We moved to the house - where my parents still live – when I was about 13 and I stayed there until I finished school at 18. It’s in Royston, Hertfordshire, where I grew up from the age of 10 months. Our previous house, which was in another part of the town, was Victorian and pretty, but the garden was a bit smaller. My mum loves gardening, and the new house was on a big plot of land. She and my dad showed me a picture of the house and said, “What do you think of this?” I said, “It’s okay, but I’d never live there.” The next thing I knew, we were buying it.

The house, which dates from the 1920s, was quite small, but my dad is a builder, so my parents did a huge amount of extension work. They took down 3½ of the four walls to extend it on all sides and make the rooms bigger and more interesting. It was a long project – I think my mum would say it’s still not finished – but the house was transformed.

Mum has a photo of me standing on the old roof trusses, helping my dad – the new ones, which are much bigger, are towering over my head. I regularly used to come home from school and do that kind of thing.

I remember once there was a tarpaulin over my parents’ bedroom, because there was no roof on the house. It was raining hard, and my dad and I were pushing the rain out of the tarpaulin with broomsticks.

Before we renovated, it was like an “old lady” house – the decor wasn’t very nice – but it soon became a real haven. There’s a large kitchen, which is really sociable. As soon as anyone comes round, even now, we all go into the kitchen and sit around the big farmhouse table, which I love.

I never got on that well with practising at home because there was always something else going on in the house and I hated to be left out of the action, shut away in a room doing scales. Even now, I go home and I’ve got a constant workload of music to keep on top of, but I want to catch up with Mum and Dad, and my brother and his girlfriend are always popping round for a cup of tea. My brother is a fireman, so he’s always got hair-raising stories to tell, and it’s so much more fun to sit at the table listening to them than to lock myself away in the dining room with a metronome.

I started playing the trumpet when I was seven. At school, I had the chance to play lots of instruments, but the trumpet was the one that appealed the most – I liked the sound of it and I liked the look of it.

I used to practise in different parts of the house, depending on what I was playing, because all the rooms have distinct acoustics. There’s a double-height hallway that Dad built – it’s incredibly complicated, with winding wooden stairs around the edge – that’s a good place to play because of the high ceiling. I used to practise in the living room, because that has a nice acoustic, and sometimes in the dining room, because it’s isolated from the rest of the house, so I could work properly there. I also used the kitchen, because everyone was always in there, so I wanted to be as well. I’d just force them to listen to me. I never practised in my bedroom – I felt too far away from everyone.

My parents were absolutely fine about me taking up the trumpet. They never knew what I was going to come up with next, so this was relatively tame. When little kids start to learn the trumpet, it’s not a horrible noise, like some instruments can be. And we’ve always lived in detached houses, so it’s never been a problem. My brother played the tuba. He doesn’t any more, although we always join the Royston Town Band on Christmas morning.

The band was the first thing I did when I started to play. My friends and I would just copy the older people around us – we didn’t know what was going on, so we would look at their valves and press the same ones. We couldn’t really read music. Even now, they don’t let me play principal cornet, because I haven’t been to enough rehearsals. I’m still considered to be one of the young kids in the band, the ones who are naughty and talk too much.

I still have a couple of friends in the town, but lots have moved away and I’ve moved on. I was ready to leave – I couldn’t wait to go out and explore the world. But every time I go back, it’s great, because nothing has really changed.

Alison Balsom’s latest recording, Haydn and Hummel Trumpet Concertos, is out now on EMI Classics. She is performing at the Albert Hall, SW7, on Thursday and Wigmore Hall, W1, on October 9

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