Bundled gloomily in his overcoat, cocooned in the back of the taxi, he thought of homes, remembering to the very beginning. Yorkshire and Radley Hill, where, an only child, he had been born and brought up. A large, solid, and comforting family home, filled with the smell of wood-smoke and spring flowers and cakes baking. The house was surrounded by four acres of land, and it had a tennis court and a little wood, where on autumn evenings he would stand with his gun, waiting for the pigeons to fly in from the stuffle fields. To Radley Hill he had returned from day-school, and then boarding-school, usually with a friend in tow, come to spend the holidays. It was a place comfortable as an old tweed jacket, which he had thought would never change, but of course it did. Because, during his last year at Newcastle University, his mother died, and after that nothing was ever quite the same again.

from an all-time fav (and a great winter read), Winter Solstice, by Rosamunde Pilcher