'Something quite special': Why millions of people connected with one woman’s emotional journey home

A little piece of Sydney’s Double Bay has long resided in the heart of English woman Meg Morris, whose blissful Aussie childhood ended abruptly when she was just eight years old. For more than 70 years, she has clung to those childhood memories of long ago, some now misty, but others indelible.

She remembers her sunny bedroom in the art deco block of flats, views over the harbour and the dinky timber sailing boat an old merchant seaman made for her, which she would drag to the sand and back again, up the stairs to where it would sit, pride of place, under her bedroom window.

“We [the neighbourhood children] used to go catching leather jackets,” she remembers wistfully, as if it were yesterday. “We’d go out to [Clark Island] and cook the fish over a fire. Playing on the rocks, swimming; it was an idyllic childhood really, I’ll never forget it.”

But a little boldness and an act of kindness by the property’s current occupants brought the London-based Morris full circle in a reunion that has received the heart-warming affirmation of millions via social media.

On a recent Friday afternoon, when she and husband Jed finally got to walk through the top-floor apartment’s front door, the memories instantly flooded back.

“I’ve been doing a lot of crying recently,” she says of the last few days. “It was wonderful. I found myself remembering more things than I thought I knew.”

It was a reunion that was a long time in the making, one that Morris had envisaged many times over since the day, just before she turned nine, when her parents decided to return home to England. With a heavy heart, young Meg had bid farewell to her friends to journey to a “new, cold place”.

“I didn’t want to go. I don’t think my mother really wanted to go either,” she says. 

While she has lived in England ever since, Morris always wondered what it would be like to return to the apartment on Stafford Street. She has regularly travelled to Australia – the couple’s son now lives in Adelaide – and revisiting Sydney, and Double Bay, has always felt like a necessary stopover. It was earlier this year, however, when she finally decided to take the leap and reach out to the people living there. 

“I had been thinking about doing it for quite some time,” Morris explains. “I think I was just nervous about what memories and what things it would bring up, and what they might say, and then I thought, ‘Just go for it’.”

Benjamin and Pamela Richards, who have rented the apartment for 17 years, opened the surprise letter and were delighted. Benjamin was familiar with the sort of emotions enveloping such a journey and immediately wrote to Morris to extend an invitation. 

“When I was 20, I went back to the mansion I grew up in and, of course, it turned out to be a small house,” he shares. “I was a bit anxious and nervous, and I didn’t speak to the owners or go inside, so I understand how Meg was probably feeling when she sent the letter.

“I wrote back immediately via email and said, ‘Yes, please come and visit, we are more than happy to have you’. And then I thought, ‘Oh God, I’ve got to clean the apartment now’,” he says with a laugh.

Richards also posted about the experience on Reddit and was amazed at the response. His story, accompanied by a photograph of Morris’s letter, has garnered almost 10 million views and thousands of comments from people sharing their own heart-warming tales of returning to their former homes, or receiving requests from previous residents keen to do so. 

“I don’t know why but this [post] made me cry a little. It’s so awesome the way humans connect sometimes,” said one.

There were even readers who wondered if Morris was possibly returning to collect some long-hidden treasure from a secret hiding place. 

Richards jokes that one benefit of the old apartment building not having been updated much during its lifetime – most of the original features remain and there is still no air-conditioning, car parking or lift – was that, for Morris, it probably felt much as it did in the mid-1940s. 

Indeed, the layout and many of the rooms were just as she had remembered, although it all seemed much smaller now.

“The first thing I looked at was the rounded wall close to the entrance, because I was remembering it as a rounded wall and I wanted to check if that memory was right,” she says. 

“And I wanted to go in and look at my bedroom to see what that was like, and seeing that was something quite special, really.”

For Morris, now 78, the urge to return “home” intensified after the death of her parents. As an only child, she had felt the ties of family slip and the need to affirm her roots became palpable. 

“It feels like I want to put my feet down here and it’s quite comforting really,” she says. “It’s connections; connections to who you were and reinforcing something. It makes me feel grounded, I think. 

“I suppose, in a way, it is closure. But it’s ongoing closure, which is a ridiculous thing to say isn’t it, but it feels a bit like that.”

For Richards, too, the experience has brought a feeling of connectedness. The couples have agreed to stay in touch and when Benjamin and Pamela travel to England next year, they plan to visit Meg and Jed. 

“It’s just something that’s really nice,” he says. “I think connecting to different and past parts of your life can be really fulfilling. 

“Most friendships happen through a quirk of coincidence and that’s ultimately what this is, connecting to another human being who just happens to have lived in the same apartment some 70 years before you.”