This is the BBC.

Hello there, welcome to late night women's hour. This month we're talking about leaving home.

Not the kind that happens all in good time when you go to university, say, or get a flat with friends or slim chance scrape enough together for a deposit.

This is the more radical kind of home leaving, a decision, a break, no going back. Both my guests this month left home as teenagers.

Sally Hughes left her family in Wales at the age of 15 and came to London where she went on to build a career as a writer and broadcaster.

Ida Idemarium left Addis Ababa in Ethiopia also at 15 to come to school in Britain, where after some time working in New York and Toronto,

she still lives and works as a journalist and writer. Sally Ida, thank you very much for being

here. So you both left home at the same age by the sounds of it, 15, which is very, very young.

It's too young. How do you feel looking back at that, yourself at that age? I feel a bit frightened for me. Very often when I do events and young women ask me how I all started the whole thing.

I always feel the weight of responsibility when I tell them because I don't ever want them to think it's a good idea and that it results in a great career

and plenty of money in a secure life

because mostly it doesn't, I think.

What about you, Ida?

Looking back at 15-year-old, you?

I think it's right that it's too young,

but you don't realise how young you are.

No.

So that's kind of part of it.

You kind of think you're completely grown up and you behave like you're grown up and you're, you know, only afterwards when you look back,

you think, God, all the things that might have gone wrong or might have happened. I think it's,

for me, having children has made me look at my teenage years differently. I think you suddenly,

if you have, as I do, a 10 year old and you think, God, I was, you know, six years older than you when I was in the back of a tour bus or whatever, like, you know, tour in the country.

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