“He was desperate to be seen and terrified of being noticed”: the acclaimed filmmaker Lorna Tucker remembers her years as a homeless teenager

Keep awake in the dark, sleep in the day: this is the first thing I learned when I was a 15 -year -old girl sleeping. Being invisible in the shadows of a city keeps you alive. For 18 months, between 1997 and 1998, I lived everywhere and nowhere: in the parks and alleys of Soho; Later in brothels and shelters, with my little daughter in an impromptu crib. I existed between two parallels: desperate to be seen, so that someone recognizes me, help me and terrified to be noticed.

In the streets, the people of the people became my superpower, both to protect me from male predators and to get away from reality. From a dirty door in London, I would look at the floating crowds, passing and seeing other teenage girls walking in their low -urbanism jeans, envying their miniskirts, cut tops, sucks of adidas songs of bright colors and classic Reebok. I would study older and glamorous women with inflatable hair, grabbing designer bags and fantasized about who they were, what they did to make a living, what they did when they went home. A woman once asked me if I needed help and, more than her kind brown eyes, I remember her colorhmire coat coat, her soft black leather gloves, how she smelled of a expensive perfume. She was all that I, dirty, without money, homeless, dreamed of being.

Growing up on a council farm in Watford, I always was the stranger: tall, heartbreaking, wild and silly. My mother was doing everything possible to juggle with five children, going only after her second marriage became violent, while studying and maintaining multiple jobs. When I got to puberty, our relationship tense while fighting with the difficulties of harassment and learning in school: reading and mathematics simply were not natural (I was 26 when I finally learned to read and write). I felt that he was the only one who did not understand what the teachers were talking about. When I started high school, I was insecure. Scarred. Angry.

When, at age 13, I began to take drugs with the other children on the farm, I finally felt part of something. I fell in love when an older friend of one of the concessionaires became interested in me, happy to drive in their truck with them burying houses and service stations. I would have done anything they asked for, and I did. At age 14 he had been arrested so many times that he was looking at a period in an Institute of Youth Delivers. Then, when the older boys left their imminent mandates in the prison, I ran with them.