In 1963, when I was 15 months old, my father, a solicitor, was offered a job with a firm of lawyers in Chichester, West Sussex. We moved from Cheam, on the outskirts of London, to a house in Fishbourne, a small village west of Chichester, famous for its Roman palace. In those days, it had a post office, three pubs, a shop and a church. Divided by the main road, it was not a Miss Marple English village with dusty, sleepy lanes and rattling carts. Our quiet, pretty cul-de-sac was one of several developments that had sprung up in the 1950s to provide family houses and bungalows for retired teachers and nurses, solicitors and employees of the bigger firms in neighbouring Hampshire. There were plots of different sizes and shapes, and no front fences. It was peaceful, modest and suburban. No fuss.

My two younger sisters and I spent our entire childhoods there. It was a house that drew people in — even now, many of my oldest friends can still remember the telephone number off by heart. We had two silver birch trees in the front garden, fir trees across the back, where the blackbirds made their nests, and a showy laurel bush, where we made a camp out of sight of the kitchen windows. In my bedroom, decorated by Habitat and my mother in 1970s colours — green and white and brown — I listened to Simon & Garfunkel and Hotel California, played on an old drop-arm record player, to Station to Station and Armed Forces and Solid Air. There, I fell in love for the first time (and, as luck had it, for all time).

As we three sisters grew older, the house became a second home for other people’s teenage children, because of my welcoming parents and the long, low sofa in the sitting room that allowed gangly boys to sprawl and self-conscious girls to curl. As important as the house itself was what lay just beyond, out of the front door, down Creek End and across the road, to where the Fishbourne Marshes spread out like an antique map. The left-hand path led over the fields to the church. Ahead, an old, brooding house looked out over the silent expanse of water like a sentinel. To the right, the path I always took, a muddy track went towards the estuary proper. I loved the whispering pampas grass and reeds that towered over my head, the rills and streams that wound round and round, like veins on an old man’s hand. My sisters and I dropped Pooh sticks from the middle of the three bridges over the waterways. We played Swallows and Amazons (without the boat) and Narnia (without the snow). We trekked along the old flint sea wall to Oak Pond, where bottles floated unwanted in the lifeless water.

When my father retired, we understood why our parents decided to sell up — we all lived elsewhere, were studying, starting families of our own, working — but each of us mourned the house. All those Christmases and birthday parties, the Sunday lunches, the rabbit and guinea pig hutches, the stories.

For years, the house inhabited my dreams. I tried, and failed, to imagine another family in our kitchen. I never went back. Over time, the memories faded. In 1998, my husband and I moved back to Sussex from London, pulled by a sense of home. On a cold autumn day, the air heavy with the smell of bonfires and dusk, I decided to make the return journey.

Memory has a habit of painting the past in unreliable colours, so I went, a reluctant pilgrim, to the marshes first. Farming had encroached on the untended woodlands, the paths were less haphazard and white posts marked the way across the estuary, but the feelings of freedom and space were still the same. The gulls shrieking out at sea, the damp mulch of the leaves underfoot, the stark hawthorn bushes, the oily smell of the mud flats at low tide. Later, as the light was slipping from the October sky, I turned my back on the sea and walked up the familiar road to the old house. There were lights on in the dining room and on the half-landing. Smaller? Certainly. Neater and less secluded than I’d remembered, less private. But it looked cared for. As if it had carried on living its quiet life without our help.

Today, we live in a leafy house not far away that, in its turn, has become a second home for our teenage children’s friends. The kitchen is bright, the rooms expand to fit and there are piles of shoes by the back door. I no longer dream about the house in Fishbourne. But I am the person I am because of my childhood spent there. There, I learnt to be myself. And, although I write novels inspired by the landscape of France, my preoccupation with the landscape, with that tipping point where sky and hill and water meet, began years ago in that first home in Fishbourne.

© Mosse Associates Ltd

- Kate Mosse’s novel Sepulchre is published by Orion (£7.99)

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