I always wanted to live in London. I remember coming up from my home town of Winchester for a school trip and peering out of the coach window as we drove up Cromwell Road, thinking, “This is it. This is where I want to be.”

So when I found myself living in a flat in nearby Redcliffe Gardens some 15 years later, I felt privileged. It wasn’t much of a flat, more like a cave running under a house, but it was the first place I shared with Jane, who later became my wife. It was here I proposed to her, in bed, just a year after we met.

She had come into Jakes, the restaurant where I was working in Fulham in the mid-1980s, and we quickly decided we wanted to live together. She was already renting the flat for next to nothing from an eccentric Polish man who owned the whole house. He had divided it into flats and lived in one himself.

The basement had two bedrooms and a large drawing room that doubled as our bedroom; the others were already taken by Jane’s brother and sister. There wasn’t much light and it was so damp mushrooms were growing out of the walls. But still I felt lucky: it was right in the heart of where I wanted to be. Jane and I would go out for evening walks along the embankment and stop off at a cafe for a coffee. If we weren’t feeling all that flush we could walk up to Earls Court, where £1.50 would buy a bowl of stew and a punch in the throat.

There were always people coming and going. My friends knew when they’d outstayed their welcome, but Jane’s “friends”, whom she’d never actually met, would pitch up from her native New Zealand and stay for days, on the floor, because they were too tight to find a hotel. On many mornings I’d have to step over whole families of Kiwis to get to the bathroom.

Another unwelcome visitor was the flasher who would expose himself to the girls at the window. Once I was in the bath when they screamed, so I raced down the street after him, still soaking wet. I caught up and was shocked to see he was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. “What the hell are you doing?” I asked. “I’m sorry, I thought I knew someone who lived there,” he replied, red-faced. “The usual response would be to ring the bell,” I said. He ran off and we never saw him again.

By the time I met Jane I was already becoming disillusioned with the catering industry. I’d hoped to rise through the ranks from waiter to manager, or even perhaps to restaurant owner some day. But everyone I worked with seemed to be using it as a stopgap, to raise money to enable them to do what they truly wanted to do, which usually centred on the performing arts.

They assumed I was doing the same, and I had to convince them I wasn’t an aspiring actor. As time went on, though,it occurred to me that there was more for me out there. So, one day, I found myself queuing for the open mic slot at the Comedy Store in Leicester Square. I had no jokes and no idea what I was going to say, but I pulled it off. From then on I knew I would be a stand-up.

I would sit in the crummy kitchen, thrashing out lines on a rusty 1930s typewriter, smoking roll-ups. I’d always work in there because it had a flagstone floor so cold it stopped me from nodding off. In the middle of the night, when everyone else had gone to bed, my only company was a black cat called Poppet, whom we’d inadvertently adopted.

We wouldn’t have left if the landlord hadn’t wanted to renovate his property. Everyone told us that, as sitting tenants, he couldn’t make us go, and he would have to compensate us if we did. But he was a nice enough guy and I didn’t want to create any bad karma — it would have ruined my memories of the place if we’d tried to screw him for money, so we just packed up our stuff into bin liners and moved on.

Jack Dee’s autobiography, Thanks for Nothing (Transworld £20), is out now

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