The first time we saw the house on Rosecroft Avenue I was eight and it was a wreck. My older brother, John, (the broadcaster) and I played table tennis on this huge kitchen table while my mum and dad looked around the ground floor. There was no kitchen, just the odd little cabinet.
My first impression was that it was huge. It’s a Victorian copy of a Georgian house on three floors: ground, first and what used to be the servants’ quarters at the top. There were about 20 rooms and my favourite was the smallest. When the au pair left I chose it as my bedroom. The cellar was like a dungeon and there were two compartments: one for dad’s wine and the other for coal. John and I used to go down there and count the coal sacks being delivered so we could tell mum.
Dad did the place up when he could afford to. He gave mum a modern kitchen and the scullery was turned into a laundry room. Mum used a mangle and a washboard so when the washing machine arrived it was a big moment. She used to put my younger brother, Peter, in front of it to watch the washing go round. Now children are put in front of the television.
There was a wonderful ice-cold north-facing larder with big hooks for hanging game. The ballroom became our playroom. It had a sprung floor and when mum and dad bought me a pogo stick for Christmas I went straight through it.
Croft House was like a holiday home because I went to boarding school in Kent the year we moved in. I had been the youngest for seven years and then Peter was born and I was sent away to school. I thought maybe there wasn’t room for me at home and I was terribly homesick. My earliest joyful memory of the house was when I returned from my first term. Being at boarding school meant I didn’t have friends nearby so I went out with John.
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The garden was beautiful and quite big for a London house. I enjoyed hoeing the rose beds — I fancied myself as a gardener at one point.
My grandfather, James Jarche, and grandmother, Elsie, moved into the top flat when I was about 12. Jimmy was a distinguished press photographer, but by the time he lived at Croft House he was in his sixties and his photography days were over. He had a darkroom in the flat and he inspired my passion for photography. We went to the little zoo in Hampstead and he taught me how to take photographs and develop them. Jimmy and I were incredibly close. He was my best mate; we used to listen to music and debate. I could talk to him more easily than I could talk to dad, who was very much up on a pedestal. When dad walked down a hospital corridor, nurses would curtsy and call him “Sir”.
From the age of 14, I wanted to be a doctor. I had a desire to heal but I didn’t get anywhere because I failed my sciences. My next choice was to be a portrait photographer, but you couldn’t get a job unless you were in a union.
When I played Macbeth at Wellington school in Somerset, my English master suggested I joined the National Youth Theatre, which I did. Actors were rogues and vagabonds then, and my father was not best pleased that one of his sons should want to become “a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage”. Without mum’s encouragement I’d never have gone into acting. Elsie was in the music hall so there was an acting tradition. Mum was born into it and she got into stage musicals. While we were at Croft House mum did amateur dramatics in north London. I went to see one or two of her plays and felt very proud. When I performed at Stratford with the RSC in 1973 and dad came to see me, he felt I had gained some respectability.
In the 1950s, Hampstead was quiet and empty. When I go there now I notice the traffic and that most of the houses have been turned into apartments. In 1971, dad sold the house for £70,000 to a developer who divided it into flats. I waited two or three years before going back and when I did I had a huge lump in my throat. At that time, they still hadn’t got rid of a bit of cement around the side of the house where John, Peter and I had written our names. I’m a very emotional man and that really touched me.
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Suchet stars in Terence Rattigan’s Man and Boy at Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, 01483 440 000, from September 22 before a national tour. Interview by Louise Johncox