THERE’S no place like home – especially if it’s a 120ft steel schooner, a house boat, a bus, or a haunted farm in Macclesfield.
Adventurous grandmother Anna Rains, 66, lived in no less than FORTY-SIX "houses" across three continents, before settling in Mottram St Andrew.
An estate agency trainer for Reeds Rains in Macclesfield, 66-year-old Anna’s journey started just 21 days into her life – as a Second World War evacuee from London living with a family in Llandrindod, Wales.
"My cot was a drawer pulled out of the bedroom chest and when I became too big I slept in an old wicker theatrical skip," she said.
"I feel very fortunate. By the time I was 39, I’d lived in a 120ft steel schooner in Hong Kong, a houseboat near Chichester, skyscrapers, high rises, town houses, a thatched cottage and a haunted Macclesfield farmhouse."
The oldest of three siblings, Anna lived on a bus with mum Hyacinth and dad Alfred from 1947.
Next, the Holmes family moved back to a farm in Wales, then Scotland, before a stint in Sussex, then Eastbourne in 1957, when Anna was 15.
At 17, Anna attended college in Edinburgh, and two years later, her mum gave her a one-way ticket to Hong Kong so she could "see the world".
A few months later, Anna married Anton Emmerton, a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps, living on a small two-berth yacht.
"We moved around Hong Kong seven times during three-and-a-half years, and I lived on a 120ft steel schooner," she said.
"Looking back on it, it was stupid. We were out in deep water and there was only me, my husband, baby Simon and a Hawaiian fellow called Sam."
After moving back to a cottage in Wiltshire, Anna moved to Sussex, before living on a Chichester houseboat. Her biggest learning curve was moving to California in 1968, living in four different places during a four-year stint.
"It was the height of hippies and flower power. My husband had a business on Newport beach. He would sell boats at the front, and coffins and caskets round the back," she said.
In 1983, Anna moved to Brooke House Farm, in Mottram St Andrew, where she lived for 22 years. For the past three years she’s lived in a Mottram cottage – which she says is haunted.
She resides with Michael Rains, former director of Stockport County Football Club, who she married in 1987.
She added: "I’m happy in Macclesfield. I don’t think I want to move again, but who knows, I might have one move left in me yet! For me it is back to Jim Rohn’s saying – ‘Let death find me climbing a new mountain’."
Will you take the dogs or the diamonds? An Historical Account of a Very Eccentric Family, by Anna Rains, is to be published and sold this summer.
