personal trainer who lives in New Zealand - came home to visit after a 17 year absence. This photo is taken outside our old childhood home looking a little worse for wear but packed full of fantastic memories of family and friendship.

[PigletJohn]

the cat when new



When I look at this I am reminded of one of my few lasting regrets, that I didn't sock the man who threw stones at it.

[littlehouseinthesuburbs]

This photo is the house opposite and was taken in about 1977 when we had rare (for our area) snow, and all of us from several houses teamed up for snowball fights. I think it sums up a 1970s youth well. Note the lack of cars, and the fashion of the only grownup walking by (was it Her Maj?)

[ShiverMeWhiskers]

This is a picture of my sister and I taken in the late 70s in our living room. I have no idea what we were wearing but we used to have so much fun! We would prop my mums cooling trays against the kitchen chairs and pretend to be in the zoo, or shoot along the carpet on all fours pretending to be spiderman running up a wall.... or maybe we were just hallucinating off the carpet patterns!!

[QOD]

Happy happy days, farm cottage, we had our own mini crazy golf, wildlife pond, tyre swing... Sigh

[DuelingFanjo]

This is the house I grew up in from 6 months to 5 years. We were 2 adults and 3 children in a three roomed house with no bath or toilet; my parents were living the 1970s self-sufficient dream. I have nothing but happy memories and we still have the house, though it has deteriorated over the years. Some of my very earliest memories happened looking out through that little window on the right.

this will out me to anyone who knows me in rel life.

[BewitchedBotheredandBewildered]

I lived in 7 houses between being born and leaving home aged 18. Don't have any photos of any of them
Quite bizarre, would never have occurred to me if you hadn't asked.

[CheerfulYank]

I don't think I can win 'cause I'm American, but I wanted to play anyway! :) I love this house. My parents still live there, that's my dad up painting. We moved into it and it had been empty for more than 30 years. No electricity or running water. (This was 21 years ago, so strange to think that now!) People thought my parents were crazy, but it was right on a river with 19 acres of land. There were holes everywhere and bats and bugs but they made it lovely. It is gorgeous now; they've been offered hundreds of thousands for it time and again. And they never hired anyone, my dad did it all himself.

[katydid02]

Maybe there is scope for friendly Mumsnetters to get together and go an take a picture for people who have moved away and no longer live where they grew up - we must have the whole country covered.

[florencebabyjo]

This was the house I grew up in during the early part of my childhood. It is a lovely proportioned Georgian house with a sweeping staircase, a ballroom , stables and extensive cellars. I remember as a child the big walled garden with it's mulberry tree in the middle and the huge hydrangea bushes which I used to spend hours sitting under. I remember looking down the gratings into the cellars and scaring myself with imaginary monsters and exploring under the yew trees at the bottom of the garden and finding the graves of family dogs. My grandmother used to lay huge sheets of polythene under the mulberry tree at harvest time to catch the berries, and it was my job to collect the berries into ice cream tubs ready to make steaming mulberry and apple pies which I loved. I also used to spend hours with a butter knife and a bowl scraping the moss out of the cobbles near the stables. My grandmother used to give me 10p for every tubful of moss I collected. I loved doing that, and it was an ingenious way of keeping a small child occupied! Another magical memory I had was standing at the window right at the top of the house in the evening. I used to watch the ferry crossing from Torpoint to Plymouth and love seeing the lights twinkling on the water as it crossed. It was a magical place to grow up in and perfect for hide and seek. Unfortunately my grandmother sold it as she couldn't manage to keep it up on her own. It then was bought by a dentist who had his surgery on the first floor and has since been sold again, though I don't know who to. I don't have a photo of it to add, so I found one on streetview which shows the lovely high slate walls around the house.

[DuelingFanjo]

I thought I would also share this picture of me, my sister and my mum with my son and my niece when we visited the house last year. It was the first time my mum had been back in around 20 years.