posted on 10 Jul 2016

Street-Walker by Anonymous

British social attitudes towards prostitution have had one consistent feature – inconsistency. This has also been reflected throughout history in the legislative programmes that have tried to deal with the issue and which have fluctuated between liberality and authoritarian morality. This has led to all kinds of puzzling contradictions which, for example,  simultaneously makes the act of prostitution legal but the soliciting of clients or the payment for sex illegal.

Of course, the way the majority of people view prostitution is the result of a complex mixture of influences and is subject to much bigger movements in the tides of public opinion. In Britain as the 1950’s turned into the more progressive 1960’s there was a desire to think again about those two big taboo issues – homosexuality and prostitution. In 1957, to help the politicians in their thinking about these matters, Sir John Wolfenden, who was then the Vice-Chancellor of Reading University, was approached to produce a overview of the law in these areas and to make recommendations.

On the issue of prostitution, Wolfenden took the view that getting prostitution off the streets was a priority – even if it led to an increase in what they then called ‘call-girls’. These were essentially prostitutes operating from cheap rented accommodation or under the guise of offering other services such as massage or social ‘escorts’.

There are many commentators who now argue that Wolfenden and his committee served only to confuse and complicate the law further, embedding the existing contradictions still deeper and adding more to it. So, I was intrigued when I came across this book, Street-Walker, in a sale in a second hand bookshop in York. Published in 1959 by Bodley Head and attributed only to Anonymous, this book claims to be a true and honest account of the life of a street prostitute and carries an endorsement by Wolfenden.

When I got home and I was able to do some research on it, I found this book had a slightly more complicated background. The general opinion, although this hasn’t ever been formally acknowledged, is that the ghost-writer behind this is the prolific crime writer and creator of Lovejoy, Jonathan Gash. And this would certainly make sense when you start to read the book.

It is, in fact, written in a style that makes it very difficult not to slip into thinking of it as a novel. It is structured around a slice of life of a London street prostitute, Jay, and covers a period of around one year seen exclusively through her eyes and  from her point of view. We join Jay when she is working a regular spot in Piccadilly, she is self-sufficient, not attached to a boyfriend or ‘ponce’ and is making regular payments into a savings account in order to buy a car. However, her life is inevitably precarious and there are some distressing sections that deal with the sorts of random violence that are always on the edges of the prostitutes life and which can alarmingly move into the centre. We also discover how she ended up in the situation she finds herself – unsurprisingly we see family breakdown, a personal rejection of the mundane and a lack of alternatives.

However, the issue that sends Jay’s life into a tailspin is the alienation and sheer emotional loneliness of her existence. It only takes one moment of weakness when she reaches out to someone else to destroy everything she has been trying to build up. Suddenly she is under the control of a violent, manipulative man who takes her money and her well-being before eventually violently assaulting her.

We leave Jay at the end of the summer after she has left hospital and is trying to change her life by moving to the coast and away from the dangers of the London streets. Whether she will be able to break away from the life that sucked her into its grasp is left open – although anyone who knows anything at all about this subject will know that her chances of making a fresh start are not good.

The book is an eloquent portrait of the life of a street prostitute but an atypical one in reality. Gash, if he is the author, has made Jay a compelling, articulate, thoughtful and hugely sympathetic character who is able to engage in a very sophisticated level of personal and political analysis. It makes the important points about how women often fall into the sex industry through family and personal strife and underlines the grotesque risks and violence they face but it is also very strong on the emotional emptiness that can corrode anyone’s sense of self.

There are a small number of copies of this book being advertised on the internet by second-hand dealers but you’ll probably have to pay something over £10 for a copy but if you have an interest in the social issues covered here, that’s not expensive.

 

Terry Potter

July 2016