Anthony Head

The Buffy actor recalls the Victorian cottage where he was brought up - a world away from the yuppie style of the Gold Blend ads that brought him instant fame

My parents moved to Church Cottage, in Hampton, Middle-sex, in 1960. It was a tiny Victorian gardener’s cottage and was only meant to be a stopgap until they found somewhere bigger, but they stayed for more than 40 years.

It was shoddily built and only one brick deep, but it was in an idyllic spot near the Thames, between a 16th-century house called Penn’s Place (believed to have been the home of Edward VI’s nurse, Dame Sibel Penn) and St Mary’s Church.

The house was set back from the road by a large garden, which everyone admired enormously. My father [the documentary film-maker Seafield Head] made the garden path from some fabulous paving stones he salvaged when one of the nearby bridges was demolished. It had a big herbaceous border, a small lawn and three fruitful apple trees. My dad also replaced the rather unpleasant little porch tacked on to the front of the house with leaded panelling he’d picked up on one of our camping holidays in France.

To the left of the path was the old church wall. My friends and I would play hide-and-seek in the graveyard, although we had this rather arduous ritual whereby, if you touched a gravestone, you had to spit on your fingers and turn round three times, which made play quite difficult.

Some of the graves were very old – Henry VIII’s court jester was buried there - although, when I was 15, the vicar decided to remove the gravestones and turn the churchyard into a garden of remembrance. It was horrific. My parents were literally running around in front of the bulldozers. A JCB went down into a burial chamber and one of the builders asked my mum if she’d like to keep a baby’s coffin they’d found. They tried to get down all the names off the gravestones before they disappeared completely. Thankfully, there is some record for people who come to see where their relatives were buried.

You entered the house though a narrow pair of double doors, to be confronted with an extremely steep staircase, like the north face of the Eiger. The sitting room, with a fireplace and stripped floorboards, was to the left. The dining room, on the other side of the house, included a sideboard that had been converted from a spinet and had a black line around it to mark Nelson’s death. The piano, which my mother [the actress Helen Shingler] used to play, was wedged under the stairs. There was also a Georgian mirror that my parents have promised I will inherit; I saw myself grow up in it.

We had no central heating, but there was a Pither stove, made out of burnished steel, which heated the house and the water. It was beautiful, but it was laborious removing the ashes and refilling it with anthracite every morning. To get to the kitchen, which was tiny, you went through a little door and down a step. There was a small space in front of the cooker, then you turned a corner, which is where we used to eat. The table folded away into a kitchen unit and came out in two parts that clunked into place. That’s also where we watched television. It was so close, our faces were practically pressed against the screen, and there were often arguments. My father always wanted to watch Panorama; I was desperate to see The Dick Van Dyke Show. My parents always dismissed it as “American rubbish” – until they saw it by accident one night. From then on, we all used to watch it together.

At first, I shared a bedroom with my brother [the singer Murray Head] who is eight years’ older than me. Initially we had bunk beds, then I had a pull-out bed that tucked away underneath his. He came to bed later than me and always gave me grief if I was still awake and playing with my cars. When my mother played Madame Maigret in the BBC series in the 1960s, we had au pairs who slept in a tiny box room, which my brother later moved into.

When it was my turn, I took it over and my old bedroom became a study. When I was revising, I’d look mournfully out of the window to see my friends walking down the path and my father striding purposefully towards them. “No, he’s not coming out, he’s studying,” he’d tell them.

I left home when I went to drama school, but it was only three years ago that my parents decided it was time to move. Church Cottage has since been pulled down. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realised how much we lived on top of each other. It’s a miracle we didn’t explode or kill each other.

Anthony Head is starring in Merlin, a 13-part series on BBC1 from the end of the month