I was born in Milan in 1960, but when I was four, my Italian father persuaded my mother that we should be based in England. He sent us to London, where he was supposed to join us. He never did. It was his way of getting rid of his family to pursue a bachelor life as an adventurer and collector of art.

For a time, we were homeless, but when I was six, my Italian grandfather bought us a beautiful Victorian house in Haywards Heath, West Sussex. It was symmetrical, like a dolls’ house, with an enormous back garden, made even larger by the fact that there was an estate next door. I would shimmy over the wall with my older twin brothers, Tom and Paul, and play in the woods beyond. Often, we were chased by the butler and his dachshund.

There was a period when the neighbouring mansion was abandoned. We’d run around in it, finding strange gadgets. We built a camp in the garage and collected all our booty there, mainly piles of old magazines and gardening tools. For kids, it was a fantastic place. We rode our bikes through woods and across streams, and filled our wellies with frogspawn. My brothers made shelters and camouflaged mantraps, but a lot of the time I wasn’t welcome. I used to dream of having a sister.

I always think about the garden when I remember that house. My mum, Pamela, came from a working-class rural family in Gloucestershire. She had a raspberry cage and grew artichokes and basil, things you couldn’t buy in the shops. The peas were so delicious, they never made it to the table.

My father, Luca Scacchi Gracco (“Scacchi” rhymes with “wacky”), is an artist, and a good one. At the time, he was also a dealer, responsible for bringing many British artists to the international market in Milan. He would turn up several times a year, larger than life. He was so much fun, but before the week was up, he’d be running away.

The house had five bedrooms upstairs, but only four rooms downstairs, because my mother, who had been a Bluebell dancer in Paris, wanted somewhere big enough for a dance studio and knocked two rooms together. She started to teach me and a couple of girls from up the street; the school grew until she had 150 pupils. Every evening after school, the house would be full, with the piano jangling away and loads of little girls in blue leotards. I can still see them under the cherry trees outside the back door, kicking though a carpet of blossom in pink ballet shoes. Later, my stepfather, Giovanni, would play Erik Satie and Scott Joplin on the piano, and the studio was used for Italian evenings.

There was a roomy cellar with windows looking up into the garden on either side of the front steps. One side was used for storage. Dad had a vivid imagination – he was always thinking of what disasters might happen. There were packs of sugar, flour, condensed milk, pasta, tinned tomatoes, olive oil and bottles of water and wine. We also had the area’s first sauna.

The other half of the cellar was our playroom. We would watch Super 8 films of our holidays, and old Laurel and Hardy movies. My most vivid memories are of when my father was there. He thought we should have a swimming pool, so dug a big rectangular hole at the bottom of the garden and ran a hose-pipe into it. We have a film of the three of us jumping into our muddy pool.

Because he was an art dealer, the house was full of paintings and objects. Every now and again, he’d hire a van and drive to Italy with one or two of us children. He was never good at business, but he had an insight for art. We had Egon Schiele paintings on the wall and a Francis Bacon hung at the end of my bed for two years.

We had a formal front room, not because we were parlour-type people, but because it had glass cabinets full of Dad’s most valuable things. My brothers and I were banging on the piano once when a Lalique vase shunted its way to its death. Our street was where the well-to-do of Haywards Heath lived, and the neighbours petitioned to get us out: we were just too reckless and loud. The bailiffs were round regularly and we kept snakes, even an alligator at one point.

When my mother remarried in 1975, I was dragged kicking and screaming to Australia. Haywards Heath had been my world, but two years abroad showed me how pea-brained and provincial it was: the most up-with-the-Joneses environment you could imagine. At 18, when I ran away to drama school, it was a fantastic springboard, representing everything I wanted to get away from.

+ Shoot on Sight, a film prompted by the July 7 bombings, is out on Friday

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