For the past year I have had three teenagers living in my house – two sons of my own, and a young woman who’s become part of the family. It has been, as my US friends say, a ride. There’s been high drama, but also hilarity and the enormous pleasure of hosting the trio’s friends. There are distinct differences between the groups that come to the house. The international friendship group of the older two barely drink alcohol, let alone take drugs, preferring basketball and talking politics. But they have plenty of dramas around love, exams and mental health. My younger son’s circle tends to be footie lads and long-tressed girls armed with cherry vapes. I sometimes see kids in our town doing something daft – like pushing two boys in a shopping trolley down a slope – and then realise my youngest is part of the pack. Recently I discovered he’d been at an illicit party held by another fifteen-year-old who was home alone, when a hundred giddy teens descended on a small village address – and the police were called.

“Didn’t you do stupid stuff like that?”, asks son No 2, “when you were my age?” I try to keep a poker face, but a smirk starts forming. In fact, when I look back at the worst things I did in my teens (and early twenties) from a parental point of view, I am suffused with horror, shame and also – I admit it – a twinge of regret at that lost, reckless self. And gratitude my mum and dad had almost no idea. It helped, I suppose, that I’d been a swotty bookworm until I was sixteen, the kind of child who cried if they didn’t come top in an exam. And then – wham! – the hormones hit and I discovered alcohol, boys, dancing, parties and the adrenaline rush of being disobedient. I disobligingly told my history teachers that they weren’t up to preparing girls for history A-Level and promptly got thrown out of lessons, so had to teach myself (I was vindicated when those who remained got Es).

Looking back at the worst things I did in my teens, I am suffused with horror, shame and a twinge of regret at that lost, reckless self

I kept hold of my good-girl friends, but also acquired a bunch of naughtier ones: the smokers and drinkers known for their kohl-rimmed eyes, stilettos and ability to French-kiss a boy for two hours solid without seeming to take breath. Three of us got a reputation for locking ourselves in a dark bathroom at parties and running a tub, which we’d plunge into naked à trois. Better still, we’d track down a swimming pool and be over the hedge in a trice, skinny-dipping. I have photos of my sixth-form gang dressed as flashers in black undies, suspenders and dirty raincoats, looking like St Trinian’s on speed.

I also acquired a bunch of wayward, charming, male chums from the grammar schools dotted around the Tonbridge area. This gang was an anarchic hoot; several played in bands and wore guy-liner – two went on to become leading lights in the Stoke Newington squatters’ movement. I once rode pillion on a friend’s motorbike and he only just managed to steady us as we skidded on black ice towards the railing of a high bridge (a parent’s nightmare). One evening a party was held at my stoner friend Pete’s oast-house home (yes, his parents were away), which ended with the furniture being removed and piled up into a mountainous Habitat construction in the garden. Some months after that I drove to Aldeburgh with Pete and his friend Stew, who I had a wild crush on despite his embryonic heroin habit. We made the journey in Stew’s yellow Beetle with its registration number 666 and I discovered the downside of drugs when we careered the wrong way down a dual carriageway and nearly hit a car hurtling towards us.

Perhaps because of this, I didn’t experiment with drugs myself until I was twenty. My parents’ horror of illicit substances was one factor, plus I didn’t smoke so joints weren’t alluring. Then, one weekend at university, my friend Polly phoned to say she was driving from Wales with a bag of freshly-picked magic mushrooms. My housemates and I spent the weekend in a drifty state of altered reality, seeing friends’ hair turn to feathers and dragons in trees. Shortly after this a Kentish rogue I knew said he was growing cannabis in his garden and did I want to sell some to my student mates? It seemed an easier side-line than waitressing, so I blithely said yes. A couple of friends handed over tenners before declaring the grass “weak” and “rubbish”, which ended that enterprise. Now I quake at how little thought I gave to the possibility of being arrested.

But none of this was as bad as the time I borrowed Polly’s Citroen 2CV for two months, even though I hadn’t yet secured my driving licence. The wanton stupidity of driving around a busy town when you’re not insured fills my adult heart with fury and ice. I would be appalled if one of my sons was this idiotic. But perhaps this in itself is the rite of passage: if you can survive your idiot teen self, despite your own best attempts at self-destruction, you can survive anything. Including raising teenagers.

Rowan Pelling is co-editor at Perspective and former editor of the Erotic Review