Baby boomer house prices

It has become a tired old cliche for the younger generation to whinge on about we baby boomers sitting pretty in our million-pound plus mansions that we have done nothing to deserve.

According to them, we just bought a cheap house decades ago and sat in it while its value rocketed and if the new government makes us sell our ivy-clad manor houses to pay for care in old age, that is only just and right.

We acquired these now high-value homes by sheer luck, they moan, as they struggle to afford tiny boxes on which they are paying an endless mortgage.

Yet none of this is quite true. While the younger generation, and I include my now middle-aged sons Tom and Will, partied endlessly in their youth, many young people of my generation put ourselves through hell to ensure we were eventually decently housed.

We bought wrecks and gradually did them up, coming home after work to paint ceilings, and spending weekends at DIY centres. We put up our own shelves, sanded our own floors, made our own curtains and slept on mattresses until we could afford proper beds. We bought cheap Victorian furniture that nobody wanted, lugged it home and painted it.

My first purchased house, in Newcastle, was a six-bedroom Victorian terrace in terrible condition. That was after three years' married life in a grotty flat to save up for it. In the 1960s, old houses were not popular and so we got it for about £2,500. We renovated it ourselves and let out the top floor, consisting of two attic rooms and a kitchen, to students. We later also rented out the spare bedroom, meaning that we lived, in effect, mortgage-free.

When we moved to London in 1970, we found there was nothing whatever we could afford in the capital. My husband's bank manager suggested we buy a modern three-bedroom semi in New Malden but we couldn't bear the thought of deepest suburbia. Instead, against his advice, we struggled to buy a tiny two-bedroom overpriced cottage in Richmond for £7,800. My husband's father lent us some money to make up the mortgage and it was a painful age before we managed to pay it back.

I just about went mad in that house as I had two small children and no money. Couldn't even afford a gin and tonic! But we were in Richmond, not New Malden and 15 months later, the property's value had soared to £11,500; enough to afford a bigger place. Our next four-bedroom house was also in Richmond and cost around £14,000. Once again it was in dreadful condition and to make things worse, we had to share it for a time with the previous owner, who had divorced and had nowhere to live.

Although I was now at work, in Fleet Street, we still had no spare money and had to tart it up ourselves. Our next move was to a large Edwardian house in Richmond that had not been touched since the 1930s. It had no central heating, the garden was a tangle of weeds and there was not even a proper kitchen although the vendors were intellectual snobs who would say to each other: 'Shall we speak in Latin, or Greek, today?'

Our final house in Richmond was a potentially beautiful but completely dilapidated Queen Anne house on the river. It is now worth about £4 million, but when we bought it for around £200,000 in the 1980s, we were the only idiots who would consider it. There were three or four squatters living there, trees were growing in the living room, a tenant was in the basement and the council had refused permission for two cars to park on the front, ordering us to put up railings. The lack of parking spaces meant that the house was virtually valueless but my husband fought the council for three years to get the order overturned.

He finally won, and as a result the house doubled in value overnight – and went on doubling. By now, though, we were getting divorced, and, finances halved, I moved to yet another dump in Notting Hill. Six years later I bought a wreck in Hammersmith, and after that a tired old place in Worthing.

My latest home, a large flat in Oxford, was not exactly ramshackle, but very old-fashioned and I spent years renovating this as well. The consequence is that I am one of those lucky buggers, according to the younger generation, sitting mortgage-free in my valuable pile.

Yet if we had bought that semi in New Malden, or worse, stayed in the Newcastle house, we would be worth practically nothing. It is only by making all these moves, and taking huge gambles on fetid dumps that many baby boomers have eventually become property millionaires.

This constant moving and willingness to live in temporary squalor was, I think, a unique feature of my generation. When I was growing up in St Neots, near Cambridge, nobody ever moved or did any DIY. My parents lived in the same house for over 40 years, hardly doing anything to it and it was the same with my in-laws.

Yet in my adult life I have moved house 10 times and lived in five locations in different parts of the country. Today's hedonistic householders would not be prepared to do this. My sons bought small houses about 15 years ago – with massive help from the bank of Mum and Dad, which my generation did not get – and are still living in them. They would consider it a serious infringement of their human rights to waste time going round B&Q when they could be out enjoying themselves.

But as I think all oldies will agree, I, and many of my contemporaries, have jolly well earned every brick of our glorious homes.

End