Ever since I was a teenager, people have thought I am much older than I actually am. Their mistakes have stopped bothering me
When I was 14, someone thought I was my nine-year-old sister’s mum. In purely practical terms, imagining me having had her at, say, 14, that would put me at nine years over my actual age, but I was reading the cues of this exchange with passionate concentration and completely absent from it was any of the normal condescension people heaped upon a teenage mother. This mistaken person had clearly processed me as a legitimate child-rearer who had had her nine-year-old at the appropriate time, which placed me conservatively at 30.
So that was the backdrop to my mystified neurosis – do I really look twice my real age? – when, later that year, I went to help my mum with her job. She was a set designer, filming a children’s drama that necessitated making summer look like spring, to which end someone had to remove the cherries from some trees, eat them, and glue on some fake carnations, to look like blossom. It’s not even respectable work for a 14-year-old, but someone had to do it. When I needed a lift back to a station at the end of the day, there was only one guy free to take me, and I arrived at Sheringham in a 16-metre articulated lorry, which the fella in the ticket office then asked me to move as it was blocking, well, everything; it was blocking Norfolk’s entire connection with the outside world.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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