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From the age of three, Wensley Clarkson was obsessed with cars. By 10, he was driving his parents' Jaguar around London. What fuelled his escape?

I turned to cars at a young age out of loneliness. They spurred me on to create a magical, driving netherworld away from my mother and father, who lived on a different planet from most parents. I grew up as an only child in postwar London in the late 50s and 60s. My mother, Pam, spent much of her time in bed nursing a tumbler of whisky and a bottle of pills, while my father, Tony, edited one of Britain's bestselling weekly newspapers, the wartime favourite Reveille.

Most children were taken to playgrounds and parks to play, but I was often left sitting in the family's Ford Zodiac outside pubs for hours with a bottle of pop, a packet of crisps and my favourite plastic stick-on toy steering wheel. No wonder I got a taste for driving at a dangerously early age. There's a photo of me aged three charging around in a tin toy pedal car (see left). I hated it when I was a child – I thought it was embarrassing. But seeing it now reminds me how that toy car first fuelled my obsession with driving, until I nearly ran over an old lady walking past our house and my dad confiscated it.

We lived in a huge house in Kensington, west London, which my mother bought for a song because it was filled with sitting tenants and backed on to a refuse dump. My bedroom was hemmed between bedsits containing an 80-year-old former brothel madam, an elderly maths teacher and a French woman who frequently brought strange men back to her room.

My parents were an odd combination. My mother had been brought up in the south of France, where there was no smog and lots of sunshine. Two of her main obsessions were sunbathing and peroxiding her hair. She'd had servants as a child. Maybe that was why she liked me to wait on her hand and foot, although I didn't mind because I liked being needed.

My father had been a communist before the war but his politics softened after some horrendous wartime experiences. He never drove again after the Normandy landings, when he was shot at as he was driving a DUKW (pronounced "duck"), a six-wheel-drive amphibious truck. My dad was a ruggedly good-looking fellow with swept back black hair and a long, straight nose. One of his oldest friends once described him as looking like a Mafia don, except he came from New Zealand not Sicily.

By the time I was born in 1956, my parents were better at partying than parenting. But alcohol ruled most things back then. My mother, as did many others, often drove while drunk. From an early age, I'd sit in the back of the Zodiac nervously watching her weaving her way home from the pub, desperate to take over at the wheel.

One afternoon when I was five, my dad turned up at home after a typical liquid lunch and jumped in beside me in the parked Zodiac and I pretended to drive him back to his office near Fleet Street, as he gave me directions. It was an enchanting mystery tour of our imaginations that has stayed with me ever since; a rare occasion during my early childhood when my dad got home before I was in bed and we actually shared something special together.

When I was eight, my mother pulled into a field in Hampshire, got in the back of our brand new Jag Mark 2, took out a bottle of scotch from her handbag and told me to jump in the driver's seat and put my foot on it. Being allowed to drive a real car for the first time was the happiest day of my young life. Within two years I was encouraged by her to drive on the streets of London in the Jaguar, and I took to it like the proverbial fish to water.

By the age of 12 I was allowed to chauffeur my parents' drunken cronies home from parties – and getting paid for it. I was 5ft 9in tall and looked almost old enough to drive legally. I earned £30 driving one couple from London to Plymouth in their Ford Cortina. My mother knew how much I adored driving by this stage, and wanted to keep me on her side.

Tags: Family, Life and style, Motoring, Motoring, Parents and parenting, The Guardian, Features

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Wensley Clarkson: My love affair with cars was originally published by Technology: Motoring | guardian.co.uk. Read the full story by clicking here.