I THINK I now know how salmon feel when they swim upstream to return to their spawning grounds, writes GRAHAM CARTER.

I recently did the equivalent by getting on my bike and cycling up the hill to Kingshill House, the place where I first drew breath, 55 years ago.

Back then it was Swindon’s maternity home, and if you were born in the town during a 40-year period starting in 1931, the chances are that Kingshill House is where it happened.

Like many of those born there, I never had a reason to go back, but a recent open day, organised by its new owners, gave me an excuse, and turned out to be a thought-provoking experience.

The owners, volunteers who call themselves The Kingshill Trust, bought the place in 2011 and have spent a fortune turning it into a fantastic community asset, partly as a peaceful refuge for people facing certain challenges, but also as somewhere for community groups and local people to meet.

They are a ‘community of faith’, but you don’t have to be a believer to visit, or indeed, be a former Kingshill baby. They will have anybody.

There is a permanent invitation, for example, to join them for lunch or just a cup of tea on Fridays, in a smart cafe called Urban Monk.

The house is easy to find, because it’s at the top of Kingshill, and if you climb up a couple of storeys to the house’s little tower, you can look out across the rooftops of Old Town.

You can’t go much higher in Swindon, so those of us born in Kingshill House could say we were born looking down on the rest of the town.

Although I have seen the house from the outside, hundreds of times, it wasn’t until I dropped in to have a proper look that it suddenly hit me that I had come into the world in one of the most stylish properties in Swindon.

I even wondered whether it would have made a difference to my life if I had realised, earlier, that I had been born in such a beautiful place.

It’s also ironic that while my birthplace is still standing and has – to coin a phrase – been born again, the maternity unit at Princess Margaret Hospital, which took over the job of delivering Swindonians into the world, including both my children, is demolished and gone forever.

The open day also helped to exorcise some dark images of Kingshill House as it was pictured in my mind.

My mum never had a good word to say about the place, and whenever she did talk about it, it was if she had been sent to jail there.

To be fair, as a woman about to give birth to twins in her late thirties, which was then comparatively old to be a mother, let alone of twins, the four weeks she spent there before the birth and then the obligatory two weeks afterwards must have felt like a prison sentence.

Worse still for my image of Kingshill House was its role in its post-natal days, when it became a psychiatric unit called Seymour Clinic.

So while the open day was filled with happy tales of proud mums and bouncing babies, some came with terribly sad ones, including of padded cells, bulletproof glass and panic buttons.

That makes it all the more pleasing to find Kingshill House has come full circle and is a happy, cheerful, welcoming place again, and full of smiles.

So drop in – especially if, on your last visit, you arrived there crying, and all pink and wet and floppy, like a salmon.