Hookers : Candid Confessions of Real Call Girls

151 Pages·2014·0.93 MB·English

by  Julian Davies

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?