When I was 16, my dad went through a big change. He’d left the company he’d helped to build from the ground up and decided to start his own. It was the happiest I remembered him. My mum and dad turned the shed at the bottom of our garden in Redbridge into a workshop to make high-end office furniture. Dad was an amazing draughtsman. People went crazy for his designs, but that’s all they were at that point, just designs, pictures on a pad.

Once they had enough orders in, Mum and Dad set to work making the chairs themselves. All the individual pieces were manufactured off site then delivered and put together by them in the garage. Some nights they’d be down there until two or three in the morning putting together handmade chairs. After a couple of hours’ sleep, Dad would load up the van he had rented and deliver the things himself.

They got a big order from a major company to make chairs for its new HQ. This was it. Fulfil this order and we were laughing. We didn’t, and we weren’t laughing. I still don’t know all the whys and wherefores, but we failed. The order was just too big. The bank sent notices, the creditors circled and we were finished.

When the end comes it’s horrible. Everything my dad had worked for was taken. Assets and dignity stripped away. In the garage the frames of chairs, the skeletal remains of a dream wrapped in sheets of soft Italian leather, lay waiting to be reclaimed by creditors. Behind closed doors voices are raised. Tears. Fists are pounded into tables. In public there is silence. Dad gazes into the garden. Deep sighs. Thousand-yard stares. Mum busies herself around Dad, cajoling, geeing him up, trying to ignite something in him. Everything is gone, and with it my father’s dignity. He never recovers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Dad was an amazing draughtsman. People went crazy for his designs’: a young Nick with his parents. They turned their garden shed into a furniture workshop.

The bank takes our home away. The council refuse to rehouse us at first, so we live next door with our neighbour Chris and her children. From our lovely double-fronted house we now lived in one tiny bedroom. Three of us lived there with our massive Alsatian, Sheba. We were all stressed and sad and angry.

One night I came home fairly early. Everyone was up and about except Mum. She’d gone to bed with a bit of a headache. I pop into the bedroom to say goodnight. As soon as I push the door open I hear a very inhuman and yet totally human noise, a scream, a hollow roar. It isn’t right and my spine and brain twitch. It’s dark and I don’t know what’s happening, but noises like that never mean anything good. Never.

I flick on the light and find Mum fitting violently. Her arms thrust into the sky like a boxer knocked out with the perfect punch. Mum’s brain is malfunctioning and it’s the oddest, most frightening thing I’ve ever witnessed. She’s having a stroke.

I watch for what seems to be an age, one of her eyes focuses on me, pleading for help. I don’t move, I can’t move, I’m stone. She emits a growl and it snaps me out of my terror. I crash through the door and pick up the phone.

I’m making a strange noise, which gets people off the sofa. They peer at me. I literally cannot talk, but my noises leave little doubt that something is very fucked up. Our neighbour Chris sees me and sees my panic and as an ex-nurse knows exactly what’s happening. Chris always had a very cool head.

I have the phone in my hand and 999 answers. I can’t speak. I groan and feel tears tumbling down my cheeks. I try and talk, but someone takes over and once again life quickens. An ambulance turns up, groaning Mum is rushed into hospital. The stroke was bad. The doctors suggest it was brought on by drink and stress. It could have been a lot worse, we could easily have lost her that night.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nick Frost as a baby in an early family passport photo.

After three days of touch and go, her prognosis finally improves. Mum’s speech returns – this has its good and bad points. Eventually her facial paralysis disappears, too.

After this I feel truly alone. It is a sobering feeling the moment you become your parents’ parent. For some people it’s not until they’re in their 50s or 60s, but I was 16 and it was too much for me to bear. After Mum’s stroke my lovely gentle dad had a massive nervous breakdown and he was never the same again. The man I knew, the workaholic, the joker, always laughing but often absent through hard work, had disappeared. There were glimpses every now and then, but it wasn’t the same.

I’d only seen Dad cry once up to that point. After the collapse of us I saw him cry every day. The fact that my dad had failed, failed in business, failed as a man, to support us, his family. It killed him inside. The truth is not this at all, he didn’t fail me. What I saw was a brave man who gave everything he had to make things better.

He was different when he came out the other side. Not necessarily a bad different. He was quieter, gentler, softer, he needed mum now more than ever. She held him when he cried, soothed him when he was frightened, and when it was needed she bullied and cajoled him into action.

What that action was is hard to say. Dad never really worked again. At first he’d just leave the house in the morning and would spend all day out, just walking. He’d take the dog and walk along the River Roding sometimes for seven hours a day. He started fishing through the river and reeds for lost golf balls near a local course. He’d come back with carrier bags filled with hundreds of balls and sell them to a local driving range. This was what he did for a long while. He just couldn’t take it any more. He couldn’t find it in himself to get smashed up by the baying, hungry rat race again. His heart was broken and he was a fragile thing, and if all he could face was collecting golf balls then that was fine by me.

Eventually, after a couple of months, the council rehoused us in a place called the Ray Lodge Estate in South Woodford. The first time I went there my blood ran cold. The room that eventually became my bedroom had human shit smeared all over the walls. There was also a big red puddle in the middle of the floor which the council woman suggested nervously was “just paint”.

It was the worst place in the world to me. Hard kids with dead, hard eyes bogged me down, smashed-up washing machines and fridges lay everywhere, needles and burnt-out gutted cars littered the underground car park. As a 16-year-old it was a bad time to try and fit in. I’d missed the window. If I’d have moved here when I was younger, I’d have just become a part of it. I never became part of it. Thank fuck I had a big dog, a big Alsatian, the gorgeous and talented Sheba. No one fucks with you when you have a big dog. She was my furry flick-knife.

Once we moved my “mates” distanced themselves from me. They’d play games with me, not answer their phones (house phones I might add, this was a long time before mobiles). They’d not call me back, they’d say they’d come round and they never did and I don’t know why. What had I done to deserve this?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nick Frost with his wife Christina. Photograph: Rex Shutterstock

I was alone in a terrible place with an alcoholic mum and a father broken by failure. I think I probably wanted to be dead at this point. One day I’m very drunk at home in my room. I’d started stealing and squirrelling away Dad’s pills, he had so many barbs and squeakers and downers he never noticed any missing. I took a handful of pills and washed it down with more booze. I write a goodbye to Mum and Dad apologising for what was about to happen and I attempt to lie on my bed. I don’t make it. The Close Encounters soundtrack, a favourite album I find in a junk shop, blares out, my head fogs up and I collapse on the floor. Dead. I’ll definitely miss everyone but I’m glad, to be honest.

I wake up the next morning. Balls. I’m still alive. My room has literally not been touched. My note has not been found, my Close Encounters album is still revolving on the record player. No one came in. No one lifted me on to my bed or called an ambulance. I feel like shit.

I leave school when Mum and Dad collapse. Partly because I hate school (apart from rugby) and partly through a sense of duty: we have no money. We live off of Mum and Dad’s benefits. I felt like I needed to contribute.

After a lot of interviews and looking in the papers for jobs I find myself employed. I start working at a shipping company in Ilford called Cowell Nicola. I have no experience but it doesn’t seem to matter, they employ me and I like it. I really like working in that office. I’m the youngest one there and they treat me good, the girls think I’m cute, and the blokes talk to me like I’m a football hooligan. At this point I was earning five thousand a year! It seems like fuck all now but back then it was loads, loads to me anyway. After I’d paid housekeeping to Mum and Dad I was free to spend the rest. Spending my money meant booze and petrol for our mate who drove, and McDonalds and raves and hard-house weekenders and hash and squares of paper with mystical symbols etched into them. If you ate the squares the wonders of the universe would be unveiled to you. Not bad for a fiver.

Home was somewhere I did not want to be. I’d work then I’d do drugs, mostly on my own. Mostly weed, sometimes other things if I needed to be really away. I needed to escape that place mentally if not physically. When I was there I was locked in my room listening to music, music was one of my escapes. I loved the Happy Mondays, loved the Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets, Charlatans, Spacemen 3 and the illegal exciting world of pirate radio. I also began writing poems and painting. Could I have been any more of an angsty teen-twat cliché? My poor parents, my poor me.

I hated leaving the office at night as it meant I’d have to go back to Ray Lodge. Whenever I got close to that place my heart would beat a little faster, especially if I didn’t have the dog.

One afternoon in the office my colleague Brendan pulled me aside, suggested we go and have a beer after work. It’s what geezers do when they need to put the world to rights. I met him in the Valentine in Gants Hill, a place I used to frequent when I was fifteen or so. We all hung out in pubs back then, playing the endless game of cat and mouse to see who could get served. I think Brendan saw in me something he might’ve had in himself. After a while and several beers later he talks to me about his time abroad, talks to me about his travelling adventures. He tells me about a place he went to that helped him sort his shit out.

Like the French Foreign legion, this socialist commune accepts people from all religions, all colours, all creeds, no questions asked. All you need to do is work. He’s talking about a kibbutz. My mind starts to race. I could go. I could leave and start again, be someone else. Leave this fear and paranoia here in England.

If it hadn’t been for Bren’s intervention I think I might have died. Everything was killing me. The problem was I had next to no money. Fortunately for me, back then in the early 90s we didn’t have the instant connectivity there is now, banks didn’t talk to each other as much, this was perfect for what I needed. I found a place that had four or five different banks pretty close together. I started at 11.59 p.m. and stopped at 12.01 a.m., going from one cashpoint to the next drawing out all the money I could. I managed to get almost £700. Minted. Let’s roll.

I don’t remember what my Mum and Dad’s reaction was to me leaving. I think they were shocked but they didn’t try and stop me. If this is what I wanted then they’d support my decision. We had a little farewell BBQ at Uncle Brian’s house where I was presented with a shiny new backpack.

Mum kept a stiff upper lip until we got to the airport where she crumbled slightly. Poor thing. Dad’s wounds were beginning to scab over so he was on good form, cuddling Mum and cracking shit puns. We had a three-way cuddle and that was that. I was gone. When you share joy and tenderness and sadness at the prospect of a long time away from people you love it’s easy to forget for a moment the reason you’re leaving. I had no idea what I was getting into. No idea whatsoever.

Some years later I was working in a Chiquitos, and a girl came to work in the restaurant who would eventually and inadvertently change my life for ever. She was a wee Scottish thing I’ll call Mouse. I liked her a lot. My heart sank when I found the nerve to ask whether or not she had a boyfriend. She did. I caught a glimpse of this sexual Tyrannosaur one night. It was the first time I’d ever seen a man under 35 wearing elbow patches on a corduroy jacket.

A few weeks into knowing her we had a party at my house. Her boyfriend – her stand-up comedian boyfriend – was coming. I’d heard a lot about this guy, I felt any man would have a problem living up to this kind of expectation. The Mouse felt sure we’d get on. At some point Mouse walks in, I crane to look, and there he is.

Mouse catches up with me in the kitchen and we say hello.

“Are you coming outside to meet him?” She leaves, I follow. He’s there chatting to some of my friends and they’re really laughing, some of the girls are even tossing their heads back, really guffawing. I realise, oddly, I now have a toothpick in my mouth. No idea how or where it came from. I gob a foul brown liquid from my chewing tabbacy into a bucket, it dings loudly. The crowd part and that’s when I see him for the first time, Simon fucking Pegg…

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Best mates: ‘He got it, whatever it was. I understood him completely and he understood me,’ says Nick Frost about Simon Pegg. Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer

For the next two hours we spar, jab and comedy counter-jab, our eyes narrow as we size each other up. In truth I remember very little of this meeting. I know we laughed a lot and that there, on that balcony in Cricklewood, was where our 21-year best-friendship began. We did impressions, Rick from The Young Ones, Matthew the kindly Nigerian from Desmond’s and of course sports commentator David Coleman.

Things then get dark and blurry, party business takes over, and in the confusion and flirting with Simon I’ve neglected my job as host. Apparently and actually pretty early in the night I drank myself to a standstill. Sitting to take a breath and to gather my thoughts I fall asleep, cross-legged, leaning against a giant bass bin and that was where I stayed all night.

Simon and me see bits and pieces of one another over the next couple of weeks. A drink after work here and there, the odd house party, but it was at the Pink Rupee where our love truly blossoms.

A bunch of the restaurant staff had gone out after work one Friday night for a nice butter chicken and a few cold ones. Simon and I found ourselves sat opposite one another. As we talked and laughed drunkenly that night, Simon did something that would change me for ever, change us for ever. He picked up a condiment and moved it across the table making this sound: Birbirbigitt Birbirbigitt bigitt. I knew exactly what this was. Time slowed around us, a warm bubble of light inflated and for a moment I couldn’t see or hear anything but Simon. He was making the sound of the mouse droid that Chewbacca roars at in Star Wars. It was as if we were the only two people in the world. He got it, whatever it was. I understood him completely and he understood me.

I’m not sure how long we were in that golden bubble of self-indulgence, but once it popped our mains were on the table. It must have been a while though as my naan bread was floppy and cold. I didn’t know what was happening, but I’d made a new friend really quickly, and I wasn’t afraid or nervous, it didn’t feel weird – on the contrary it felt great and it’s been that way ever since. I guess one could argue we fell in love that day. It’s never left us either, we still make each other laugh more than anyone else.

Truths, Half Truths & Little White Lies by Nick Frost (Hodder & Stoughton, £20). To order a copy for £16, go to bookshop.theguardian.com

Nick will be talking about his book at Foyles, 107 Charing Cross Road, London at 7pm on Thursday 8 October (www.foyles.co.uk/Nick-Frost-Truths)