Mother, Dearest

Stand-up comedian and actress Sara Pascoe on the woman who helped her survive, in more ways than one

There is a young woman opposite me on the train. She is drunkenly lolling, skirt riding up, head leaning on the glass behind her. Her wedges are rain-splashed, on her leg a streak of crusted mud. She’s got green in her hair, braces on her top teeth. She might be 14, she might be 20. I’m filled with maternal instinct, despite being nearly as drunk as she is, and I stay on past my stop to guard her like an egg. I didn’t sit on her – I’m not a weirdo. I’m just a normal 35-year-old woman staring creepily at a sleeping stranger, ready to snarl if any predators move too close. But the egg hatched without incident and jumped off at her stop, leaving me heading in the wrong direction, wondering if she lived near the station and hoping she got home okay.

How am I me and not her anymore? When I was 14, 15, 16, I lived for clubbing. I grew up in East London, a 20-minute ramble from Hollywood nightclub (famous because Martine McCutcheon might have been in there once), Pulse (where the bouncers had no lower age limits – seriously, a teenager could bring her baby), and Time and Envy (two clubs for the price of one, with a staircase that everyone fell down on the way out). I never had any money but I knew how to get drinks (ask men in suits), how to hitch a lift (ask men in cars), and I took shortcuts through parks (how was I not murdered?). And before you assume my rancid social life was the result of lax parenting or neglect, I didn’t have permission to go.

My mum fought hard to keep me in: she hid clothes and double locked the doors, she confiscated shoes and dinner money. But she had to sleep sometimes and, when she did, out I’d run. Climbing down drain pipes and squeezing through windows, retrieving copied keys and wearing my sister’s too-small plimsolls. I was an intensely committed burglar, stealing my own freedom.