My heart skipped a beat when I first walked down the hill, in autumn, and saw the back of the house. From the front it was a classic “added on to” 16th, 17th, 18th-century cottage. From the back it was wider, and there was a nice country garden with a terrace. It wasn’t too big and it wasn’t overlooked.

It was the 1990s, and I had lived on my own for a long time [Marsh was divorced from the late actor Jon Pert-wee], so there are all sorts of things you have to take into consideration - will there be enough people around to help to mend a gate, say? But when you live on your own, you don’t have some bloke there saying, “You can’t do that.”

The cottage wasn’t in a village or even a hamlet; it was really a settlement. It’s in a seductive place about five miles from Henley, in an area known as “the lost villages of the Chilterns”. It is very old-world, with not much land under the plough: there are fields, almost meadows. It just touches your heart.

Turville Heath, nearby, is quite well known, as it’s where John Mortimer lives – it was he who introduced me to the house. I was living over towards Thame, in Oxfordshire, and he knew I was thinking of moving. He told me about this cottage for sale, “near friends of mine, that I think is about the right size for you”. So I went and had a look. I did a big circular walk, past two lovely farmhouses and a pond stuffed full of wild ducks, with one white one, which is good luck. The gamekeeper there – an attractive young man – said that if I bought the house, he would hanga pair of mallards on the tree for me.

John introduced me to his friends the artist John Piper and his wife, Myfanwy, a great librettist. I was incredibly impressed by them, bowled over, but they wore their learning lightly.

When I saw inside the cottage, I thought, “This is Jean’s house.” There were three bedrooms, an inglenook fireplace, flagstones and a stable-type door. I ended up paying about £320,000 for it. It was very pretty and had been left in good condition. And the kitchen was fabulous. The overhead lights were made out of upturned shopping baskets. Oh, and, dream of dreams, there was a medlar tree just outside the kitchen window, so I made jelly.

I had furniture I had brought over from the apartment I was renting in New York. There was one piece of walnut, lots of Shaker and some lovely chairs from 18th-century Massachu-setts. And there was lots of blue and white, with sudden splashes of raspberry. I gave up the flat, as it was fiendish running two places.

At the time I still had to sell the Thame house. I had a mortgage and was old enough to be just a little bit scared, so I was literally living on fish heads and berries from the hedges. I would go to the local shop and ask for turbot heads; then I could make fishcakes and stock. The owner knew when I had got a good job once I moved on to lamb cutlets.

It was the perfect area for me to write. Upstairs, Downstairs [which first appeared in 1971] had been based on an idea by Eileen Atkins and me. We then co-created a television series called The House of Eliott. I wrote the novel of it afterwards, which I finished off at the cottage.

Then I wrote Finders Keepers, about how class isn’t necessarily passed on. My mother was a barmaid and my father not much better than a labourer, but I was living in a posh, middle-class house, where others had fallen off their perch.

I’m not much of a party person, but it was the most sociable house I’ve ever had. Everybody around was so inclusive. There are pockets of greatness, and with the other families I felt so safe. John and Myfanwy had a rather mucky, simple sort of swimming pool in the woods, just down the lane from me. I would put on my flip-flops, go down and take everything off, and swim. Sadly, the gamekeeper never came, but he did leave me braces of mallard.

In the end, a neighbour in one of the nearby barns started a business and traffic started going past. So I sold up, privately, as I decided to go quickly. I went back recently to stalk the house, and it was so touching – it really was a magical, mystical place. I don’t regret living there and I don’t regret leaving, because the people living there now are so happy there. I know I can’t go back. I don’t expect to live in the past.

Jean Marsh is appearing in The Portrait of a Lady, directed by Peter Hall, at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, until September 6

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