Why didn’t I appreciate it more?

I should hesitate in any circumstances to compare myself with Marcel Proust; but on opening this marvellous book I knew exactly how he felt with that madeleine.
My father was appointed Ambassador to France in 1944, moving in a few weeks after the Liberation of Paris; thus it was that from Christmas of that year — when I was 15 — and for the next three years I spent all my holidays at the Embassy. At that time, oddly enough, we had no other home; so it was there more than anywhere else that I felt I belonged. As I read this book and feasted my eyes on the superb photographs by Francis Hammond, the past 65-odd years fell away; here were rooms and pictures and pieces of furniture that I had almost forgotten, all swimming back into my conscious mind, suddenly as familiar as they had ever been; and I felt tears starting in my eyes.