My childhood home was in Kensington, west London. My mother, her sister, Mary, and their mother, Ida, came down from the northeast in the war and rented in the area. They moved into No 62 Abingdon Villas during the blitz. People who owned houses in London were eager not to leave them empty, so they let them for a pittance, to have someone there if they caught fire during a bombing raid or were flooded by a burst water main.

My mum, my aunty and grandma always landed on their feet: they negotiated a 10-year lease for £2 a week on No 62, a four-storey townhouse with a lovely back garden. It was in this house - now worth £3.5m – that they partied through the war. My mum and aunty were single, and there were always gentleman callers. When American and Canadian servicemen came on leave, they’d turn up and say, “Hi, a friend came back from R&R in London and said this was the place to head for.”

The house was built in 1880 and was white stucco, with steps up to the front door. Kensington wasn’t the “des res” it is now. It was the Kensington of Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, one of bomb sites and elegant but dilapidated houses with bedsitters.

We lived on the ground floor and in the basement, where I shared a bedroom with my mother. My mum’s name was Gladys, but she was called Gypsy because, when times were hard in the 1930s, she had set herself up as a fortune-teller in Whitley Bay. She was from a working-class background and had lost her father in the first world war. The second world war cut across the summer of her life and she never married. She had a couple of passionate relationships, but one man was killed and the other had to return to Poland.

Gypsy met my father, Alessandro, after the war, and she was 40 when she had me in 1952. He was a dashing Italian who had spent 10 years in the Foreign Legion and was part of the flotsam and jetsam from Europe who ended up in London. He was making sandwiches in the canteen at Imperial College, in South Kensington, where she was working as a cashier. They separated soon after my birth and he settled in Warren Street, which was an Italian ghetto. I used to visit him, and wouldn’t hear English spoken for the whole day.

I didn’t know until I was 13 that Gypsy hadn’t married my father. The official line was that my mother and father were divorced. My mum always called herself Mrs Lunghi to avoid the stigma attached to me being illegitimate.

I had a happy childhood and was always running about barefoot, singing and dancing. From the age of four, I had classes at the Ballet Rambert in Notting Hill. I am sure No 62 had everything to do with me becoming an actress, as it was living theatre.

We rented five rooms on the first and second floors to a wonderful array of characters. There were permanent residents who stayed for years and others who came and went. Behind each door was a character and a life story.

These were kind, good people who had survived the war. I would wander into their rooms and chat. Nicky was an ex-pilot. He would tell me about flying bombers and had a lovely old volume of Alice in Wonderland, which he read to me. Mrs Anderson was elderly, with long, grey hair to her waist. She taught me to plait and I would practise hair-styles on her. She also had a canary and I would help to clean the cage.

Some people kept themselves to themselves. For years, an architect called Rosenthal lived in the large, sunny front room. He was taciturn and reclusive – my mother told me that he had come from Germany and had lost his entire family in the camps. I would sneak into his room because he made mobiles out of coloured Perspex. The room was hung with them and they would be slowly floating, casting rainbow prisms. It was magical.

Paying guests would cook on their Baby Bellings, but they weren’t confined to their rooms. Our kitchen was on the ground floor and we had a big oval Victorian dining table, which we would sit around – there would be conversation and laughter.

In 1962, the lease came to an end and we had the option to buy the house. Nobody in my family had any capital and a single woman could not get a mortgage in those days, so we had to move. We rented a mansion flat by the river in Hammersmith. I was sad to say goodbye to No 62, and so were Mum and Mary; it was where they’d spent their war and had some incredible times.

Cherie Lunghi can be seen in Strictly Come Dancing on BBC1 on Saturdays and Sundays

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