Julian Davies - Hookers : Candid Confessions of Real Call Girls

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 days work and she seemed happy to live off the state.

One day I asked her why she wouldnt 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 didnt 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 whats in someones mind, so the next punter you pick up could be your last.