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.
“Wait,” I said.
“It can’t wait!”
“You can’t possibly think I’m old enough for an HGV licence?”
Which is older, between the respectable mother of a nine-year-old and the seasoned driver of a heavy goods vehicle? It’s impossible to figure that out, which I know because I spent the next 36 years trying. All I know is, both of those people look a lot older than 14.
This happened a lot in my teens; someone once mistook me for a teacher while I was in school uniform. But while all my peers marched into their 20s full of anxiety about invisible crows’ feet and looming life choices, I absolutely loved getting older, just because the differential between how old I was and how old people thought I was inevitably narrowed. By the time I was in my mid 20s, people were just assuming I was a 30-year-old in denial. A bloke in the office said, “Is that a massaged age?”, when I was 26, and while on the surface I went absolutely bananas with a tirade in which the words “fucking patriarchy” featured more than once, inside I was thinking, “Take the win. ‘Massaged” means what, two or three years? He didn’t say, ‘Is that a completely fabricated age, which, in order to make credible, you’d have to kidnap a king’s first-born child with magical hair, lock her in a tower and somehow – details unclear – tap her elixir?’ At least he didn’t say that.”
There have been ups and downs. Someone on Wikipedia thinks I was born in 1963, and periodically I go in to correct it to 1973, and then they correct it back. I broke down on a motorway when I was 31, with three siblings and a dog on the passenger manifest, and the AA guy said: “Let’s get the kids safe and leave the dog in the car.” Instead of any normal response such as, “I would also like the dog to be safe. If anything, the dog is my favourite,” I said: “When you say ‘kids’, do you mean, ‘normal adults acting like kids because they are stupid,’ or do you honestly think these people, one of whom is two years older than me, one of whom has a moustache, are my biological children?”
Overall, though, the mistakes get smaller, lesser and farther between: someone almost exactly my age might be surprised I did GCSEs, and not O-levels; someone else might mistakenly think I’m eligible for a mammogram. These errors don’t even register on my offence-taking Geiger counter. And now I’m 50, I can finally relax: whatever the hell happens, nobody could mistake me for 100.
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Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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