Hookers: Their Lives in Their Words Read online

  HOOKERS

  Candid Confessions

  of Real Call Girls

  JULIAN DAVIES

  MILO BOOKS LTD

  This ebook edition published in 2011 by Milo Books

  Copyright © Julian Davies

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  MILO BOOKS LTD

  www.milobooks.com

  [email protected]

  Julian Davies is the author of Streetfighters and Bouncers, both published by Milo Books. He lives in South Wales.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Anne Marie

  Brogan

  Carissa

  Colleen

  Faith

  Georgina

  Linette

  Zhila

  Punters, Part One

  Lynn

  Gerald

  Pam

  Rebecca

  Joyce and Sarah

  Sandra

  Simona

  Mary

  Punters, Part Two

  Emmalee

  Stephanie

  Margo’s Story

  More from Milo Books

  Introduction

  SOME YEARS AGO, I lived on a council estate in Merthyr Tydfil, the tough former mining and steel town in South Wales, and would often visit a friend there called Marie. She would tell me all the latest gossip over a cup of tea. I had got to know Marie through her brother, who was a good mate of mine. She was about twenty-six, overweight and, to be blunt, was not pretty by any means. She lived on her own and had three children by different fathers. I never saw her do a day’s work and she seemed happy to live off the state.

  One day I asked her why she wouldn’t get a job. She explained that if she needed anything she would take a train to Cardiff and earn good money as a prostitute. Marie was known to like shocking people and took great enjoyment in watching me squirm as she told me some of the more intimate details of her profession. I had known her family for many years and never had a clue what she did. She explained that other local girls did the same thing and some would make a big day of it, travelling to Cardiff by train in groups of three and four. They would get dressed up in their best clothes, eat in a restaurant, treat themselves and their children to new clothes. Travelling to Cardiff made it unlikely that anyone would recognise them, even though it must have happened every now and then.

  Marie had always been labelled as ‘a bit of a slapper’, jumping into bed with different men each week, but I never thought that she would sell her body to pay the bills. I was intrigued by her double life and fascinated by her matter-of-fact approach to it. I asked her many questions and, as I did so, I began to wonder if I could put together a book on prostitutes. I had already travelled the country interviewing people for two books, one on streetfighters and the other on bouncers. They too spent a lot of their time in that netherworld that exists outside straight society, a world that few know but many are intrigued by, a world with its own code.

  At that time, the murders of five prostitutes in Ipswich, their bodies discovered within weeks of each other in December 2006, were very much in the news. A fork lift truck driver, Steve Gerald Wright, was later sentenced to life imprisonment for their killings. All five of his victims had worked as hookers to fund their drug addictions. The case had chilling echoes of perhaps the most infamous criminal in British history, Jack the Ripper. For me, it also echoed a similar murdering spree I remembered from my youth and, together with my conversations with Marie, it reignited my curiosity about the real lives of ‘streetwalkers’ and of the constant dangers and vilification they faced.

  I have always been interested in old papers and black-and-white photographs and from an early age would hoard any that took my fancy. As a child I had cupboards full of yellowed comics, newspapers and books with the covers hanging off. My mother would try to throw them out but I would always search through the bin to retrieve them. One day, when I had long since grown up and left home, my mother phoned to say she had found a huge stash of my rubbish while cleaning out the attic. I explained that as a fourteen-year-old I had hidden them there in case she had thrown them out. I decided it was only fair that I helped clear out the attic and dispose of what I had previously hoarded. I filled my car with boxes and took them to my own home. My wife came home from work to find me sorting out stacks of items that were to be kept, thrown away or put on eBay.

  ‘What the hell is that godforsaken smell, you can get that crap out of the house whenever you like!’ my darling wife said as she greeted me.

  I put up a good fight and stood my ground, explaining these were memories from my childhood and no way were they going. Ten minutes later I was out in the garden standing next to a small bonfire of my paper treasures. I was under the watchful eye of my wife, who looked daggers at me from the kitchen window, ensuring I didn’t keep anything. As I threw each magazine or book on the fire I gave them the once over and while she made tea I managed to sneak a few interesting items from under her nose and stash them in my office/garden shed, behind the lawn mower and paddling pool.

  One of them was a copy of the Daily Express from 1964. The headline said, ‘MURDERED: WARD CASE GIRL, detectives quiz vice trial witnesses.’ It was about a tattooed girl, Francis Brown, a prostitute found dead on a rubbish dump. I started to research this woman and found she had been murdered by a West London serial killer known as Jack the Stripper. No one knows for sure how many vitims he claimed, though it is believed to be between six and eight, and he was never caught. His killing spree simply stopped one day in the 1960s. He may have died or he may still be alive somewhere, drawing his pension and dwelling on his unspeakable memories.

  Traditionally prostitutes have been regarded as next-to-worthless in our society, their lives and deaths of apparently little significance to our mass media. Occasionally a Pretty Woman comes along to recast sex workers in a different, more glamorous light. Recently the Internet has given rise to a series of blogs by purported hookers, the most famous being ‘Belle de Jour’ an anonymous former London call girl whose widely read online diary was later turned into two books and a television series starring Billie Piper. Yet there seems something suspiciously inauthentic about their accounts of lucrative, adventurous, no-strings sex and personal empowerment. Is this really what the lives of most prostitutes are like?

  I was interested in the truth behind the majority of most working girls’ careers. What were their lives: Gritty? Sexy? Sordid? Laced with black humour or laden with an undercurrent of despair? Perhaps all of those things and more. I started phoning bouncers and fighters I knew from all over the country, asking for female contacts. Then I trawled through dozens of escort agency sites on the Internet, arranging interviews with prostitutes who were willing to speak to me.

  I found them candid, warm and often witty. Some were hard as nails, some were frankly half-crazy, yet all somehow retained their humanity. Some became call girls as a career choice and lived well out of it, certainly too well to think of giving it up. Others fell into the life and found it hard, if not impossible, to escape. And then there are the horrific cases of wretched young women forced into a life of prostitution, one of whom, Zhila, tells her harrowing story in this book. While I wanted to concentrate on the more workaday lives of hookers in the affluent West, I could not ignore the despicable industries of sexual slavery and people trafficking in
the poorer regions of the world.

  Every town and city in the UK, indeed all over the world, has women, and some men, doing exactly the same thing. If you have no idea about their world, try to picture what it must be like to have to sell your body to make a living. Can you imagine working alongside drug dealers, pimps, drug addicts, ex-cons and murderers? Could you do a job where you run the risk of being robbed, beaten up, raped or even murdered? You never know what’s in someone’s mind, so the next punter you pick up could be your last.

  Every girl who works the streets runs the risk of ending up like one of the five London prostitutes that Jack the Ripper slaughtered and mutilated in 1888, or the victims of the Ipswich killer nearly 140 years later. It is easy to forget that all those girls were real people with families and friends. This was the world that I stepped into as I researched this book. I learned so much from interviewing the women – and some of their punters. I always thought that prostitutes were victims but I soon learned that you cannot make such a blanket statement just because someone has taken what others might see as a wrong choice in life. Do they need saving? Well, every one I interviewed told me that they had their own minds and the only thing they wanted was money. Several had regular punters who had offered to ‘save’ them but they turned them down.

  Another myth is that all prostitutes are drug addicts, trying to sell their bodies to feed some crack addiction. Some are, some aren’t. Only a few of the girls I spoke to actually took drugs to the stage where it was a problem or they had become addicted. I have trained in gyms where solicitors, nurses and teachers have openly spoken of taking drugs more frequently than some of the working girls I spoke to.

  A friend once said to me, ‘The thing is, hookers are too lazy to get a real job.’ Most of the girls I spoke to would have loved a job but just couldn’t find work. Try finding work when you’ve got no home, no education or are a single parent. And if you have been arrested, who is going to employ someone who has charges for soliciting?

  In the course of researching and writing this book I have tried to show every aspect of prostitution that I could. I wanted the sadness to come across, as well as the occasional comedy. Being on the game is not a great way of life, in fact it can be terrifying. I hope this book opens your eyes to this other world which is all around us. If any of our lives took a different turn, who knows what we would be forced to do to earn a living or simply just to survive?

  Chapter 1

  Anne Marie

  Age: 26

  Swansea

  MY FATHER WAS a drunk and used to beat my mother and me black and blue. He was a big man and would throw us around like rag dolls when the mood took him. We never had Christmas or birthday presents, that would take up too much of his drink money.

  He’d come home straight from working in the factory, change his clothes and out he’d go. We wouldn’t know what time to expect him home, but I knew to be asleep when he came in. More than often he’d pick some fight with my mother and I would hear him screaming at her or slapping her around. By the time I was fifteen, I was making plans to leave home as soon as possible. I’d made friends with a woman called Alison, who was about twenty-five, who had been a prostitute years ago. She said she had a spare room for me if things got too bad. One night I got between my dad and my mother and he actually punched me up in the air. It was like something out of a cartoon; I flew across the room and landed behind the settee, face-down. It was a strange thing waking up staring at the floor and the back of the settee, having no idea at first how I’d got there.

  My father was bent over my mother, who was sitting in an armchair. He had her by the throat and was squeezing the life out of her. My mother always had a coal fire burning away in the hearth as my dad was too tight to get a gas or electric fire. I grabbed the hot poker from among the coals and thrust it down the crack of the fat prick’s arse. Trouble was he couldn’t get it out as the end was sort of wedge-shaped and with him having a belt on and because he was now standing up straight it sort of got stuck there, burning.

  That night I gathered up my things and moved into Alison’s spare room. She was a good sort and tried her best to look after me as I had no money. It wasn’t long before she was back on the game, and getting some cash in. Over the next few years I was moving constantly between Alison’s, relatives and various boyfriends’ homes. It was one failed relationship after another and my life was going down the toilet with no real hopes or prospects. I was taking on part-time jobs, which usually ended in me getting fired for bad time-keeping. I lost contact with my mother and was getting desperate for money.

  One night I got a little drunk and said I was going to go on the game. Of course I’d had serious boyfriends before so you could say I knew what I was doing and was no virgin, far from it. Alison didn’t mind. She knew we needed as much cash as we could get because she was way behind on rent and other bills.

  The first punter I went out with was a man of about fifty who had been introduced to me by Alison. He was a real gentleman: he knew it was my first time on the game and paid me £150 to spend the whole night with him. I was so scared at first that I drank loads of vodka to calm myself down. How I managed to stand up I’ll never know, let alone anything else. I can’t really remember what the sex was like as I was so pissed. The next day I got up first, as the guy was still fast asleep. When you make a deal with a hooker there’s no contract to sign or rules to obey, so I really had no idea what to expect the next day. I actually made the guy a full breakfast and like an idiot went across the road to get a newspaper for him! It’s not as if there’s some set formula for this sort of thing, I just played it by ear. All said and done, I sat there alone with the money I’d earned and realised how that one night had changed the whole course of my life.

  I had been working from Alison’s home for about two years when I was approached by two older working girls. They explained they had been doing the area for years longer than me and because I was losing them business I had to pay them twenty per cent of all the money I was making each week. I told them to fuck off and started to walk away when the bigger of the two pounced on me. She was a fat old bag but could move like a cat when she wanted to. She pulled me down to the floor by my hair and proceeded to punch the fuck out of me. None of the neighbours came out to help, as I always left or entered the house through the back lane so as not to arouse suspicion when I arrived or left with any men. This way the two tarts couldn’t be seen doing me over.

  The fat one had broken my nose but even though I had blood all over my face she still kept punching me. I covered up my face with my hands and rolled myself into a ball. The skinny one joined her friend in kicking lumps out of me. Suddenly they stopped and ran off. I thought at first someone had come to my rescue, then realised that they had found my handbag and seeing the few hundred that I had in it, they must have thought their ship had come in and legged it.

  Alison got me to the hospital where I told the doctor and the police officer they sent for that I had fallen down some steps. They copper said that the round circular marks on my hands and the back of my head looked like heel marks from a woman’s shoe. I guess he knew what I was and that I wouldn’t give him any information, so he left. At home in the mirror I looked a right old sight. My face was badly swollen up, my eyes almost closed, my arms were bandaged, finger and nose broken, and I had stitches on the back of my head. You see it’s not only violent men you’ve got to look out for, it’s the other girls in the same trade as well.

  I met up with an older man one night and he came back home with me. After a cup of tea we went upstairs but then he stopped and clutched his chest in obvious pain. He then dropped backwards down the stairs and died from a massive heart attack. Alison phoned 999 and within minutes an ambulance turned up, and after examining and working on him they pronounce him dead.

  Next thing, I’m in the living room being questioned by the police. I had to tell them the truth – not at first, I admit. At first I told them he was a friend usi
ng my toilet, but this story was an obvious lie as I didn’t know the punter’s name. When the truth came out the police were quite reasonable about it and didn’t pull me in for being on the game. About two days later, his wife came to the door and accused me of having a full-blown affair with him. After I explained, to my embarrassment, what I did for a living she was taken aback and had a look of sheer disgust on her face.

  She asked, ‘How much did he pay you for sex and did he actually have sex with you?’

  I replied, ‘Forty-five pounds and no, we didn’t do anything, as he was taken ill beforehand.’

  ‘Right then, you dirty tart, I want the forty-five pounds back as nothing happened and I’m his widow. Cough up,’ she screamed in my face. I paid the money back and off she wobbled down the street.

  I had been a hooker for about six years when I met my future husband. He came in with a group of lads on a stag night, then came around on his own one morning. Over coffee he told me about his ex-girlfriend and what a bitch she was and suddenly, out of the blue, he asked me out. Since I had started walking the streets I had never been asked out. I declined his offer, as my job would make things difficult for him, but he explained that he didn’t mind and we’ve been together ever since. I gave up the streets for him about a year ago, not because he put pressure on me but because I felt it was the right thing to do. I can’t say I didn’t make a lot of money out of it because I did. What I will say is that if I had come from a good home, with good parents, and stayed on in school, things would have been different.

  I’ve seen good friends done over bad by customers and their pimps. I’ve seen girls so messed up on drugs they didn’t know what planet they were on. I lost one friend through a drug overdose and another slit her wrists and died. You can see it’s not some glamorous lifestyle that some of these Hollywood films portray. I was lucky and managed to come through it all very well with owning my own house and having such a lovely man by my side. I live and work in a factory miles from my home town, I’m five months pregnant and I don’t miss my other life for a minute.