How did I meet my Oxbridge graduate fiancé? I was a sex worker ... he was my client

Do you know it only takes around ten seconds to pass out when you’re being strangled? I learned the hard way.

It’s not, I discovered, the worst way to go. Sound fades away and your vision becomes grainy, but I don’t remember any pain.

As I have been a sex worker on and off for the past two decades, you probably think such brutal attacks come with the territory.

But the assumption that a ­client did this to me would be incorrect. This was Tom, my first long-term boyfriend.

An aspiring doctor, Tom, was volunteering at a hospice when we met, while I was 17 and at college. We were together for nearly five years. Now he is a GP. A man people look up to and respect, while I get spat on by society.

People are often surprised that a sex worker has a partner, as though we are unlovable 

There’s no doubt that being a sex worker is risky. Any wannabe young hooker who thinks it’s a cool job with no dangers is kidding herself.

But no man I have ever met in my work has been as dangerous as Dr Tom. And while it might surprise people, I have met some good men.

Adam, my partner of the past ten years, was initially a client — though we tell people we met in the pub.

An Oxbridge graduate who works with numbers, like Tom he’s educated, but he’s also kind and would never hurt me.

The real Pretty Woman story, I like to call it. But it’s not lost on either of us that society would look at my ex, the respectable GP, and at Adam, and think one a catch and the other a user of women.

There’s an assumption that all sex workers are damaged, lost souls, and I can’t deny I would never have gone into sex work if it wasn’t for Tom.

My early childhood, on the other hand, completely shatters the broken-home-to-hooker ­narrative. Growing up in the ­Midlands, days were filled with ­reading, outings and pitting my wits against my dad in endless games of chess.

There wasn’t a lot of money. Dad was a stonemason and never ­managed his business very well. My sister and I didn’t care. At Sunday School I would wonder what the point of Heaven was when nothing could be better than the life I had on Earth.

My teens were tougher, however. At school, glasses resembling the bottom of a jam jar and heavy ­braces singled me out for relentless bullying. I retreated into a world of books. After GCSEs, college was the fresh start I needed. And the strangest thing happened. Boys started looking at me.

I lost my virginity to a long-haired musician when I was 16, though I was so ill-informed I didn’t even know that women could have orgasms.

Then I met Tom and that’s when the trouble started. We fell in love in the cold room of a restaurant, where he was plating up cakes and I was putting away dishes, one of my many part-time jobs. Everyone told me how lucky I was to be with him, and I agreed.

Of course, if Tom had been violent from the outset I would have left him. But his manipulation and control grew slowly, like a cancer I couldn’t see, as my confidence and self-esteem withered away.

First, he told me I looked better without make-up, then he started suggesting what I should wear, next that I could lose some weight. Then he told me he didn’t like my friends. I dropped them one by one without even noticing it. When, two years into our relationship, Tom began studying medicine we found a flat together, two hours from home, and I became even more isolated.

Three years in and I would wake up at night to find him having sex with me. I would lie still and wait for it to be over. The next day he would pretend it had never happened.

One minute he could be loving and tender, the next kick the door so hard it buckled. But the day I forgot to buy Tom’s cereal was the pivotal point.

He was so angry, he grabbed me, pushed me on to the bed and wrapped his hands around my throat.

Then, just as suddenly as he’d turned on me, he let go. I lay on the bed, frozen.

Inevitably, and thankfully, we split up soon after. We both knew there was no coming back from that moment. Initially I didn’t want anything to do with men, then I veered to the other extreme, sleeping around as a form of self-harm.

It was this combination of ­emotional pain and out-of-control promiscuity that led me to call a knocking shop and ask for a job. I was 21.

Brothels are everywhere. This one was an ordinary two-bedroom house and the set-up was that there were two women working each day and one maid who answered the door.

According to the madam, the standard service was ‘covered’ sex — meaning the use of condoms — and the main thing was to give the men a good time, while not letting them get away with bad behaviour.

If we needed help we were to shout. The maids in brothels are almost always a retired sex worker and don’t take s*** from anyone. My first customer was a lovely-looking semi-professional footballer and I walked away with £150.

Sex workers might have a reputation for being hard as nails — and many are — but many of the women I worked with in the early days were kind and good company.

One used to be a cleaner but became a sex worker because the hours she needed to work in her minimum wage job meant she never saw her baby. Having become isolated during my time with Tom, it was good to have female company again.

I would read Jane Austen novels between clients. The other women thought I was posh for that, but good old Jane got me quite a bit of business, as some men want a woman who they believe is educated and therefore more refined.

But while there were aspects of the job I liked — the camaraderie and the money — I did have qualms about what I was doing. I was now involved in criminality. While it’s not illegal to exchange sexual services for money, related activities such as soliciting for sex, working together with another sex worker and owning or managing a brothel, are.

And it was obvious to me that no woman should go into the sex industry because she has been abused by a man, so after a year I left. Having got out, people will wonder why I’ve spent my life returning to sex work.

Quite simply, it has enabled me to make a living (and yes, I pay taxes as a self-employed person and HMRC allows me to claim the tools of my trade, such as condoms and lubrication, as ­business expenses).

It’s enabled me to buy a house, afford holidays and even support my parents in a way that minimum wage jobs never could.

That was made crystal clear when, having left the brothel, I got a job working in a profiterole factory. It was brutal. Twelve-hour shifts, four days on, four days off. I took all the overtime offered, so I worked my days off too and turned my 12-hour shifts into 18-hour ones. But it still wasn’t enough money. At the brothel I could make that in less than an hour. I was just so exhausted that I couldn’t stand up. So, after a few months, I quit the factory and slept for a week. Then I called the brothel. They welcomed me back with open arms. This time I stayed for six months, and having paid off my debts and accumulated some savings, I quit again.

Having always loved acting, I got into drama school for a three-year degree course and moved to London. But this left me in a lot of debt, and while I did eventually get ­acting jobs, they weren’t what I’d dreamed of.

There was a pantomime that had three performers and toured schools. A theatre-in-education job, acting out scenes from Shakespeare for kids, often in deprived areas. Entertaining old people in care homes with a singing and dancing routine.

This work might have fed my soul, but all the time my debt was growing. I took on as many low-paid jobs as I could to stay afloat — working in bars, nightclubs, promotions, even selling weight-loss products for a

company that claimed to have a special channel to God.

Eventually, I realised I would never make enough to pay off my bank loans and other debts. I bought a copy of a listings paper, which included adverts for girls, called a place in North ­London and got an interview. After seven years, I was back on the game. This was very different from my previous experience. A few old brown leather sofas were scattered around the shabby upstairs room and the bedrooms lay down some stairs, in a slightly damp basement.

'One boyfriend, Tom, said I looked better without make-up, then he told me what to wear'

It was dark and gloomy, which was also the mood of the ­Romanian women I found myself working with. In the time I’d been away from the industry, brothels had gone from being all English girls with perhaps one Thai girl, to me now being the only English girl in the entire place.

But thanks to my brothel wages, I found some balance in my life. Yes, I was lying to almost everyone I knew, but at least I was ­paying off my drama school debt and could afford to eat. I am careful who I tell about my job. Once you tell the truth, you can’t take it back, and people almost always think less of you.

When I began working in a brothel I told my sister and instantly regretted it. Over the years she has judged me, even though it’s been my money that has bailed our parents out. The common consensus is that sex work is the lowest of the low.

Sex workers are either Jezebels or victims. Anything more nuanced is too complicated for people to understand. But I am not ashamed, because we all work to pay for the things we need  to survive. The worst are the people who proclaim themselves feminists. They like to pretend they care about women’s rights, but the reality is they only want to ­support women who are exactly like them.

There is nothing more dangerous than a liberal, middle-class white woman with a moralistic agenda. If they truly cared about eradicating prostitution they would be focusing their attention on ­poverty, the reason most sex workers enter the industry.

A few years ago, Amnesty International stated they were for decriminalisation of sex work —the legal model that sex workers want, enabling us to operate without fear of police harassment or criminal sanctions and ­protecting labour rights.

But the Hollywood actresses didn’t agree. Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emma Thompson and many others signed a letter ­telling Amnesty to rethink its stance. The sex workers, in no uncertain terms, told the actresses to f*** off.

What radical feminists want to do is make it illegal for a man to purchase sex. Yet in the ­countries that have already implemented this, the statistics show that violence against sex workers has gone up. If you already have a conviction for violence, then it won’t deter you from abusing a sex worker.

And previous UK law changes intended to combat sex trafficking have only resulted in more convictions for sex workers. It was partly this reason that I wanted to move away from working in a brothel. And the reason I’d never go back to one is Adam.

People are often surprised that a sex worker has a partner, as though we are in equal parts unlovable and soulless. Even some of my friends have been quick to make comments. If a man ever bailed on a date, the question was always: ‘Does he know what you do?’

'Adam is an Oxbridge graduate, he’s educated and kind and I know he would never hurt me'

When I first saw Adam, he was standing near the brothel door in London, ­looking nervous.  We went to a room and talked. I have no recollection of what else happened that night, of the details.

What I remember is his manner and the fact that he was really, really funny. I was pleased when he came back to see me the next week. And the one after. He began to enter my thoughts when I wasn’t working. That hadn’t happened before. I took his number so we wouldn’t lose contact if the brothel was raided. Slowly we started seeing each other out of work.

We grew into each other’s lives in a way that I don’t know where I end and he begins. One night in the brothel I walked up the stairs to the communal space and there he was. When he saw me, he got on his knees in front of the amused Romanian girls and told me he wanted to marry me. I laughed it off and said, ‘Absolutely – I can’t wait.’

Seven years later he proposed for real, and we now have a baby ­daughter. I don’t know what the future holds professionally. But I do know that whatever I decide, I will never judge another woman who earns a living this way.

• Eve Smith is a pseudonym. All names have been changed. Adapted from How Was It For You? by Eve Smith (Picador, £16.99). © Eve Smith 2024. To order a copy for £15.29 (offer valid until June 30, 2024; UK P&P free on orders over £25), go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.