“I was a whore,” she told me

I was, in point of fact, minding my own business doing what Sergeants tend to do in times of total idleness and that is—make careful plans to induce as much misery into the lives of the lowest ranks as is humanly possible. Filled with the lust for absolute power I was ill prepared for the young lady that stepped into my office with a tale of utter woe.

What could I do but listen?

Suppressing the urge to make stupid, possibly puerile, comments I focussed my attention on what she had to say.

It went rather like this.

“My Mum was a really good mother until, somehow, she started taking drugs. I never knew my Dad. Mum said she had been raped and the result was me.

“That was why we lived in a disreputable part of a bad neighbourhood in a council house on the edge of a large city in England.”

She looked grief-stricken so I held my tongue to see where this was leading.

A tragic tale unfolded in which her Mum turned to prostitution for money to buy drugs. No money was being spent on food, clothing or ‘incidentals’ and so, seeing no other option, the girl also started to sell her body.

Mum was unhappy because she believed her daughter, just turned twelve years old, was taking away her ‘client list’ but daughter needed cash for survival. She knew nothing of child welfare or social security—nobody explained this to her.

When the school asked for her parent’s signature on a form she signed it herself. Nobody asked. Nobody queried. Nobody worried.

The gang who supplied the drugs killed her Mum—possibly for non-payment, possibly to make a point to others? Who knows? They dumped her body in the trash behind a public house. The police did a cursory search but, really, who cares about one more junkie?

For slightly more than three and a half years she plied her trade but, ultimately, she fell pregnant.

She told her local gang boss to sort it out. 

“I didn’t care if he solved it by killing me. I should have no life with a baby anyway,” she shrugged her shoulders at the memory.

A back-street abortionist fashioned a tool out of a bent wire coat hanger and used it to scrape out the foetus. It was, she assured me, agony. I didn’t really have to be told that, I could have reasoned it out for myself.

Inevitably an infection set in. There was very little recollection of events as the fever got worse. She woke up after two weeks in a coma to find that her reproductive system had been ‘trimmed’. They had given her a hysterectomy.

At first it meant very little to her but now, ten years later at the age of almost twenty-five, it had become a matter of concern.

Her choices had been removed.

She said that she would, very likely, choose not to have children but that choice had gone. There was no possibility of having children even if she could bring herself to find a man to have children with!

As she was leaving the hospital one of the nurses asked her what she was going to do. She told the nurse that she would be a better whore, a more careful one. It was the conversation with that nurse that led to her enlisting in the Royal Air Force; an option that she had not considered.

I was not required to give a decision or offer advice. She had just arrived at a point in her life where she was due to leave the Royal Air Force and found that her future was uncertain. What to do? She could, she thought, go back to her previous life since she was fit and healthy and it was a trade she felt comfortable pursuing. Safety? Irrelevant, to her.

My job was to just listen and let her unburden herself. Her decisions would be her own. Any advice I could give would be based on my needs, my experiences and not hers.

All over the World there are people, I was thinking in terms of children, really, who suffer the hardships and terror of warfare. They live in constant fear of injury or death from bullets, blast or shrapnel. This is all they know. It is all they see in their future. Small children dash out for supplies for the family because they are harder to hit than adults and they can hide in smaller holes. It is all they know. They have no choices.

There are people, children, who have nothing to eat or drink. They may, if they are lucky, drink water from a puddle. What else is in the water doesn’t matter because the bulk of it is water and that is what is important. They will die of disease, malnutrition or dehydration. That is their world. It is all they know. They have no choices.

The girl who told me of her life was only extending what she knew. She could not see choices because her view of the world was formed in her head from her previous experience. That is why she told the nurse that she would be a ‘better whore’.

When you see a homeless person lying on the pavement remember that they are not there by choice. This is their world. It is what their world has become. No doubt they would like a home, a family to love and be loved by, to have friends to chat with but they have not.

We do not know why they are on the pavement. We do not know what devils are in their heads or what terrors drove them into this state. 

We should not condemn these people because they, too, are human beings.

The CEO of a large Corporation is also a human being. They also have their own devils driving them on—different devils to the homeless man but by no means less relentless.

We are all human. Next time you think to look down on someone or be patronising remember that it could be you.

We do not know what is in other people’s heads. Perhaps we do not want to know.

A wide-eyed, innocent-looking young lady came to me and poured her heart out—a decent, respected young lady.

“I was a whore,” she told me.

And so a story was born.