Sarah Beeny, 52, is a property expert and TV presenter. She has been married to Graham Swift since 2002; they have four sons. In 2022 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Here she looks back on her untraditional life and the lessons she has learned on parenting, health and renovation
When I was a child, there was quite a lot of boredom. I always had to find something to do. My four children have been lucky because they’ve also been bored. It’s fortunate to be bored. You can make a sword or learn to bike-jump.
My parents were self-sufficient. We lived in the countryside and we didn’t have any money. I always had a warm bed, but my dad used to mix porridge into mince to make it go further. My parents used to make doll’s house furniture for collectors. I definitely didn’t have helicopter parents. It’s ironic because sometimes I think I’m a helicopter parent. I think everyone is. Last night, I had two of them at the kitchen table doing their homework. I was offering to help but they really didn’t want it. I was cutting up their art with a guillotine. My parents would never have sat there cutting up my art.
I don’t think I ever suffered as a child but then my mum died when I was 10. That was complicated. I had a mother who loved me, and that’s more than a lot of people have. It’s better to have a mother who loves you for 10 years than not at all.
When my mother died, my dad sold our house because we didn’t have any money. We moved into a caravan and then he got planning permission to build another house. I watched the house being built. My dad was an architect and in those days, they didn’t have laser levels or things like that. You needed someone to hold the end of the tape measure. So for a lot of my childhood, after school, I was holding the end of a tape measure.
Filming a documentary about my battle with cancer really helped me put to bed a whole lot of things. I spent years terrified of cancer, as my mum died of the disease. The documentary helped me to research it and actually realise that they were unfounded fears. It’s still not great, but the earlier the diagnosis, the better the outcome. I’m not saying it’s fine for everyone, because it’s definitely not, but it’s not like it used to be.
I had a terrible relationship with education. I failed all my O-levels. I couldn’t understand the point of any of it. I couldn’t concentrate on anything and I couldn’t listen. For secondary school, I went to an all-girls boarding school – boarding during the week. I absolutely hated it. I just couldn’t bear being shut up with all girls. I was terribly homesick, and just wanted to not be there. Looking back now, I suspect I’d have been diagnosed with all sorts today. All my sons have dyslexia and one has ADHD. For most of my childhood, I had something written on my left hand.
When I was 17, I went travelling around the world on my own. The weird thing is, no one said I couldn’t. There were some not-so-brilliant moments. In the days before mobile phones, you were really on your own if you went travelling. There were a lot of scrapes. I got a job on a sheep-shearing farm in the lambing season in New Zealand by saying that I knew how to do lambing. I walked into a bar and told them I could be a sushi chef. I got the job but eventually they moved me into washing up. They thought I had quite a good attitude.
When I was 19, I bought my first house with my then-boyfriend, now husband. We were really young but I really wanted a home. The concept of home really mattered to me after my mum died and my dad remarried; his new wife was much older, and it was definitely their home more than ours. [My first house] was one-and-a-half bedrooms with an outside loo in a pretty terrible bit of London. After that, we did it up and then we sold it. Then we did another one, and we thought, we could make this a business.
We have made a lot of renovation mistakes. I have done the wiring wrong in a house, and I have given myself electric shocks. I have drilled through pipes. I have done rendering that has fallen off the walls. You learn because you do it wrong.
In the early days of the business, my grandfather was an accountant, and he taught me double-entry bookkeeping. Quite early on, I worked out that you’ve got to keep a set of accounts, and you’ve got to understand your costs. My advice for those buying a project: don’t try and do it all at once. Just do the bit that you can afford, and then do the next bit. Try to enjoy the journey rather than completely overwhelming yourself.
After attending a hen party, I got a call saying: “Do you want to be the face of this new TV series?” It paid practically nothing and I nearly said no. For ten years, I had a really nice business. I was having a really nice time and life was fine. It was my stepmother at the time who said: you only regret things you don’t do. I’ve had an amazing career – I get to go all over the country to places that I would never have gone to. I meet people I have never met, and I hear all their stories.
My four sons are in a band called Entitled Sons. This happened because while we were filming for New Life in The Country, we didn’t get planning permission in time to build. Still, we had to film something. My sons had formed a band, and the producer said, let’s get them playing at a local pub and we could film that. Since then they have won a competition and played at Glastonbury, and loads of other festivals. I’m obviously a bit biased, but they are really good, and they work really hard.
I feel lucky to have a family around me that I like spending time with. Don’t get me wrong, we argue. The biggest argument we have is about devices, which I really hate. They’re really toxic. We’ve never had any gaming devices in the house, but unfortunately, the school insists that all their work is done on iPads, which is a gaming device. It’s really difficult, and it’s a constant, complicated battle.
But I’m really lucky to have kids who are nice. My eldest son said: “The biggest thing you did is make me feel relevant. If I felt irrelevant, I’d probably have loads of fight in me but I haven’t really got anything to be angry about.”
Sarah Beeny’s New Life in the Country is on Channel 4 at 5.10pm from 4 January, and available on demand
