The Huxters Feel Right At Home

When Army wife Sophie Bell-Carr made her twelfth move in eight years little did she know it was a homecoming. She spoke to Roger Borrell

AFTER travelling the world as the wife of a British Army officer, Sophie BellCarr made her first trip to her husband’s new posting in Lancashire and had ‘a strange feeling that I was coming home.’

It was only after she had enrolled her two sons at Kirkham Grammar School that she found out why she was so relaxed coming to a county she’d never visited. ‘My father died when I was ten,’ explains Sophie. ‘He lived in Ilfracombe and we’d always assumed that he was from the west country.

‘After we’d moved here my mother called me and said she had come across some old family papers in a drawer that showed he was actually from Lancashire and his family ran a garage business not far from here at Lea near Preston. That was a complete surprise – none of us had any idea he was from here.’

If that took Sophie by surprise what her mother told her next was, in her own words, astounding. ‘Mum also found his old school reports and dad had been a pupil at Kirkham Grammar. I couldn’t believe it. I suppose it explained why I had such a nice feeling when we first arrived.’