Twenty years ago Gail met and fell for, a man, who suggested that she came to live in London with him, and through his contacts he would get her work as a nanny. Gail soon found out that his idea of "nannying" was very different to hers and she began to work as a prostitute.
Gail describes her first experience with a client as "pretty horrible. I remember going back and running a bath and scrubbing myself and feeling quite disgusted that I had done that. It did get easier because you accept what you are doing, once you've crossed that line."
Gail says the work was quite lonely; "in most jobs, you get support and supervision ...in prostitution you are very dependent on informal peer networks, and quite often you haven't got those certainly if you are working from home and going out to a job alone. And like any other job if you can't offload, stress comes in."
Prostitutes aren't without families and Gail had parents whom she was in regular contact with, so how did they react; "My parents both knew what I was doing but neither of them confronted me with it."
After seven years Gail decided things had to change "I think I'd come to the end of a cycle of my life. I'd left the partner that I'd originally gone to London with. There was a lot of negative stuff around me, a lot of sadness and a lot of frustration and drug dependency and I'd got to the point where I'd said I'd had enough. A man friend of mine whom I'd known for years had come to London and he said 'if you want to come back and if you want to change your life, I'll support you'. And that was a big motivating factor."
Gail returned to live with her parents. Her mother was happy to have her home but Gail's father wasn't quite so welcoming " I found out later that he'd said 'she's never been anything but trouble and I'm not having her here' but my mum delivered an ultimatum that if he was going to throw me out and not give me a second chance, that she would go too".
Nearly twenty years on, Gail is now settled with her partner and their two young daughters. He knows about her past but will she ever tell her children what mummy used to do?
"I certainly wouldn't tell them just for the sake of it, but it's a very big part of me so I don't like living in denial. But a lot of the denial is about the way society perceives prostitution which means that it's difficult to bring up things like that with your children."
Does Gail have any regrets about her past"I was talking about this to my mum the other day and there are things that I wouldn't like to re-experience. But I don't regret my past because it's made me who I am today and I'm quite happy with who I am."
